Editorial

When I started writing this editor’s note, I was sitting on an airplane, on my way back to Nova Scotia, where I grew up. I have to admit, I did not know what to say. I go out to Cape Breton Island each late-May to run the Cabot Trail Relay. I’ve written about the event here before – 276 kilometres, up broken up into 17 legs. The Cabot Trail features some of the most stark, windblown terrain in Canada, and some of the most beautiful. It’s also known for some of the country’s toughest climbs. Each leg is like running just about the hardest 10-miler you can find wherever you may live, and then tossing in a mountain on top of it.

This year was my ninth time in a row running the relay. It’s become the one running event each year that I refuse to miss no matter what else is happening in my life. Seventy teams from around the country (and the world) pile into rental vans and 1,200 people track their runner along the twisting narrow mountain roads. We line the rural route from the Gaelic College at the start of the Trail, through the Highlands National Park, finally finishing nearly 2 4 hours later in the town of Baddeck. By the end of it, my voice is invariably wrecked.

In those nine years Cabot has become an important part of my life. I first decided to join a team as an excuse to visit the island after staying away for over a decade. My father had grown up on Cape Breton, and my family spent summers touring the Cabot Trail and visiting with my grandparents in Sydney. I hadn’t been back since my grandmother died in 1999.

I ran two legs of the race for a team that first year – the first one (I remember wondering when I hit the first climb if I’d gotten in over my head) and the 14th, which follows the Margaree River just as dawn breaks. There’s a road that forks off the course route with about a mile to go named after my family because many generations of Doyles had lived there (and still do, I was later told). My father drove up from Halifax, and showed up on the side of the road to cheer me on at 4:30 a.m. After I finished, we sat in the restaurant attached to a set of rental cabins. I looked out the window at the mini-put framed by green mountains out back. He told me we’d stayed there when I was just learning to walk. With a group of like-minded runners, we formed our own Cabot team a couple of years later, which also grew into a dedicated training group in Toronto when we weren’t out East. Like other running groups, I don’t know if I would have met anyone from this disparate group of people if it weren’t for our care for running. And these men and women, who work as electricians, school teachers and ceos, varying in age from 19 to 58, have become my family.

I was nervous about this year because we only fielded a team of 11, and I and others would have to run twice. I was afraid that I would not be able to muster up the intensity and the strength to do right by my teammates over about 34k of very hard terrain. My wife had just given birth to our first child a few weeks prior, and I admittedly hadn’t been running much (or sleeping). But my teammates ran with such courage and determination that I wasn’t given much choice but to suffer through two hard and surprisingly quick efforts. I focused by staying positive, and wandered to picturing my mysterious new son, who we have named in part after the island of Cape Breton. I wondered if he would ever run this race. I thought of my wife, Kelly, whom I met in the Baddeck Yacht Club years ago, after we both ran leg 10, a 14.7-kilometre climb in the darkness up MacKenzie Mountain. It took us a few more Cabot Trail Relays before I quietly asked her to marry me at the 2016 race.

I’m finishing this editor’s note on the f light back from Nova Scotia. I now realize that what I was trying to say is that this strange and captivating Cape Breton race, and running more generally, is about so much more than just an event, a sport or even a lifestyle. Running is simple, yet profound. And running is so inherently difficult because you can not hide from yourself when you run. And because of this, if you continue running, you get to find out who you really are.