Undefeated
The strangely parallel journeys of a runner who found – and lost – her father, while training for her first 100K race
Chantelle Erickson’s father appeared in her life for the first time while she was training for her second 50k race in Alberta. When he disappeared again, she returned to the trails, determined not to let this loss define her.
One Sunday in May 2018, I had just started my long run when my cellphone rang. I was training for my second ultra, the 53k Lost Soul Ultra in Lethbridge, Alta., and I was near the top of a steep gulley (called a coulee), typical of southwestern Alberta, where I’ve lived since 2014. Taking my phone out of my hydration pack, I saw that it was my Uncle Tony, who rarely calls, so I knew it was important. Still running, I answered the call, putting him on speaker.
Tony told me that the previous night, he’d sat down beside a stranger at a bar in Burlington, Ont., where he now lived (we’d grown up one town over, in Oakville) and struck up a conversation. The two men discovered they had gone to the same high school, and knew some of the same people. It slowly dawned on Tony that he knew who this man was. He interrupted him. “We are related,” he said, which must have shocked the man, because Tony (like me) is Black, and this man was Italian-Canadian. Tony told him he was going to the bathroom, and that if he was ready to be honest, he would stick around until he got back. When he returned, the man was still there. After 33 years, Tony had found my father.
I stopped at the top of the hill and cried in disbelief. I don’t remember the rest of that run, because a million thoughts coursed through my head as tears streamed down my face. I was so grateful to have received this call in the middle of a run. I believe it was thanks to running that I was able to handle this information when it came, and it was moving up to my first 100k race that gave me the strength to overcome the pain that would follow. My mom was a Jamaican-Canadian teenager in her last year of high school when she had me in 1985. We were one of only a handful of Black families in the Toronto suburb where we lived. My mom had been a promising 100m sprinter, sometimes travelling to meets in places like Flint, Mich. For one season, she and Donovan Bailey, who would go on to set a world record in the 100m, ran on the same track. But getting pregnant put an end to all that. My father was Italian-Canadian, a little older than my mom. The relationship was never serious on either side, but when my mom discovered she was pregnant, she tried to reach out and was rebuffed.
Tony is my mom’s younger brother, who gave up a potential football scholarship to a U. S. college to stay in Ontario and support my mom and grandmother with raising me. He was only 15 when I came along, and he was always more like a big brother
than an uncle. When I was three, my mom started seeing the man I would come to know as my dad, and my little sister was born. When I was eight, they got married, and eventually they had my brother. When I was 10, they told me that the dad I had always known was not my real dad. Then my parents separated, and I went through high school without a father.
I never knew why I didn’t know my real dad. It was a confusing time, and I started journaling to unleash my feelings and thoughts. I was a writer before I was a runner.
Like many people, I was introduced to running in gym class, running repeats around the track and aiming for my “fastest mile” as a test of fitness. I hated it. I was the only nonathlete in my family. I found joy in reading, writing and acting in school productions – that is, until I revisited the sport in high school. Things were difficult between my mother and me at home, and it was years before I learned about the personal struggles behind her behaviour. But Tony and my grandmother were loving, steadying inf luences.
One day, one of my friends, Karla, invited me to run with her after school. This time, running made me feel great. I soon discovered that running was an escape, just like writing. Both helped me to think more clearly. But at 15, I left home for good, to be raised by my grandmother. I couldn’t keep running with Karla, so I stopped.
Not a day went by that I didn’t think about my father. Sadly, I never had the courage to go looking for him. I figured if he had never tried to find me, he probably didn’t want to be found. But in my heart, I dreamed that someday he would come looking for me. Eventually I moved to Saskatchewan for college, and started running again. My roommate, who was also named Chantelle, invited me to join her for a treadmill run in the gym. After a few runs, I realized I needed this sport. When I ran, I felt lighter. I had been carrying an emotional burden all my life, and for that hour or half-hour, the burden was lifted. I began to understand that while I enjoyed competing and achieving new personal bests: running, for me, was mostly a way of dealing with emotional pain.
By May 2012, I was married to my backpacker/hiker husband from Montana and completed my first half-marathon, eight months after the birth of our son. A year later, I was pregnant again, but we lost the baby at 20 weeks, and I underwent an emergency delivery two days after Christmas. We named the baby Jaelyn. After my body recovered, once again I turned to running. When I was happy, I ran. When I was sad, I ran. I ran to figure things out.
Losing my daughter showed me what I was capable of overcoming, and that propelled me into running with more purpose and intention. Three years later, our daughter Addy came along, and I carried her to a halfmarathon finish 20 weeks into my pregnancy.
I told myself that when I crossed the finish line of a marathon and still felt like I could keep going, it would be time to level up to an ultra distance. In 2016 I had volunteered for the midnight shift at the Lost Soul Ultra ( lsu) in Lethbridge, and it was inspiring to watch the 100k and 100-mile runners as they came into the aid station. At Woody’s RV World Marathon in Red Deer that fall (my third marathon), I signed up for my first ultra, the 53k distance at lsu in 2017.
Lethbridge is the perfect place for rookie trail runners, since the coulee system is a well-groomed network of trails with public washrooms, a nice mix of f lat and rolling terrain with some steep climbs and descents, for good measure. In 2018 I ran the lsu 53k a second time, and this time, I had the same feeling – that I had more in the tank. I learned early in my ultra career how much stronger the mind is than the body, and that even if I was struggling, I could go much farther than I thought I could. I attribute this early knowledge to my challenging upbringing. Because my early life was so unstable, I learned to be adaptable in turmoil. It was while t raining for t his second 53k that I got Tony’s call. The following Monday, I was teaching a fitness class when my phone buzzed with a text from a number I didn’t recognize, and a southern Ontario area code. “Hello, my name is Riccardo,” a man said. “I’m not sure, but I may be your father.” The emotions I felt were similar to those I felt each time I crossed the finish line of a new distance: Excitement. Shock. Relief.