ON THE MOVE
Staying active helps Archie Smith, 63, to enjoy life and, in the process, clear his lungs
Archie Smith has been on the move since growing up in the Ottawa Valley town of Deep River, close to Algonquin Park and its bounty of forests, rivers and lakes. It’s where he fell in love with paddling and the wilderness and he has cultivated those interests all his life.
Now retired and living in the house that he built in Wakefield, Que., on the east bank of the Gatineau River, Smith, 63, loves to get out in the bush with his friends or hit the nearby ski slopes.
He had just finished a morning of snowboarding when I contacted him.
Smith and his wife, Marilyn, began snowboarding, normally an activity associated with younger people, 15 years ago with a board cast off by one of their three children.
“One of the kids left a snowboard and we tried it out,” said Smith, who has long been a downhill skier — as has his wife. “We just clicked on the snowboard; actually, we fought over it, so we bought two new ones.”
I first met Smith in September 2011 at Pearson Airport in Toronto while we were waiting to board a plane on the first leg of flights to Kathmandu, Nepal.
He joined our group — which in- cluded me and my son, Nick, and four others from the Gatineau-Ottawa area — for a trek to Everest Base Camp.
Since that trek covering 200 kilometres over three weeks, Smith has become part of our group and joined us on other trips: kayaking in the islands of Georgian Bay near Killarney Provincial Park in Ontario, and cycling around Lac StJean and down to Tadoussac at the confluence of the Saguenay and St. Lawrence rivers in Quebec.
The cycling trip was noteworthy for the fact that Smith pedalled an old Peugeot that he had purchased at a garage sale for $ 10.
We did another cycling trip the following year in the Lower St. Lawrence region from Lévis to Ste- Flavie and back, with Smith covering the 660 kilometres on a new bike.
He had actually built the bike with a carbon- fibre ( very light) frame with mostly used parts sourced on the Internet.
Apart from a couple of flats, the new bike performed very well — as did Smith. What was also remarkable was the fact that Smith had put in only 60 kilometres of training.
Most of his spring training was devoted to getting ready for the Ottawa marathon, held just a week or two before our bike trip.
A veteran of a dozen half- marathons in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto, Smith decided “to up the ante,” as he put it, by running a 42- kilometre marathon for the first time. That was in 2013, when he was 61 years old.
He runs on the advice of his respirologist, who believes it can help people with lung problems such as the ones Smith has.
“He said one of the best things you can do is run to clear all that stuff ( phlegm) out of there,” Smith said, referring to his lungs.
But the respirologist cautioned him about doing a marathon because of its toll on the body. In Smith’s case, his lungs are beset with asthma and allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis ( ABPA), a reaction to common fungus spores that cause little or no problem for most people. But for individuals like Smith, the condition affects his breathing.
To deal with the lung issues, he takes a “smorgasbord of meds.”
“A lot of people are quite surprised that I maintain that level of activity,” Smith said. “It has been good for me, because often I’ll go for a run and end up coughing up a lot of stuff.”
He finished the marathon in a minute over five hours and it seems to have cured him of any desire to do the same distance again.
“It was so much ( expletive deleted) work. I got so fed up with running that I didn’t run for almost a year after that,” Smith said.
During a career lasting more than 30 years, Smith taught physed, math, physics and science at Philemon Wright High School in Gatineau. A member of the gymnastics team when he studied at the University of Guelph, he was a natural to coach Philemon Wright’s gymnastics team, taking it to the Quebec and Ontario championship tournaments, and was an assistant coach of the football team, the Falcons, a perennial powerhouse in Ottawa and West Quebec. But canoeing remains a passion. He organizes a white- water clinic on the Madawaska River, south of Algonquin Park, every June — an activity that has been going on for 30- plus years, sometimes drawing more than two dozen people.
And he speaks fondly of the time he and five buddies paddled unguided down the mighty Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories in 1993. They were on the water for 23 days.
‘’ It was just a great experience. It was just a magical river in so many ways,’’ he said.
One of the kids left a snowboard and ( my wife and I) tried it out. We just clicked on the snowboard; actually, we fought over it, so we bought two new ones.