A Christmas Morning Jog

My gifts had been opened and I sat on the couch, beginning a routine I rehearsed before: lay more or less languid for most of the day, waiting for family to arrive. The middle of Christmas Day is a vacuum, bookended by gifts in the morning and all-too-rare family and feasting in the evening. It was 2014. I had been out of Mum and Dad’s for just over a year, and I had begun to observe other ways of living. I had already fallen madly in love, which agonizingly upended my life as blind infatuation taunted me. It seemed to display a far more desirable life, signalling how small my life had been before. I had also been rejected from that love, which agonizingly upended my life yet again. In the fallout, I felt even smaller still. The events of my earliest independent years were intensely confronting, and as I sat there on Christmas morning, I was at a stage of life in which I questioned many of my life’s default patterns.

I am from Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver on the Pacific coast of Canada. A city I gradually learned to be ashamed of. A city whose name raises eyebrows and stimulates cut-and-paste jokes about gang violence, filth, and poverty. I can’t say I remember whether those disapproving reactions occurred in my childhood. If they did, their impact was limited because I had little to compare my home against, to say nothing of how off-base they were relative to my lived experience. An underwhelming suburb? Maybe. But I never understood how my home’s reputation had gotten so uniformly tarnished. Nevertheless, the shame I eventually learned was real.

Now I was an adult on my own though, living in a place whose beauty and brilliance smacks you across the face as soon as you round the Connector Highway and catch a glimpse of the views, like the shimmering deep blue lake everything seems pointed at, or the dry pine-speckled mountains of the valley that look suspiciously like a painting brought to life. For my 17-year-old self, the Okanagan Valley was a paradise of natural beauty. Compounding the electricity of place that accompanies one’s earliest days of true freedom was the euphoria that came as I realized my new home was a genuine tourist destination. People from across our province, the country, and the world, came to my new home to hike on its dusty trails that were lined by dry grasses and cacti, and climb to viewpoints that unveiled heart-stopping blue above and below. The colour of the sky and the lake were comforting novelties for me: in Surrey I was used to grey skies and a distinct absence of viewpoints.

Easy to fall in love with Okanagan views.

The default modes of my life were being challenged, inviting me into newness. My senses were alive in ways I hadn’t felt before. It was painful and captivating and supremely confusing. Young adulthood, right? One thing was certain: I was hooked. To me, it was time to raise my game in order to be worthy of the new life and love and home I was thrust into.

Put simply, in many ways, I was earnestly trying to be better, whatever that meant. And when I sat on the couch on Christmas Day, I decided to do something different. I decided to do something insane. I decided…to go for a run. On Christmas Day! Okay, perhaps that’s not the most groundbreaking decision. But habits die hard, and the routines that are built year after year calcify over time, leaving us less spontaneous and less open to new experiences. So I decided to run: to do something different; to level up my life in a small way. After all, why shouldn’t I? I loved running! And if holidays are for anything, shouldn’t they be an opportunity to live a day of your life doing exactly what you love to do, free from constraints? So I laced up and headed out on my own, dismantling the structure of the Christmas routine I architected year after year; the routine that saw me idling indoors, peaceful yet bored.

My feet hit the ground one after another, springing me predictably down the paved path adjacent to my house. This path carried me toward Green Timbers Urban Forest Park. I had run to Green Timbers hundreds of times before. It is a small wooded park with gravel trails winding through the trees this way and that before encircling a manmade lake. To me it was nothing special, but it was the best nature I could get in this uninspiring labyrinth of payment that was the city I grew up in.

On this day, inspired by the novelty of my new life, I felt called to continue exploring opportunities with fresh eyes. I spotted what looked like a trail on the corner of a street I always turned right at. This time I turned left. I jogged gently down the winding trail that was surrounded by tall cedars - cedars that quickly muffled the sounds of the busy road humming behind me. Before long, it was essentially just my breath and my footsteps that accompanied me. Cool wind graced my skin and water droplets fell all around, turning the recent snowfall to slush. As I continued to run, I was put at such peace that I had to ask myself why I spent so much of my life - of course beyond just Christmas Day - sitting in stagnation in spite of the fact that I knew I was my happiest self in nature. And the nature time itself: Why had I always run on autopilot around the same lake, in the same direction, taking the same route? Even as a seasoned runner and strong cross-country athlete, I had never even seen this trail before, and it was just under my nose all my life. It felt like such a waste of a resource! Then it dawned on me: I had been so inundated with messages disparaging the city I grew up in, that I didn’t appreciate how close I had been to these rich, wet rainforest trails all along. Here I was putting my new Okanagan home on a pedestal, and yet even in that magnificent new home I did not have access to nature as readily as I did here: a city that I could only see as a bland suburb.

Just as my life’s default patterns had been challenged in those early adult years, that Christmas morning run opened up new ways of thinking about my life’s priorities, my relationship with my home, and what I found nourishing. Without realizing it, I had always found refuge at Green Timbers. Whether it was a fight with parents, stress from school, adolescent heartbreak, or just plain boredom, I found life’s challenges were blunted when I could feel my lungs stretch and my muscles strain under the nourishing insulation of trees, moss, ferns, and soil. That simple run, stimulated by openness, began to open my eyes to what I had taken for granted.

In 2024, catalyzed by insights from that Christmas run that had been incubating for ten years, I launched a nature-based advocacy project that leveraged my love of exercise in nature to help protect nature itself, which had protected and nourished me. I left my loved ones, home, and job behind, and cycled solo more than 8,000 kilometres throughout Canada to put a spotlight on the unsung heroes of the natural world and raise funds to support their conservation. I called it the Biodiversity Bikeride. More than a simple west-to-east trip across the country, my route was focused on visiting Key Biodiversity Areas. KBAs, as they’re called, are areas that have distinct importance for national and global biodiversity due to the way they support and nourish rare and threatened species and ecosystems, as well as key natural processes. As important as they are, these KBAs are often under-appreciated or unknown at all. Many of them are far away from residential areas, not included in park systems, incredibly small in size, or without signage to indicate their unique inhabitants, natural processes, and value. Even many nature enthusiasts and lovers of outdoor adventures I met along the way didn’t necessarily know what important local area was sitting under their nose. Just as I had not adequately understood the unique treasure that Green Timbers was for me, these ecosystems were easy to overlook.

The first stop on the Biodiversity Bikeride: Green Timbers.

Before embarking on the Biodiversity Bikeride, I thought it would be appropriate to look more into the history of Green Timbers, as it had served as such a central contributor to the path I was on in life. As I read its history, my worldview was again shaken, just as it had been shaken ten years prior. In the very city of Surrey that I had always unquestioningly regarded as a bit of a bore at best and a shameful place at worst, I learned that Green Timbers was once famous as the only remaining old-growth forest between San Diego, California and Vancouver, BC. 95 years before the Biodiversity Bikeride, boring old Surrey was a tourist destination known for its breathtaking forests! I could not believe what I was reading. I read on and found that in spite of its inherent natural value and visual magnificence, the forest was under threat by logging efforts. A campaign had tried to save this natural wonder, but ultimately failed. The entire 5,000-acre forest was clearcut by 1930.

As they say, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. In the same year that the clearcut was completed, replanting efforts began, which eventually became the park I knew, loved, and depended on. And while I am grateful this reforestation took place, it still hurts to think of the beauty I missed out on because the natural world was not fully appreciated. This became a central motivator for me as I cycled across Canada to visit KBAs: to showcase both the beauty and the importance of KBAs in the hopes of contributing to a changing relationship with nature. In other words, I wanted to get people to appreciate the value of nature for its own sake, before it was too late. Before they became repeats of Green Timbers. Time will tell if it helped, but perhaps we should all take a pause from our normal routines, and be open to trying something a little different.