SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: We haven’t talked much about your mom. How does she feel about your running?
QUINN: She’s not too thrilled about it. She definitely didn’t want me to sign up for the 100-mile race.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Hard to blame her. It’s pretty extreme.
QUINN: Sure, I get that. And Mom’s kind of nervous to begin with. If some people have an anxiety disorder, my mom has an anxiety volcano.
(Audience laughs)
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: You’ve received a lot of media attention since running the race. What has that been like for your mom?
QUINN: It’s been hard on her. People have said some cruel things.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Really? Like what?
QUINN: Some guy on the radio said she’s guilty of child abuse. He said Family Services should pay us a visit.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: But it wasn’t your mom who signed you up for the race. That was your dad’s idea, wasn’t it?
QUINN: Yeah. He’d run the Shin-Kicker a few times himself and he thought it would be cool if we ran it together. So last October he sent me the money so I could register. Mom nearly had a coronary over that, which is why Dad took me to a sports doctor and got me checked out.
The doctor said I was the fittest kid he’d ever seen. And that my diet is excellent, and I have no body fat to speak of.
Mom asked if the running would harm my knees.
The doctor said that a hundred miles is a ridiculous distance, but that I’d probably quit when it started to hurt.
I can still remember the look on my mom’s face when the doctor said that. She knew she’d lost the battle, and her smile snapped like an old crayon. After that, she didn’t ever ask about my running. But Dad and I talked about it all the time.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Did you and your dad do much training together?
QUINN: Lots. One time we drove out to Hither Lake and climbed all the way up Chimney Top Mountain. Dad said if I could conquer Chimney Top, then I was capable of anything. He was wrong about that, there are plenty of harder things, but Chimney Top was still a good place to train.
Chimney Top has this crazy, unmistakable shape. It rises out of the ground like a regular mountain, but two-thirds of the way up it flattens out, like someone smacked it with a fly swatter. It’s a thousand metres tall, which is almost like two CN Towers stacked on top of each other. I just about died the first time I saw it.
“You want me to run up that?” I asked.
Dad grinned and nodded. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “Besides, you’ve got superpowers, remember?”
Hold out your index finger. Point it at the sun. Now, imagine running up your finger, only it’s 6 kilometres long. The trail doesn’t go straight up to the top, of course — there are plenty of hoodoos and switchbacks you have to hike around.
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” I said, staring through the windshield. “That’s impossible. You’re crazy.”
“Oh, come on,” said Dad. “You’ve jumped ramps on your BMX bigger than this! When you were a baby, you took craps that were bigger!”
Dad parked the car at the foot of the mountain. We jogged to the trailhead in spitting rain.
“Hey now, look at that,” said Dad. He pointed out a black pile of dung on the ground. It was the size of a hubcap.
“A bear did that?” I asked.
“A big one, yeah. There are his tracks, see?”
He showed me the footprints. I felt my guts turn to water.
“Don’t worry,” said Dad. “He’s more afraid of us than we are of him.”
“Really?” I said.
“You bet,” said Dad. “Besides, bears are mostly vegetarian.”
Mostly. That made me laugh. If bears are mostly vegetarian, what are they the rest of the time?
We started up the mountain. We jogged for a while; then, when it got steeper, we power-walked. As we climbed, the hills in the distance seemed to be climbing too, and when we came to a lookout, the highway seemed really tiny below us.
“We’re really climbing a mountain!” I said.
“Not yet,” said Dad. “We’re only on the apron.”
A few minutes later we climbed into cloud. The world around us became grey and dim. Later we sidestepped some narrow ruts. “Mountain bikers were here,” I said.
“No,” said Dad. “That’s a hoop-snake track.”
“A what?” I said.
“You don’t know about hoop snakes?” Dad said. “Awful things, terribly poisonous. They grab their tail in their mouth and roll down the hill like a bicycle tire. Scientists have clocked them doing a hundred kilometres an hour.”
“You’re a big fat liar,” I said.
“I resent that,” said Dad. “I’m not fat.”
I was never sure when to believe my dad. He knew a lot about animals, especially whales, but sometimes he said things that didn’t sound quite right. Like once, when I was little, I asked him how he’d lost all his hair. He thought about the question for a moment, as if deciding which version of the story he ought to tell.
“One day I was cooling off in Watson’s Pond,” he said finally, “and I must have swum too close to a beaver lodge, because WHAMMO, Mama Beaver appeared out of nowhere and went all shock-and-awe on my head! You know how beavers have those flat tails? Those things are as hard as a frying pan. My concussion was so bad, people called me Eric Lindros. And a couple of weeks later, all my hair fell out!”
This seemed to me a reasonable answer, until a month later I asked my dad the exact same question and got a completely different story.
“My hair?” said Dad. “Didn’t I tell you about that? I was hiking in the forest and I came across a wolverine. He was a monster, claws as big as dinner knives. He took a swat at my throat, but I ducked sideways. Unfortunately, he caught the end of my ponytail.”
In this version of the story, Mom fought off the wolverine with a pool noodle.
“A pool noodle!” I shrieked. “Mom, is that true?”
Mom smiled and shrugged her shoulders and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Of course it’s true,” Dad insisted. “Your father wouldn’t tell you a lie, now would he?”
Good question.
We left the hoop-snake tracks behind and continued up the mountain.
The mist thinned out, and a ghostly curtain of rock appeared above us. Dad wiped the sweat off the back of his neck. “This is the same trail we’ll follow in the Shin-Kicker,” he said.
“Is Chimney Top really the hardest part of the race?” I asked.
“No, not really,” Dad said.
“What’s the hardest part?”
“The trail demons.”
“Trail demons?” I asked.
Dad leaned against a boulder and took a sip from his water bottle. “When you run long distances, your brain gets really tired and it plays tricks on you to stop you from running.”
“What kind of tricks?” I said.
The mist rolled back in, pressing against the granite cliffs like rumpled bedsheets. “You’d think that your brain would be on your side in a long-distance race,” Dad said. “But it isn’t. Your brain is your worst enemy when you run long distances. Your brain is on your body’s side, and believe me, after your body has spent eighteen hours running up and down mountains, it just wants to go home, lie down on the couch and inhale a bag of barbecue chips.”
He squirted water into his baseball cap and put it back on his head. Streams of water dribbled down the back of his neck.
“Oh sure,” he went on, “every now and again, your brain will play nice. It’ll say something optimistic like: ‘The bath you take after this race sure is going to feel good!’ Or, ‘It sure is great, being outside in the fresh air!’ But most of the time your brain just lobs grenades at you. Things like, ‘You’re stupid for trying this; you should drop out and go home.’ Or: ‘NO WAY can you run a hundred miles! What are you, crazy?’”
It began to drizzle. The mist was whiter than snow. I had no idea how close we were to the top of the mountain.
“But always remember,” Dad said, “the trail demons aren’t real. It’s just your mind, trying to get you to stop. Don’t fall for it. Don’t let anything stop you. Nothing is impossible. You’ll be amazed what you’re capable of.”
We climbed for another hour, and then, quite suddenly, we popped through the roof of the cloud. The sun shone down and heated our faces, and steam rose off of our arms and legs. Chimney Top’s flat peak was straight ahead. It looked as though someone had sliced the top off the mountain with a bread knife.
“Don’t lean forward so much,” Dad told me. “Just imagine there’s a huge magnet at the top of the mountain and you’ve got a band of steel wrapped around your chest. Imagine that the magnet is pulling you up the hill. There you go. We’re almost there. Keep going!”
Eventually we reached the summit and stared down at an ocean of grey. Red-tailed hawks flew in circles, and between the breaks in the cloud, I could see the long silver finger of Hither Lake.
Dad opened a bag of trail mix and a carton of chocolate milk, and we ate and drank and didn’t say much.
“This is a beautiful place where we live,” Dad said at last. “Of all the places I’ve been, this is the nicest.”
He used that word, nicest, but I knew he was thinking safest. Dad liked Canada because it’s safe. He was always talking about that.
“You’re so serious,” he said, turning to me. “What are you thinking about?”
I looked up at him and smiled. “I’m thinking … I just climbed a mountain!”