It Was Never About The Running.

Running and I have a complicated history. Like most of my relationships with exercise, it started with good intentions and ended with a respiratory infection.

I took up running in my early teens, mostly because my dad was a marathoner and I was looking for common ground with the man who left when I was ten. Don’t get me wrong—he was a good dad, just not there every day. We needed something to share. Running seemed like the obvious choice. Something besides genetics and a mutual fondness for coffee.

Later in life, I trained for the Around the Bay 30k in Hamilton. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the oldest road race in North America—older than the Boston Marathon. This apparently makes it historic, though it doesn’t seem to get you a discount on the entry fee. I trained through a Canadian winter, which in hindsight was not my brightest idea. By race day, I had a chest infection and chronic bursitis. My lungs felt like wet accordion bellows.

I finished the race. Technically. I ran it, anyway. But somewhere between kilometre 23 and existential collapse, I realized something important: I didn’t actually love running. What I loved was the connection it gave me to my dad. I was trying to retrace his steps—literally.

What stuck with me most from that day wasn’t the race itself. It was the people watching it.

The spectators. The cowbell shakers. The “You’ve Got This!” sign holders. The woman who locked eyes with me around kilometre 27 and shouted, “You’re almost there!”—an outrageous lie, but exactly what I needed to hear.

I came back the next year. Not to run, but to cheer.

I stood at kilometre markers with my camera, watching strangers pour out every ounce of themselves while being lifted by people who didn’t even know their names. I started sketching. Photographing. Thinking: This is what I want to paint.

Not the runners, exactly. Or at least, not just the runners. What moved me most were the people on the sidelines—the ones cheering for the last-place straggler with the ambulance crawling behind him just as passionately as they had for the elites. It wasn’t the triumph of sport that got to me. It was the humanity. The spontaneous, generous instinct to lift one another up.

That’s the real subject of these paintings—not competition, but encouragement. A behaviour so beautiful and underrated it almost feels like a spiritual act. In a world obsessed with being right or being first, here was a place where strangers clapped for you just because you were trying.

I decided to paint one scene for every kilometre of the Around the Bay race—thirty in all, plus the start line, for a total of thirty-one paintings. It took years. Each race day, I’d head out along the course, take a dozen or two photos at each marker, and return to the studio to stitch something together from the best of them. I work in acrylic because I make a lot of mistakes and acrylic forgives quickly. Also, I paint in the massage clinic I run, and oil paint smells like something decomposing in a bath of paint thinner—not the vibe you want during a relaxing back treatment.

The Around the Bay series was finally completed and shown in 2019 at the community gallery in the Hamilton Art Gallery. It felt like a personal finish line. I had painted the race I could no longer run, and in doing so, I found a better version of the thing I’d been chasing all along.

And then, on the opening day of the show, we got the call: My stepkids’ father—had passed away.

I don’t know what to do with that coincidence, except to say that art and grief seem to walk hand in hand more often than we expect. One opens us. The other fills the space. Or maybe it’s the other way around. What I do know is that it drove home something simple and unavoidable: my family is the most important thing in the world to me, by a wide and startling margin. The art world would have to wait.

Eventually, I started a new series based on the Boston Marathon. Bigger race. Bigger crowds. American mile markers, which threw off my rhythm at first—but I adjusted. I’ve finished seven paintings so far. The process is the same: follow the race, take 12–24 photos at each mile, and build a composition from the best of them.

I don’t know when the Boston series will be done. And that’s okay. I’m not in a hurry. I’ve stopped running toward things. These days, I mostly walk toward them, take a few photos, and go home to paint.

But I still believe in showing up. In cheering. In witnessing. And in the simple, stubborn beauty of people who choose to lift each other up—even if it’s just with a cowbell and a lie about how close the finish line really is