I took
the long way around.

Crowsnest Pass sits on Treaty 7 Territory. The Blackfoot Confederacy, including the Piikani Nation, along with the Ktunaxa and the Tsuu T’ina, have lived with and moved through these mountains and the plains below them for thousands of years. Any story about running here starts with them, not with me.

Long before anyone called it ultrarunning, the buffalo runners were doing the hardest endurance work this land has ever asked of anybody. They were young men chosen for stamina and nerve, then trained for years. They went out to the herds wearing bison calf hides and moving the way a calf moves, close enough to stand among animals that could have killed them without breaking stride. Then they drew those herds, slowly and without spooking them, across kilometres of open prairie into drive lanes marked by hundreds of stone cairns. The work could run for days without a real break. Get it right and a nation ate through the winter. Get it wrong and people went hungry.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Estipah-skikikini-kots, sits about eighteen kilometres north and west of Fort Macleod, and it is where that knowledge is stacked deepest. The site was in use around 5,800 years ago and stayed in use until roughly 1850. The cliff itself is about ten metres at the drop, and the bone bed beneath it runs twelve metres deep. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981, and the interpretive centre is there in large part because Joe Crowshoe Senior, Aapohsoy’yiis, a Piikani ceremonial elder, spent years making sure the story would be told by the people whose story it is.

The story does not end there. Within a single generation the herds were gone, and the nations who had built their whole way of living around them were pushed onto reserves and into hunger. That grief is still carried, and the people carrying it are my neighbours. Kerry M. Scott’s A Contemporary Winter Count tells that history from the inside, in paintings and words, and it is worth your time. The runners did not disappear. Their descendants are still here, and they are still running.

In 2024, Elder Morris Little Wolf of the Piikani Nation gifted me a Blackfoot name: Ikkaayayi Sahkómapii, which translates as Swift Runner Boy. I carry that with a great deal of gratitude and care. I am also a supporter of the Buffalo Runners Society.

I run on this land as a guest and I try to act like one. I want to learn this history because I respect the people who were here long before me, and I want to look after this place the way they looked after it. The legacy is still going. I would like to be some help in carrying it forward.

Your capacity to handle hard things is not fixed. It is trainable, and there is real biology behind that: a principle called hormesis, which describes how the body and nervous system rebuild stronger after the right dose of stress.

The Mountain Method takes that, plus what I learned across thousands of kilometres of trail and twenty years of work in high consequence environments, and turns it into three pillars your team can put to use.

Twenty to sixty minutes, story-driven and free of buzzwords, delivered with the same energy I bring to a 4:00 AM start line.