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iRun to paddle faster Adam Van Koeverden, Ontario

I’ve asked a lot of people why they run. And our magazine has collected thousands of iRun statements in which people spell out what they love about running.

But this, from Olympic champion kayaker Adam van Koeverden, might just be the best answer I’ve ever heard:

“Why do I like running? Because it’s there, I suppose. Because it’s within my grasp. The same reason why I like doing everything that I do that’s active: mountain-biking, kayaking, running, cross-country skiing. Because it’s not going to get done if you don’t do it.”

Because it’s there. If that’s a sufficient excuse to attempt Mount Everest, as it was for George Mallory, it’s a good enough reason to go for a run.

You know him as a kayaker, but van Koeverden is one of the most intensely passionate runners I’ve ever met. When we photographed him for a profile in iRun in the middle of winter, he insisted on doing an outdoor shot in which he would run through a cloud of snow. So I stood up to my knees in a snow bank and threw handfuls of snow in the air while photographer Colin Rowe captured van Koeverden sprinting through them.

How competitive is van Koeverden? Even though running is not his Olympic sport, all he wants to do is beat other runners.

“Whenever I see somebody in front of me, it doesn’t matter how far away they are, I just love chasing them down,” he says. “I don’t care how fast they are, I want to get in front of them and pass them.”

Van Koeverden started running before he started paddling. He ran cross-country in elementary school. And when he started kayaking, he noticed very few athletes at his club didn’t run.

“Right away, I recognized that all the good kayakers in the world and all the good canoeists at my club and everybody I was training with were running quite a bit,” he says. “You can’t be on the water all the time as a kayaker with the weather in Canada. Running in the winter is a lot easier than breaking the ice to be in your kayak.

“I became a serious runner the day I became a serious kayaker.”

How serious a runner? Despite having the physique of a kayaker, he came close to doing a seventeen-minute 5k in high school.

“For someone who was 185 pounds, that’s pretty good. I remember lining up in cross-country in high school, looking over and thinking, ‘These guys are 140.’ I was pushing 190.”

On top of his training in the kayak, van Koeverden ran three times a week at school, plus track workouts once a week. On Fridays, he would run twelve kilometres in the morning at school, then fourteen or fifteen at night with his canoe club.

“I’m glad I’m not doing it anymore because it’s a lot of kilometres for a guy my weight,” he says. “But it made me tough. It made me really tough.”

Van Koeverden says he packs his running shoes wherever he goes. “Even if I’m going somewhere for a night, well, what if I wake up and want to go for a run? I can’t leave these behind.”

As an elite athlete with a finite career, he’s already thinking ahead to life after kayaking, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever give up running.

“I will always be a runner. Running is just so accessible, I’ll always do it. I’ll always enjoy it and I’ll always live somewhere close to trails and I can always just get on to the trail and give ’er in the trees for a few minutes.

“I always look forward to my next run. I could go on at length about the feeling you get after a run and the high that you feel and the sense of accomplishment that you get for days after. Even if you just did a short one, you just have something to reassure yourself that you’re doing what you should be doing and getting the most out of your day.”

Like many runners, van Koeverden dreams of running a marathon. But he wants to complete his Olympic career and then move down a weight class first. He’s done a half-marathon in 1:18, so he figures he can break three hours in the marathon.

“I don’t want to do a marathon until I’m sure I can crack three hours. I just don’t want to run for three-and-a-half hours. I’d much rather run fast and be dead. But I’ll have to lose some weight. Towards the end of a half-marathon, it’s starting to hurt a lot in my joints.”

Van Koeverden says he believes in getting the most out of every day, and he can’t think of anything more productive that investing time in your health.

“From my perspective, the things that are worth enjoying are free. Running shoes aren’t free, but it doesn’t cost anything to get out there and go for a run.”