Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies (6 page)

I
ce hockey is Canada’s most popular spectator sport – although they just call it ‘hockey’ – and we were off to train with one
of its legends, Reggie Leach. Reggie is an indigenous, or First Nations, Canadian who had a long and distinguished career
in the National Hockey League (which also covers the USA) back in the 1970s, playing for various teams including the Boston
Bruins and the Philadelphia Flyers, with whom he won the prestigious Stanley Cup. Reggie was a serious player, the Wayne Rooney
of 1970s ice hockey; in one season he scored sixty-one goals, notching up nineteen in the play-offs alone. His record still
stands. I wondered if that made him a little nervous at the beginning of each season, but he pointed out that records are
meant to be broken and that sooner or later somebody was going to come along and do just that. I’d heard that kind of talk
before: John McGuinness with his TT records, Giacomo Agostini, the most successful motorcycle racer in history, with more
Grand Prix wins than anyone else, they all claim that records are there to be broken, but I bet there’s a bit of every
great champion that really hopes theirs won’t be. After all, it’s that kind of winning mentality that made them a champion
in the first place.

Reggie now works with First Nations kids, teaching them how to play hockey. I met him at the T.M. Davies arena in a town called
Lively, and before I knew it he had me in the changing room getting kitted out. First I had to slide on a pair of Lycra pants
with a massive codpiece at the front. I felt like Blackadder, the way it was dangling, and I made a great show of prancing
around the changing room.

Once Reggie had helped me with the inner pants, I put on the rest of the kit. The body armour the players wear under their
shirts is lightweight and close-fitting; even a guy with my physique ends up looking like some sort of Roman gladiator. On
top went a baggy shirt, and the whole thing was finished off with a helmet and, of course, skates. Reggie looked impressed –
not with the way I was turned out, necessarily, but with what he called my ‘play-off beard’. Apparently the goatee I’ve cultivated
over the years is exactly what the players who reach the playoffs grow for the occasion, only in their case they keep it going
until their team gets knocked out. The teams that reach the finals often have guys on the ice with full beards, because once
they start growing, it’s bad luck to shave them off.

Oh, wow. I was so looking forward to this, although I wasn’t exactly feeling confident. Reggie was going to put me through
my paces with a bunch of kids, the youngest of whom was about seven years old. Seven. That’s nearly thirty (ish) years my
junior and this bore all the hallmarks of potential humiliation. I’d played field hockey when I was at school, but Mungo didn’t
think it would help much.

The kids were all whizzing about as if they’d been born on
the bloody ice and all I could do was try and keep up. I was nervous – ice hockey is the fastest team sport in the world, and
if you’ve seen it, you’ll know there is
always
a fist fight and the refs rarely get involved. It wasn’t fist fights I was worried about right then, however; it was getting
around. I’m not bad on roller blades, but on the ice – kitted out like the Incredible Hulk and with a hockey stick and the
puck to worry about too – I was slipping and sliding all over the place.

The basics of the training involved ‘carrying’ the puck around the circles on the ice and shooting at the goal. By carrying,
Reggie meant working it from side to side with the stick, moving in a circle. Having Reggie there to coach was a help, and
I began to get better. I’d been doing it one-handed, but that was all wrong – you needed two hands on the stick at all times,
and Reggie insisted I learn how to carry the puck properly. The most important thing he told me was that far from being a
hindrance, the stick was actually a help. He showed me how to use it to balance, and I started to get the hang of it, skating
over the ice, working the puck from side to side before I let fly and hammered it beyond the goaltender. A goal! I’d scored
a goal! Of course I celebrated like a true pro, sliding across the ice on my belly to smack up against Mungo’s knees.

Really, I wasn’t half bad … in a sprint for the puck with a seven-year-old boy I came second, which, despite the fact that
there were only two of us, wasn’t that terrible. Yes, I was a little slower than the kids, but I was in control, sort of.
I did spend quite a bit of time on my knees, and that was before we started going backwards. Again it was a child half my
size who showed me the way, easing his skates back and forth behind him and dragging the puck along. He made it look so simple,
and yet when I had a go I sort of shuffled and fell again.

Reggie tried to offer some encouragement by telling me that the seven-year-old who’d whipped my butt in the sprint had been
skating since he was about three and was now one of the top players in the area for his age. That was all right then, at least
I had an excuse. The girls were all better than me as well – up until the age of thirteen they trained with the boys, so I
imagined they could hold their own in a fist fight.

One of the most difficult exercises was working the puck around a cone signifying another player. That was when I went down
the hardest. I tried again and again and kept hitting the ice with my chin no matter what. The difficulty was moving from
a forward motion to a backward one after pivoting on the skates. We played a mock game and I did all right, though I fell
over quite a bit. By the time we were finished I really was exhausted. I’d completely lost all my energy and these kids were
skating rings around me. Before I’d gone out on the ice I’d had no idea how energy-sapping it would be. Reggie told me that
when he was a professional player he used to go to training camp to get in shape for the season, whereas now the pro players
have to be in shape just to get to the training camp. He reckoned the pro players would spend forty minutes every day working
on those sprints alone, again and again and again. Though Reggie never claimed to be the fittest player on the circuit, he
could score goals – it’s a bit like in football, I suppose; there are those players who just seem to have the knack. And Reggie
most certainly did; his shots were clocked at an average speed of 115 miles an hour, so fast the goaltender could barely see
the puck, never mind save it. What really blew me away, though, was that when Reggie was playing you didn’t have to wear a
helmet – that rule didn’t come in until 1980. I took a moment to think about it: being hit in the head
by a puck at over a hundred miles an hour. I doubted you’d come out alive.

These kids were just one of several groups Reggie coached. He told me that many First Nations parents encourage their children
to play hockey, not necessarily because they have grand designs on the kids becoming NHL players in the future, but because
they want to give them a focus, to keep them out of trouble. There’s a drink and drug problem among youngsters in Canada just
as there is anywhere else, but the fitness requirements of hockey alone would help prevent them getting into that. In his
own youth Reggie made lots of mistakes – he had a serious drink problem – and his goal now is to pass on some of what he has
learned to his people, to give them a sense of purpose regardless of whether it leads to the professional game. He has lots
to teach them; not only his hockey skills, but also the resolve to overcome life’s difficulties. He told me he’d joined Alcoholics
Anonymous in 1985 and had been on the wagon ever since.

I really liked Reggie, and although becoming a professional ice-hockey player has had to be scrubbed off my list of unfulfilled
ambitions, I learned a lot, and not just about the game. Reggie is one of those cool people who, although he had plenty of
talent, knows how fortunate he was, and has spent his life since retiring trying to give something back.

It was a welcome relief to be back on a bike the next day. We were travelling first to Winnipeg then to Thunder Bay, where
we would hook up with some guides from Northern Soul Wilderness Adventures, who were taking us on a river trip.

We were still riding along Yonge Street, and plugging the
coordinates into the GPS, when I discovered we had six hundred kilometres ahead of us. We’d already ridden eight hundred on
Yonge Street since Toronto. One of these days I’m going to do all nineteen hundred, maybe with my wife Ollie and the kids.

So it was back on the highway, with the railway and a massive freight train on my left and the tarmac unravelling under the
wheels. The Atlantic was behind me and the Rocky Mountains ahead. So far the only boundary we had pushed was the Atlantic,
and that left both the south and the north before we rolled into Vancouver. We passed through small towns beyond which the
land seemed flat and featureless, and the traffic grew less and less until it seemed I was the only person out there. It was
mind-blowing to think I’d been on the same stretch of highway all the way from Toronto. I was contented, really deep-down
happy. This was my signature, it was what I did: the road unwinding as I winged my way west on a GS1200 with off-road tyres,
panniers and top box.

The weather was rubbish, though; since Toronto it had been raining pretty much non-stop, and that kind of damp can get you
down. It didn’t let up either; when we woke the following morning, the sky was still a mass of black rain clouds and it was
cold outside. With the river trip coming up, I was beginning to wonder if we’d get rained on the entire way. We had planned
a couple of nights under canvas, which could be a complete disaster if this kept up. According to the news, Winnipeg had seen
more rain than they’d had in years, and the farmers had been unable to plant their crops.

Having ridden through the rain the previous day and with all my energy having been sucked out of me by the ice hockey, I fancied
just chilling for a while, so I wimped out, packed the
bike in the trailer and decided to see if I could hitch a ride with Barry in his RV. Barry worked for Eagle Rider Motorcycles,
who had transported the bikes, and he was there to make sure we had back-up when we weren’t riding. To Barry that RV was home,
and he liked the fact that his home was portable. Except this morning, the morning I’d asked if I could have a lift, it didn’t
seem so portable after all. The batteries were flat – all six of them – and Barry spent a large part of the morning trying to
get it figured out, while I kicked my heels in the parking lot. Finally the sun came out and I decided I didn’t want the lift
after all.

I seemed to regain all my strength, and suddenly riding was all I could think about. It had nothing to do with the problems
with the RV – this was the first day in a week when the sun had been shining, and I wasn’t going to let that go by. With many
miles still to cover, the best way to do it was on two wheels, and all at once I was desperate to get under way. So off I
went again, and with the sky blue and the sun overhead, I could’ve ridden all day. In fact we arrived in Winnipeg in the late
afternoon. Passing under the railroad bridge, we followed the signs north for Main Street, where we’d been booked into the
Fort Garry Hotel. From the outside it looked innocuous enough, but inside was reputedly the most haunted hotel room in North
America. Room 202. Guess which room Russ had booked me into for tonight?

I hate all that stuff, really I do. I mean, what was he thinking? I can’t even watch horror movies and he knows that. But
this trip was about pushing the boundaries, and not just physically I suppose, so I had no choice. Having said that, it really
was a very nice hotel, palatial in fact, and we weren’t paying. We’d been on a very tight budget the whole trip, and this
night’s rest – if I was to get any rest in this haunted room – was courtesy of
the Canadians. I guess they wanted to see how I would fare in Room 202.

The Fort Garry was built in 1913 by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, and is only a block from Winnipeg’s Union Station. Those
railway entrepreneurs were certainly canny; they didn’t just create a method of getting from coast to coast, they cornered
the market in places to stay along the way. Anyway, against my better judgement I checked into Room 202 while the manager,
Paul, filled me in on what I might expect. He told me that many guests had seen the ghost of a young woman (which was better
than some demonic monster, I suppose, although not much). Apparently after only one day of wedded bliss, her husband had been
killed in a car crash and, devastated by grief, his young widow had hanged herself in the closet of the room I’d just been
allocated: oh joy and happy days.

As Paul took me up there, he told me it was not a popular room; apart from at Halloween, people who knew the history actively
avoided it. The widow had been spotted at the end of the bed and two maids claimed to have seen blood seeping from the walls,
which for someone like me was about as bad as it can get. Only a couple of months ago, a young woman had wanted her picture
taken by the door of Room 202, but her camera wouldn’t work. Moving down the corridor to Room 208 she tried again and the
camera was fine, so she went back to 202. Guess what? Yes, the camera failed again.

The corridor was like any other in this kind of upmarket hotel: nicely carpeted and quiet, you know the sort of thing. Room
202 was right at the end beside the fire doors, beyond which there was a staircase, so that was one escape route at least.
Paul gave a little knock just to make sure the widow was aware we were coming in and then he unlocked the door.

I was chewing my nails, trying to look cool and calm but not doing a very good job. The room was not the best in the hotel,
but it was nicely decorated. I tried to tell myself it was just a room. A room where a woman had committed suicide.

‘Anyway,’ Paul said. ‘I’ll wish you good night. Hopefully there will be no disturbances. Oh,’ he added, ‘and don’t be like
the last person who stayed here, will you.’