THE urban grind can grind one down. Being stuck in rush-hour gridlock and inhaling exhaust, hearing the unwelcome roar of a neighbour’s lawn mower too early on a Saturday morning, or fighting crowds in grocery stores and malls can give one the itch to escape.

But cutting and running from city life is not always in the cards for those who take umbrage with urban annoyances. The kids have soccer, there’s that dentist appointment, the plumber’s coming to fix the leaky faucet… Luckily, one doesn’t have to cross the Perimeter to access green spaces and nature trails. Opportunities to enjoy the outdoors abound in every neighbourhood.

“Our mental health is really at risk when we don’t get outside,” Anders Swanson, active living enthusiast and executive director of the Winnipeg Trails Association, says. “Accessing nature and moving your body is very, very good for you,” especially in the modern world where people are “increasingly stressed out.”

“If you think about it, it’s completely obvious,” he adds. “As human beings, we are part of the natural world; we grew up in it. When you take that away or we don’t get out there, you very quickly find yourself lost.”

Winnipeg Trails works to make sure Winnipeggers don’t get lost. They’re a coalition focused on accelerating the development and connectivity of Winnipeg’s greenways and cycling paths — “the transportation system underlying Winnipeg that’s built for human beings,” as Swanson puts it.

Winnipeg Trails has “done everything,” from helping to fund and build trails to adding amenities to existing ones. They’re also involved in events such as next week’s Commuter Challenge and have scheduled a Plog-a-Thon — where people jog and pick up trash — for June 8.

One of Winnipeg Trails’ most popular projects has been its exhaustive list of detailed trail maps, which can be found on their website, winnipegtrails.ca. The maps —more than 30 of them — outline the length of each trail, how they connect with the citywide network, and highlight points of interest along the way. It’s a tremendous resource for those looking to get out and explore new paths.

“Those were a pretty important project for us,” Swanson says. “It’s one of the biggest ways that people know about Winnipeg Trails is for those detailed trail maps.”

“Our job basically is to make it easy,” he continues. “We just want the easiest choice to be the most active one. That’s how we’re going to make a big difference for society.”

Charleswood’s Harte Trail, for example — a 6.5-kilometre path through a tunnel of trees that stretches from Sterling Lyon Parkway and Shaftesbury Boulevard to the west Perimeter Highway — has a crushed limestone surface and connects to five other trails, including the Assiniboine Forest trail network.

The key to finding time to spend outdoors, Swanson says, is to integrate it into one’s daily routine.

“Recreation is great — it’s great to have a chance to unwind — but you have to find energy, money, basically to do that,” Swanson says, hence Winnipeg Trails’ focus on active commuting.

“We only have a certain amount of time that we’re willing to move every day,” Swanson says. “Otherwise, we need to get some work done or go to that class… we have a time budget.

“If you live a 45-minute drive away from a city and that’s your commute, people tend to report feeling more unhappy than people who had a half-hour walk, and it’s because the people who had a 45-minute commute still want to get human connection and recreation… but they end up not having enough time to do that and then they feel more stressed out.

“People who bike or walk to school or work or out to dinner, or whatever — they integrate it into ways they get around — they tend to report being a lot happier because they managed basically to kill two birds with one stone.”

Winnipegger Jen Doerksen has been doing that for years.

Doerksen grew up in St. James near Sturgeon Creek and Saskatchewan Avenue. Doerksen cycled the Yellow Ribbon Greenway Trail — which begins at Sturgeon Creek and Hamilton Avenue, terminates at Silver Avenue and Ferry Road, and is named in honour of the Canadian Armed Forces — hundreds of times over six years as part of a commute to the University of Winnipeg and later, Red River College’s Exchange District campus.

Winnipeg Trails calls the 5.5-kilometre path a “crucial east-west link,” and it’s been just that to the now-24-year-old Doerksen.

“Green space and time in nature is super… important to me for a number of reasons,” Doerksen says.

“Primarily, it feels better to be outside, generally, than inside… It feels better on the body and mind and suits our hardware in a way. Our bodies are still getting accustomed to this whole ‘civilization’ thing, evolutionarily I’d say, and the western lifestyle of indoor work and play is somewhat contrary to how we’re built, I think.

“If I’m feeling the air, smelling the rain, grass, (and) fart smells of downtown Winnipeg, I’m more actively engaged in what I’m doing and my mind is working better in this way,” Doerksen says.

The freelance photographer, videographer and editor now lives in the Corydon area and doesn’t traverse the Yellow Ribbon Trail much these days, but still cycles for transportation and leisure.

Swanson, a year-round cyclist, prefers biking over driving to Winnipeg Trails’ Exchange District headquarters. He tries to walk anywhere within a kilometre, cycle anywhere between one and eight kilometres, and takes the bus for longer distances.

He owns a vehicle, but uses it “basically to get out into the bush” or to transport things too heavy to haul on two wheels.

Just as important as the physical benefits are the social ones.

“Try and shake hands with the person next to you in a traffic jam, you know?” Swanson says. “Our meaningful contact with human beings is face-to-face. There’s nothing that human beings like more than watching and seeing other people.

“We can’t survive without it. It makes us happy. It makes us stumble into an old friend… share a moment with a stranger… that kind of thing is so instrumental to us. The more time we spend doing it, the happier we are,” he continues, noting people in countries with the highest happiness index tend to spend more time socializing outdoors.

Using the trail network helped Doerksen develop social connections.

“Basically, my movement from living in the suburbs to developing friends, finding community, and spending time downtown came through travelling the Yellow Ribbon Trail,” Doerksen says.

Doerksen found getting to downtown, Osborne Village and Wolseley to visit friends took an hour or more by bus, but “biking that path took 45 minutes every time.”

Swanson is careful not to judge anyone who doesn’t make use of green space, acknowledging their life situation, location or physical limitations might make an active commute an impossibility.

However, he’d love Winnipeg to reach a broader consensus that walking, bicycle commuting, and active living benefits all.

“We want to make that as pleasant and fun and beautiful as possible,” he says of Winnipeg Trails. “Whether that’s biking down a protected bike lane with all kinds of shops you can stop at on your way home from work, or if you’re super lucky and you get to walk or bike to a park or along a riverbank in order to make it there, it’s the kind of quality of life thing that benefits everybody in ways we don’t even think about.

“I want everyone to be able to access nature because it’s something you want to share. For me, sharing Winnipeg in that way is really important.”

Outdoor cure

“THERE’S a reason they say exercise is the best medicine,” Anders Swanson says, and science backs up the claim. If you want to thrive, get outside.

Spending time outdoors can reduce one’s risk for a variety of common physical and mental health problems such as Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, stressrelated disorders, and even premature death.

That’s according to a 2018 study conducted by researchers from the University of East Anglia’s Norwich Medical School. The England-based research team gathered evidence from nearly 150 studies involving close to 300 million people from 20 different countries to come to their conclusions.

“People living closer to nature… had reduced diastolic blood pressure, heart rate and stress,” lead researcher Caoimhe Twohig-Bennett said in a press release outlining the study’s findings last summer.

“In fact, one of the really interesting things we found is that exposure to greenspace significantly reduces people’s levels of salivary cortisol — a physiological marker of stress.”

“We often reach for medication when we’re unwell,” Professor of Public Health and study co-author Andy Jones added, “but exposure to health-promoting environments is increasingly recognized as both preventing and helping treat disease.”

The evidence is so unequivocal that some doctors in the UK are giving patients “nature prescriptions,” eschewing pills for bird watching and beach walking.

It doesn’t take long to reap rewards, either. A modest 20 minutes in a park is enough to boost a person’s well-being, a February study by the International Journal of Environmental Health Research found.

“It would be lot easier to talk about the kind of medical ailments that aren’t helped by getting outside and using trails,” Swanson says. “Almost everyone stands to benefit making it part of their life.”