An Endurance Experiment

All photos by Brendan Davis

Dense spruce trees pushed back against my every step as I tried to inch my way through steep, rooted terrain. Rough bark and sharp twigs tried their best to scrape all the skin off my body, while needlelike leaves smacked against my face. It was only 11:00 a.m., but we’d been moving since 6:00 a.m. and had only made it a few miles.

We’d started the morning by downclimbing a 60-foot waterfall, thinking that would be the most challenging part of the day. But by the time we’d reached the gentle rise of the cliffs from the beach, we could tell we were in for even more bushwhacking. Within a mile, the beach had begun to run out. We’d either have to wade through the cold ocean for an unknown distance or bushwhack to higher ground. We chose the latter.

We’d been inching forward like this for 7 days and 115 miles, with 50 more miles to go. The island did not want to make this trip easy for us.

Anticosti Island (called Notiskuan by the Innu, and Natisgôsteg by the Mi’gmaq) stretches nearly 155 miles off the coast of Quebec, in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. A checkered history of colonization and varied private and government ownership kept the island largely uninhabited for the better part of 130 years. Today, only a few hundred people call Anticosti home. Most who visit do so to hunt and fish.

Since the island has largely been spared from large-scale development, it also has one of the richest intact marine geological records in the world, dating back 437 to 447 million years. In 2023, it was nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for conservation purposes. That’s why we were here—“we” being myself and a motley crew of runners and scientists who had agreed to help me with a research expedition that felt like decades in the making.

Outside of running, my life mostly revolves around being a fish physiologist. I spend my days in the field and in a lab, working to better understand the lives of fish around the world—especially those most critical to human livelihoods and cultures—and how they are impacted by things like climate change and pollution. At the beginning of 2025, I moved from Colorado to Quebec for a government-backed research fellowship to explore biodiversity on Anticosti and, ultimately, help shape future conservation efforts. Much of my focus was on Atlantic salmon and brook trout, two species that are declining across the eastern seaboard.

Very quickly, I realized that the best way to conduct my research might actually be through running. As runners, we can access remote places much more quickly and regularly than most scientists, and with a lower budget, fewer carbon emissions and fewer logistics—which means we can collect data efficiently. Running also brings its unique form of data collection: another perspective on what is happening around us and how we fit into the daily rhythms of a place. The act of running is a form of connection between our bodies, the air, the land and the water. It is how I intimately learn places, whether I have set foot in them thousands of times or I am meeting them for the first time. There is so much information gained in our moments of movement, both on land and in water, that also informs the more quantitative sides of science and data collection.

And so on June 23, 2025, I found myself boarding a cargo ship to Anticosti loaded down with an eclectic mix of gear: a fastpack, running shoes, ultralight camping equipment, fly rods and nets, water-sampling equipment, marine flares, energy chews, electrolyte mix, 10 days’ worth of backcountry meals and a large cooler full of lab-grade tubes, bags, water filters and fish-sampling kits.

Over the next nine days we’d travel roughly 160 miles, looping around the southeastern part of the island from southwest to northwest, largely off trail. I’d devised the route with the singular goal of connecting as many of the island’s bodies of water as possible, which meant traveling through rocky streams, slanted beaches, spongy peat and marshland, and dense forest. Along the way, we’d collect water samples for trace elements and environmental DNA (genetic material shed by all living organisms present in a given environment). You can think of these two data points like aquatic fingerprints. Together, they tell us about the number and types of species present in an area and the geological signature and history of a watershed. By comparing samples from rivers, streams and inlets across the island, we’d be able to paint a picture of where and why Atlantic salmon and brook trout have continued to survive, and hopefully inform future policies for ecosystem protection.

The trip began with a sense of urgency. Most of the major designated salmon rivers on our route were packed into the first three days, so we needed to be efficient. That proved difficult, however, since these first three legs of the route were probably the most challenging. We were constantly switching between dense forest, spongy peatland (we took turns suddenly plunging into calf- or even waist-deep muck) and hot, slanted, algae-covered beach.

On the morning of day three, we awoke to thunderstorms and rain. We were camped at the mouth of Rivière Dauphiné, an inlet with no fresh water but tons of jumping fish—great for our research, terrible for trip logistics. High tide and a strong current meant we couldn’t cross the river in search of drinkable water. Instead, we harvested the rainwater that collected on one of our bivies and tried to figure out how to handle the day’s sampling goals.

The weather that day ruined most of our sampling opportunities. Rainwater flushed away much of the environmental information we were trying to collect and made it difficult to keep our sampling materials dry and sterile. At the same time, it left us rich with information: how precipitation, sea spray, wind, sun and terrain changed dynamically throughout the day, and how different animals used the understory to seek shelter from the rain.

Six days later, we ended the trip on an appropriate note: stumbling out of dense, unnavigable forest after hours of slow progress, with 300 environmental DNA samples from 37 bodies of water to show for our bushwhacking. Of course, those samples only represented part of what we were bringing back to the mainland. As we moved through the landscape, we collected stories—both from our own lived experiences as well as from the island’s inhabitants. Our nine days in Anticosti’s backcountry had allowed us to fully experience the elements that have shaped this place and the stories of species introduction, species loss, flooding, drought and food that it holds. I can tell you where we made seal friends along the coastline and about the places where the ground changed from squishy swamp to talus-like rock; I can show you where the seaweed and shell assemblages and the fossils are hidden in riverbank rocks; I can point you to the popular lamprey, eel and frog hangout spots.

Science is a practice: a gradual collection of knowledge, experiences, experiments and theories over time. It is iterative. For me, running is also a practice: a way to learn about our surroundings, to explore places both new and old, to test theories of our own personal resilience experience, and to understand how we fit into and shape places.

At their core, neither science nor running is rooted in speed or ease. Rather, they’re about persistence, curiosity and trust. Both ask us to keep questioning and to keep putting one foot in front of the other. They ask us to press on through discomfort and uncertainty. In exchange, they connect us to something larger, carrying us continuously forward into stories that are still unfolding.