The Proposal: A running version

On the Halloween weekend of 2012, Kristin Joudrey and Kyle Landry left their Queen and Bathurst Street home downtown Toronto to go for a late fall run along the city’s waterfront. It was in evening after work, just before dusk and two weeks before Kristin’s birthday. The Martin Goodman Trail that they ran on was a favourite route for the couple. With the picturesque view of Lake Ontario and separation from city traffic, fitness buffs seem to flock to it. For Kristin and Kyle, it was close to home, plus Kristin had a tradition of picking out the spray-painted heart someone had drawn on the trail in the middle of their route.

The night before, Kyle had gone down to the trail and written “Will you marry me?” in chalk beside the graffiti heart. Before the run, he slipped an engagement ring into a zipper pocket on his jacket. Proposing during a run seems like the obvious idea. “We had been running together awhile,” says Kyle. “It was part of our relationship.”

As they approached the spot on the path where the heart was drawn, Kyle was nervous she wouldn’t see it. It was getting dark and he was scared that it would be the one time where Kristin would forget to look for it. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to prompt her,” he says. Just as he was worrying though, Kristin began to look. Relief.

“I saw writing which was very obscure,” she says. She got close to look at the words written in chalk. When she turned around, Kyle was on one knee.

“I tried to do a real proposal with real words,” says Kyle adding that his speech didn’t come out quite as he had planned.

“It was adorable,” says Kristin. At the time though, she was shocked. Staring at him with a blank face for a few moments trying to figure out what was going on.

“Eventually she just jumped on me when she realized,” says Kyle who had been waiting nervously for an answer. He says that he even had to pause that moment to clarify that she had given him a yes.

The two met in 2009. She’s from Nova Scotia and he is from Newfoundland. They met one night in a bar in P.E.I. when Kyle made an ironic comment about finding her a boyfriend that night. They did long distance for two years while he went back to school to do his masters degree. Then, after that, they moved to Toronto. They married late in August of 2013.

Kyle has been a runner since childhood running cross-country and track and then running casually in his twenties. Kristin has been running for the past 12 years but both say that when they got together, they started running more. That’s especially because they trained for their first marathon together. Eventually they both became serious runners, qualifying for Boston. “She’s very fast,” says Kyle. “She went to Boston before I did.”

Now, their running has really taken off. Though they don’t train together all the time anymore, they still make time running in Toronto ravines and trails during the week. They each joined separate clubs too and are gearing up for spring races right now. It’s a classic story of runners keeping each other’s goals in mind.”We definitely motivate each other,” says Kristin. “I personally wouldn’t have jumped to a marathon had I not had him.”

Though the couple has since moved to a different part of the city, every once in awhile, they go back to the place of their proposal.

“When we got back there, it’s very nostalgic,” says Kristin.