Canada Goose Ultra

CANADA GOOSE ULTRA 2025
MAY 31 - JUNE 01, 2025

The 2025 version of Canada Goose Ultra was canceled owing to unsafe air quality.

From our Director of Silly and Safe Goose Operations, Michael Dahlman:

After 12 hours of delay due to extreme reports on the Air Quality Index (AQI) we were unable to get our acceptable (AQI) of 9 and under. The race was unable to start and the 2025 Canada Goose Ultra was canceled at 600PM.

After waiting and watching Air Quality Index numbers all day and calling the event - we decided to celebrate our runners with a post race gathering. Thank you to everyone for your patience and working with us to keep this event safe and responsible for everyone's health.

In exchange for your bib, we gave out a celebratory mug. In exchange for giving up your morning, a token of our thanks in a medal for the event.

With the option to take off your bib during the delayed wait, some runners walked and ran throughout the day, after we called the event - everyone managed at least a lap or other runners returned to socialize after completing their distances elsewhere.

Congrats to all and from the bottom of our hearts we are so grateful for our runners and hope that everyone had a positive experience.

This run community is special, I probably wandered the race site and socialized with everyone at least 50 times in the 12 hour wait. I broke bad new 4-6 times individually to the clusters of runners every 30 minutes to 2 hours at a time.  I know people were annoyed, but very thankful we were watching for their safety.

8 hours before we started the event we decided:

-(0-6 AQI) was acceptable

-(7-9 AQI) was cautious, but we will monitor your loops and your day closer than usual.

-(10+ AQI) We will suspend the event for 2 hours and reassess at that point.

Watching the trend of a doable AQI of 9 at 4AM, at high as AQI of 38 at 11AM, to a 13-14 consistently from 2-4PM - We were hopeful of a consistently lowering index that was less risk for strenuous activity.

Thank you to everyone who was pivotal to this event. RunRegina, Culligan Water, Wanda, The Weimers, Heidi, Ryan and all you lovely runners who I hope we all know each other better after a long eventful morning of conversations, sharing food and bonding.

While it was stressful watching a pile of resources and months of planning sit and wait, this was a great test run - as race directors we made the hard decisions and unintentionally established/tested some guidelines to managing a safe race during high (AQI) during  an event. If its a 5k or a multi-day backyard ultra I hope we have data and experience to make sure our events are safer now.

As a race director I hope our experience can help establish rule and a playbook for extreme heat, cold, smoke and all the fun stuff Saskatchewan weather throws at us.

Here are some photos of our community goose event - Teresa Donley said it best, calling the hours of sitting around, listening to music, and swapping running - Goosestock!