A group of five friends walked from Oakville to Toronto last month and then laced up their sneakers the following weekend to traverse the entirety of the Line 2 subway route.
Now, they are planning yet another marathon walk, this time from Vaughan Metropolitan Centre to downtown Toronto.
It might sound tiring but for Hayden Chan, Sophia Franc, Sebastian Karall, Michaela Purcell, and Katie Wang it’s how they stay in touch.
While they have all been friends since high school, some even knowing each other since elementary, it took the group a few years for their dream of walking the 46-kilometre stretch between Oakville and Toronto to hit the pavement. Wang, 23, said she and Chan, who is also 23, had talked about doing that walk in high school.
“That’s only one day of walking, it’s only eight hours, but we never really had the time like Grade 11 until now,” Wang told CTV News Toronto, saying the group got to talking about it during a trip to the cottage in August.
“We were like, ‘You know what, when we get back, we should just do the walk from Oakville to Toronto.’”
Karall, 22, adds that, after recently walking long stretches throughout Vancouver with Chan, their walking plans go even beyond traversing throughout the GTA.
“We thought, ‘Why can’t we just do long walks? We should just do more long walks.’ We thought, ‘We should walk all of Canada,’” Karall said.
But first, they wanted to make good on the walk from Oakville to Toronto.
With the CN Tower as their pseudo-Polaris, acting as an indicator of how far they were from reaching their goal, it took them about 12 hours to complete the entirety of the walk on Aug. 27.
“We were trusting Google Maps, and they said they would take us like nine hours, and it took us three extra hours on top of that,” Purcell said. “We didn’t get there ‘til late, ‘til dark, but the journey was really fun, and it was also very rewarding.”
To stay motivated, Purcell said they would continuously talk and debate with each other, exploring their home province as tourists by taking time to look at plaques along their walks to learn new things, like how Ruth Hussey stepped in to prevent Rattray Marsh from being developed into a yacht basin with luxury housing. Past the 30-kilometre mark, Chan said bribes in the form of Oreo cookies started to be doled out amongst them with techno music blaring out loud to keep the group focused on completing their goal.
“When we did the walk from Oakville to Toronto, when we finished, it was so grueling, but everyone’s question was like, ‘When are we doing the next walk? Like, cannot wait to do the next one,’” Chan said. “It sounds brutal, but we got to spend a whole day with each other, which we loved, and we got to explore, which is our favourite thing to do. It just feels like a whole adventure almost.”
Next up was walking the entirety of Line 2 on Sept. 7. The friends started their journey at Kipling Station and made their way to each subway entrance as they continued eastbound. The walk was fairly linear, up until they reached Victoria Park, with this stretch taking the longest as the group says it took about 45 minutes to an hour between Warden and Kennedy.
“I think the Line 2 walk was a lot easier to keep going than the Oakville to Toronto,” Franc told CTV News Toronto. “You get to the next train station, like we’re at Port Credit, and then three hours later, we’re still not at the next one but for Line 2, especially in the downtown area, the stops were so close to each other.”
The step count was also significantly higher, Franc noted, as they took 44,000 steps to trek across the green line while it took 58,000 steps to make their way from Oakville to the provincial capital’s downtown core.
Their love for walking has proven to be infectious, with thousands of likes across the TikTok and Instagram videos and people reaching out asking to join their excursions.
“We got a lot of comments or DMs being like, ‘I just moved here for school and I’m looking for friends,’ and I think our initiative is to be kind of a bit of a social prescription to give people some friends, maybe we can encourage community in this way,” Karall said.
Their upcoming walk on Oct. 25, starting off at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre and continuing along the Line 1 subway route to Yorkdale before ending off at Fort York Food Bank located on College Street, is open to anyone who registers. So far, Karall said about 100 people have signed up.
“We wanted to open it up to people because obviously we can’t take random people on walks with us, but we can use our platform then for a good cause,” Karall said, noting they partnered with the Fort York Food Bank so walkers can donate to a “worthy” cause.
Chan chimed in, saying their idea to open their walking trips to more people is two-fold. While they want to use their platform and redirect it toward good causes, Chan says they are also providing a space for people to make friends and have connection with others.
“I think that people are really craving an opportunity and a space to waste time with people, like something that isn’t productive,” Chan said. “That is something we do well, is waste time together. So yeah, the community walk is a good opportunity to provide those acts of service to our community.”
