Someone just walked all the way from Toronto to Montreal to 'touch grass'

Toronto resident Noah Kochanowicz is a big walker. He's walked all of the city's subway lines in their entirety; he's walked from the downtown core to Pearson, but his most recent stroll was his biggest yet: Kochanowicz walked all the way from Toronto to Montreal.

A software developer by trade who spends his spare time playing dodgeball and kickball and, of course, walking, Kochanowicz tells blogTO that, like many of his fellow desk-job warriors, he spends a whole lot of time tethered to his computer.

When he earned a month-long sabbatical at work, he tells blogTO, "I wanted to do something challenging and something that could really only be done given a full month of work off."

What better way to unplug from his computer and, in his words, "touch grass," he figured, than to take a nice, long walk? A very, very, very long walk.

The first time Kochanowicz has embarked on such an undertaking, he tells blogTO that, more than the sheer distance and physical demand of the adventure, it was planning the logistics of his route that posed the greatest challenge.

"Especially between Toronto and Kingston, there aren't places to sleep (camping or hotels) very often along the waterfront trail," he explains. "The whole thing is set up better for cyclists. So there may be one hotel, and then the next hotel or campsite wouldn't be for another 30 km. So it didn’t matter if I was tired or not; I had to do the 30 km."

The same went for food and water, he says. On the stretch between Coburg and Cramahe, for example, all of the water access points were on private land. Running low on water and fighting against a heat index of 35 C, he finally stumbled upon a public beach and filtered drinking water straight from Lake Ontario.

But the hardest leg of Kochanowicz's trip came after he reached Napanee — over 300 km from his goal destination of Montreal.

"I had walked 37 km. My feet were completely covered in blisters, and I could barely walk. My next stop was Kingston, and I had a rest day planned there, but it would still be 30 km to go, and it would have been 20 km before I'd get to stop in a town for lunch in Odessa," he explains.

"I was super nervous about not making it because my feet were in so much pain. I was also worried about what that would do for the rest of the trip."

Ultimately, he "accepted defeat" and found a bus to take him the remainder of the distance to Kingston. It was the only option if he hoped to stay on schedule. And, despite his feelings of failure at taking the lifeline, he tells blogTO that, in retrospect, he made the right decision.

"Ultimately I'm glad I made that decision. I was able to use the extra time in Kingston to completely rework my second half plan to spread out the kms more per day, get better-fitting shoes, and of course rest my feet," he says.

The trip wasn't all teeth-gritting pain and rations of drinking water, though. Kochanowicz tells blogTO that the rewarding moments of the trip outweighed the challenging ones.

"There were just so many times where I got to see the goodness of people, who saw a fellow human and wanted to help them, and those offers of help always turned into enthusiastic encouragement to root me on to Montreal," he says.

Along his journey, he tells blogTO, numerous people stopped by and offered him food, water or a lift. He turned all these offers down, he notes, except for one man in Gananoque who wouldn't take "no" for an answer and took Kochanowicz out for a meal.

A woman near Trenton pulled a full U-turn to offer him help when she saw him walking in the pouring rain.

"Spending so much time online really makes us jaded in so many different ways," Kochanowicz says, but if this trip taught him anything, it's that there's a whole lot of goodness, adventure and optimism to be found out there in the real world.

That said, with the journey officially under his belt as of Sep. 1, Kochanowicz says that there aren't any more long trips for him in the near future.

"The only walks I have planned for the foreseeable future will be to take my dog to the park," he says. "After that, we'll see. I'd like to do something else to challenge myself in a big way again, though maybe closer to home."

For the rest of his sabbatical, he's working hard at mastering the Rubik's Cube he bought himself in Montreal — "much easier on the knees."