Every Canadian Winter Activity Ranked by How Much It Requires Suffering
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Canada has winter for approximately six months of the year, depending on where you live and how generous you're feeling with the definition of spring. During those six months, Canadians do one of two things: stay inside and cope, or go outside and participate in winter as though it is a choice they are making freely and enthusiastically.
This is a ranking of the outdoor options. Specifically, a ranking by suffering — how much cold, effort, gear, misery, and existential reckoning each activity requires before it becomes something you'd describe as fun.
Some of these are worth it. Some of them you do because you live here and this is simply what happens now. All of them are more Canadian than anything else you could be doing. 🍁
Suffering Level 1: Minimal. Almost Enjoyable Immediately.
Hot Chocolate by a Fire Pit Outside ☕🔥
Technically an outdoor winter activity. You are outside. It is cold. You have a hot drink and a fire and you are standing near both of them in a coat that's doing its job, and life is genuinely fine right now.
This is the gateway drug of Canadian winter activities. It requires nothing except a fire, a cup, and the willingness to acknowledge that cold air on your face while you're warm everywhere else is actually a pleasant sensation. It is. Nobody wants to admit this in August, but in December it's true.
Suffering level: 1/10. The suffering is a gentle background hum that makes the hot chocolate better.
Snowshoeing on a Groomed Trail 🌨️
You strap things to your feet that make you wider but more stable, and then you walk. In the woods. In the snow. It is quiet in a way that nothing else is quiet. The trees have snow on them. Your breath makes visible clouds. Occasionally something moves in the distance and you stop and watch it.
Snowshoeing is the most accessible of the outdoorsy winter activities and also the most underrated. It requires almost no skill, gear beyond the snowshoes themselves is optional, and the payoff is immediate. The only suffering is the slight awkwardness of the gait and the possibility that you go too far and have to walk back the same distance you came, which you will absolutely do at least once.
Suffering level: 2/10. Unless you go too far. Then 5/10 for the return trip.
Suffering Level 2: Requires Gear, Rewards Effort
Outdoor Skating on a Maintained Rink ⛸️
A maintained outdoor rink — flooded by someone dedicated, levelled, kept up — is one of the genuinely good things about Canadian winter. You rent skates or bring your own, you go around the oval, your cheeks go red, and for a period of time you feel like you are in a Heritage Minute about what Canada is.
The suffering exists in the putting on and taking off of skates, which takes longer than any sane person would design for, and in the first five minutes when you remember that you skate once a year and it does take a moment to come back. After that, you're fine. After that it's good.
Suffering level: 3/10. The skate-tying is the worst part.
Tobogganing 🛷
You carry a plastic sled up a hill. This takes effort. You go down the hill in approximately four seconds. You carry the sled back up. You do this many times because the four seconds is worth the climb every single time.
Tobogganing is the most democratic Canadian winter activity. It requires one plastic sled that costs twelve dollars and a hill. The suffering is proportional to how steep the hill is and how many times you want to go down. The wipeout risk is real. The snow in the face is guaranteed. The screaming on the way down is involuntary.
It is excellent. The suffering is the point and also makes it excellent.
Suffering level: 4/10. Mostly in the legs by run fifteen.
Cross-Country Skiing ⛷️
Cross-country skiing is the activity recommended by people who want you to know they have their life together. You glide through the forest on skis. Your heart rate is elevated in a productive way. You are getting exercise while also being in nature while also technically doing something sporty. It checks every box.
The suffering arrives in the learning curve — cross-country skiing looks intuitive and is not, and the first time down a hill on cross-country skis you will understand that the bindings do not grip your heel and this matters more than you thought — and in the caloric requirements, which are substantial. You will be hungry. Bring snacks. Bring more snacks than you think you need.
Suffering level: 5/10. 8/10 the first time, 4/10 once you know what you're doing.
Suffering Level 3: Committed. You Have Made Choices.
Downhill Skiing 🎿
Downhill skiing requires: a ski hill, a lift ticket that costs more than a car payment, rental gear or owned gear that requires its own storage situation, appropriate clothing in multiple layers, the ability to get on and off a chairlift without incident (a skill that takes time), and the psychological fortitude to point yourself down a hill at speed on two narrow boards with some degree of intention.
It is, when it is going well, extraordinary. The speed and the cold air and the mountain views and the specific satisfaction of a good run done well — all of this is real and worth it. The suffering comes before and after: the gear, the cold, the chairlift when it's windy, the boots, and the particular quality of exhaustion you feel at 3pm when your legs have decided they are finished and you have two more runs you paid for and refuse to waste.
Suffering level: 6/10. Immediately forgotten the next time you buy a lift ticket.
Outdoor Hockey on a Natural Rink or Pond 🏒
This is not the maintained rink. This is the pond that froze over, or the backyard rink that your dad flooded at midnight in January because he was that dad, or the cleared section of a local lake that the community maintains by collective agreement and mutual frost tolerance.
The suffering is real: the cold is unmediated, the ice is imperfect, the changing situation is usually a cold shed or the back of a truck, and pond hockey does not stop for weather in the way that maintained rinks might. The satisfaction is also real: there is nothing else quite like playing hockey on actual natural ice with a puck that skips and bounces differently than arena ice, in air cold enough that you can see your breath, with people you know.
This is Canadian winter at its most elemental. The suffering is part of why it matters.
Suffering level: 7/10. Accepted fully and without complaint.
Suffering Level 4: You Are Committed to This Country in a Specific Way
Fat Biking ❄️🚲
Someone looked at a bicycle and said: what if we made the tires wider, so they could roll through snow? And someone else said: why? And the first person said: so we can ride bikes in winter. And the second person said nothing for a moment and then said: alright.
Fat biking is a real thing that real Canadians do for recreation in winter and it is a measure of Canadian commitment to the outdoors that this activity exists and has enthusiasts. The tires do grip the snow. You can ride a bike through a snowy trail. It is harder than regular biking and the cold makes it additionally challenging and the whole thing is sustained by a very specific kind of person who cannot be stopped by any season.
Respect. But also: you could be inside.
Suffering level: 7/10. 9/10 when there's wind.
Outdoor Running in February 🏃
You know these people. You have seen them from your warm car window, running along the road in -18°C in a balaclava and technical layers, somehow going at pace, somehow looking like this is fine. They are fine. They have a system. The system involves merino wool and a specific face-covering arrangement and the deeply held belief that there is no bad weather, only bad gear.
They are not wrong. They are also operating at a level of commitment to physical activity that most of us look at with a mixture of admiration and personal exemption. Running in February in Canada is a choice. A legitimate, defensible, actively good-for-you choice. It is also suffering, and the people doing it have simply decided the suffering is worth more than the alternative.
Suffering level: 8/10. 10/10 the first five minutes, 6/10 once you've warmed up from the inside.
Suffering Level 5: You and This Country Have an Understanding
Waiting for the Bus in February 🚌
Not a recreational activity. Included anyway because it is the most Canadian winter experience available to the largest number of Canadians and it requires suffering in its purest form.
The bus is late. It is always late in February because of the conditions, which are the conditions you are also standing in. The shelter, if there is one, blocks some of the wind and none of the cold. You are wearing everything you own. Your face is the only exposed part of you and it has opinions about this. The bus appears in the distance. You feel something close to religious relief.
Suffering level: 10/10. No gear helps. No technique helps. You simply wait.
The Outdoor Polar Bear Dip 🏊
People choose to do this. On New Year's Day. Across Canada. They walk into a frozen lake or a frigid ocean, submerge themselves, and then come back out. For charity, usually. For the experience, also.
The suffering is total and immediate and over quickly. The euphoria afterward is, by all accounts, real. The story you get to tell is yours forever. "I did the polar bear dip" is a sentence that ends conversations at parties in a specific way — people look at you like you are slightly different from them, and you are, because you chose this.
Suffering level: 10/10 for approximately ninety seconds. Then it's just a story. A very good story. 🐻
The Honest Truth About Canadian Winter
You can suffer through it or you can suffer into it. The difference is whether you're outside doing something or inside resenting the outside.
Neither is wrong. But the people who go outside — the snowshoers and the pond hockey players and the polar bear dippers and, yes, the fat bikers — they tend to talk about winter differently. Not like something happening to them. Like something they're part of.
Canada is cold. It is also, in winter, genuinely beautiful in a way that requires being in it to understand. The suffering, it turns out, is what earns the view. ❄️🍁
Warmly Canadian, whatever the temperature — shop the collection at paigepoutine.com 🦊