Long Runners

By
Emily Williams

Photography by Ian Sheh and Eric Kocher

Some guys just can’t get enough miles beneath their feet.

Logan Beaulieu

In a sport that involves running anywhere from fifty kilometres to hundreds of miles at a time, training for ultramarathons can be lonely business.

Often raced over difficult terrain, training typically means miles on isolated paths, not group jogs on paved roads. And yet despite this, or perhaps because of it, there seems to be a real community of
ultramarathoners, who compete against each other but also provide each other with a lot of support. Logan Beaulieu, a B.C. native who now trains out of Edmonton, says he feels a real unity with other ultramarathoners.

The sport has introduced him to people he would never have met otherwise, and he says he has met role models as well as friends. With Alberta’s ultramarathon scene being particularly buoyant, Beaulieu wants to give credit to community. Numerous individuals stand out to Beaulieu like Edmonton’s Sandy McCallum; Gary Poliquin, the Blackfoot Ultra race director, Jack Cook of Fast Trax Run and Ski Shop; Hiroshige Watanabe; Erwin Gerber; Larry Thompson; Canmore’s own Wade Jarvis, and Calgary’s Gord Hobbins of Gord’s Running Store; Jen Silverthorn; and Ian Hutcheson, the infamous “Sandalman,” to name but a few.

Nobody, however, is more important to Beaulieu than his father, Moe the Eagle, who introduced Logan to the sport after he nearly died in a car accident. It was Moe that pushed Logan to first get up from his wheelchair, then to walk, and then finally to run. After running two fifty-kilometre ultramarathons in 1992 and 1993, Logan completed the Sri-Chinmoy twenty-four-hour marathon in 1994, running one hundred miles around a track in just over twenty-two hours. With the accident now in the past, Logan can be philosophical about it: “My past gives me an edge,” he says. “After what I’ve been through I’ve developed a real mental toughness: I know I can get through the hard times.” But it hasn’t always been easy. Though he was an active child, Beaulieu says he struggled with motivation after the accident, “Now I love it and I have to do it,” he says, “but it took some time.”

To learn more about Beaulieu, check out www.logansrun.ca.