ATHLETE
Sam at the start of the Great Divide Trail.
NIC GROULX
The legend of Sam Dickie and the cougar The mere thought of an apex predator in our midst can turn a backcountry adventure into a psychological test of mind over matter. Luckily, our fears are mostly in our heads and few have experienced a negative wildlife encounter. But, for ultramarathoner Sam Dickie, that s**t got real. This is his story.
words :: Kevin Hjertaas Anyone who runs ultras—foot races longer than a marathon—will tell you the efforts are part physical, part mental. To develop the capacity for those distances, your muscles and aerobic system must be stressed, then given time to recuperate and adapt to an ever-greater workload. The mental training is much the same. Near exhaustion, the mind will highlight any reason to stop. Keep running past boredom, past self-doubt, and you’ll eventually run into fear—fear of injury or perhaps failure. But with repeated exposure, the mind learns to accept these hardships and build resilience. Of course, not all fears are mere mental constructs. Run deep into wild mountains alone, and you’ll find very real things to fear. On August 22, 2021, when Sam Dickie limped into the remote Hidden Creek campsite northeast of Tornado Mountain, he’d survived the worst of those fears.
The trajectory of Dickie’s running career was a sudden and rapid ascent. He moved from Ontario to Banff in 2013 at age 17 to pursue kayaking, but soon fell in love with the mountains above the rivers. He remembers, “I started running a lot, but only because I wanted to explore the area. I had all the maps for the Bow Valley, and I just wanted to tick off all the trails. It got to the point where I had to train to get to certain places. So, my first marathon was just a trail run on my own. I realized it was wicked what you could do with your body. If you train it and fuel it correctly, you can do anything.” So, train he did. In 2019, Dickie entered his first race, an audacious 100-kilometre run in Edmonton called the River Valley Revenge. He won, then followed up with fifth place in a 50-miler in Squamish, BC. He capped off his first race season with a victory— and a course record—in the Golden Ultra 120-kilometre race in its namesake Rocky Mountain town. “When we saw the results of the Golden Ultra, I was like, 41
