Endurance Man, from Cradle to Grave

Sam Ouellet claimed he began skiing, at age 3, and running, at age 5. He was still doing both well into his 80s, and right up until his death. He earned an almost legendary name for himself running marathons, biking hundred-plus-mile events, and skiing multi-day events. In a profile on Ouellet, featured in his book The Maine Quality of Running, author-runner-race director Dick Goodie, himself a member of the Maine Running Hall of Fame, dubbed him “Maine’s Original Ironman.”

Born on October 5, 1904, in a small town in the Province of Quebec, Ouellet and his family came to northern-most Maine in 1914, settling in Van Buren. It was there, he said, that he began making his own cross country skis. With four brothers and two sisters, he told Goodie, “…we had to make the most of things.”

Ouellet started working in the Maine forests at age 10, cutting wood with ax and crosscut saw. Much of his life he worked as a lumberjack. The diminutive Ouellet was only 5-foot-5 and weighed just 124 pounds.

From an early age Ouellet had obstacles to overcome. During his early years in Canada he contracted cedar poisoning and temporarily lost the use of his legs. For a difficult period of time, he told Goodie, “the only way I could move was by sitting on the edge of one of those old-fashioned wash tubs and roll it. And then I used to go up in the attic to watch the kids run down the street…Finally, I said the hell with the washtub, so I fell out of it and kept moving a little at a time until I could use my legs.” The poison, he noted, had finally run out of his system.

Ouellet said the only foot races he found to participate in, as a youngster, were in Edmundston, New Brunswick. But once the family moved to Van Buren running was temporarily put aside and he skied. By 1919 the family moved to Howland, and he focused on several team sports from school, including basketball, baseball and hockey. However, because of his own admission that he didn’t like school, he didn’t proceed past the 7th grade.

Once he turned his attention to competitions in running, skiing and biking, it was the long distance events that captivated him. Maintaining a career as a runner was hard…because one had to travel out-of-state to find races. Ultimately, he ran the Boston Marathon 35 times, starting with his first one in 1928. He had a personal best of 2 hours, 27 minutes.

He told Goodie that one of his favorite memories of the Boston Marathon came the year that he missed the bus to the starting line for the competitors and caught a lift with the press bus. Ouellet was fond of Boston Post columnist Arthur Duffy, a former nationally-known sprinter. Duffy was talking about a pre-race story that had appeared in his paper. Attempting to tease the columnist, Ouellet blurted out, “Who reads the Post any way?”

Duffy got angry. He retorted, “You win this race today, Sam, and you won’t see your name in the Post.” Ouellet laughed and responded to that: “If I win this race today I don’t give a damn if my name gets in any paper!”

Legendary runner Clarence DeMar, all-time champion of the Boston Marathon with seven victories, earned Ouellet’s utmost respect. He told Goodie: “In the ‘20s Clarence DeMar was a tough guy to beat. He came to Maine to run. He would run with his money tucked in his shoe so nobody would steal it. The last time I ran with DeMar was in ’57 when he came for the Brunswick-to-Bath run. He had these white trunks all torn on one side and he had pins in them and it made me sorry to see him this way after all he’d done. He was dying of cancer. But I’d run a lot of marathons with him.” The year DeMar came to that event, Ouellet’s Ashland A.C. team won the team prize.

Ouellet also fondly remembered many of the standout runners of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s who came to Maine to compete, including “Old” Johnny Kelley, John Lafferty, Tony Sapienza and Al Confalone. Once, when Ouellet and his three racing sons, Aurele, Eddie and Paul, had traveled to Boston for the National 10-Kilometer Race at Franklin Park, he was standing in a group with Kelley, Lafferty and Confalone waiting for the race to start. Someone remarked that there were a “lot of athletes” there for the race. Confalone spoke up immediately: “There’s only one bunch of athletes here – the Ouellets, they ski, bike race, skate, canoe. The rest of us are only specialists. We specialize in running.”

In the late 1950s, Goodie remembered he watched Ouellet win a Master’s mile at the Portland Exposition Building. At the conclusion of the running events, it was announced that Ouellet had won a 15-kilometer cross country ski race that very morning in New York. “Spontaneous applause nearly lifted the Expo roof,” Goodie recalled. Yet Ouellet couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. Ouellet, Goodie concluded, “was only spending the day doing what he liked best.”

Ouellet once won a four-day, 184-mile ski race from Bangor to Caribou in 1936. His interest in entering long distance endurance events came from his mother. Ouellet told Goodie: “When they had that ski marathon from Bangor to Caribou in 1936, she said, ‘Why don’t you enter?’ and I did.” The 184-mile event was, Ouellet said, the longest event he ever participated in, and he was 32 years old at the time. Thirteen skiers entered but only five finished it. It included: 1st day, Bangor to Lincoln, 50 miles; 2nd day, Lincoln to Haynesville, 50 miles; 3rd day, Haynesville to Mars Hill, 54 miles; and 4th day, Mars Hill to Caribou, 30 miles.

“So,” Ouellet told Goodie, “that made four marathons in four days. We slept some at each town and everyone would start out the next morning at seven…People think they are doing something when they run the Boston Marathon. That’s only one marathon in one day.”

Biking was also of great interest. And, following his theory of “when people bike, they should try a race,” Ouellet was particularly interested in long distance events. He told Goodie the longest bike race he ever entered was 1,080 miles in eight days, held in Quebec.

For years he returned to his hometown in Quebec for a 300-mile bike race. He told Goodie he was 58 years old the first time he entered it and, “They gave me the whole town. When I quit going they cancelled the race.”

At age 79, in 1984, Ouellet completed a 62-mile ski race in Canada over a two-day period. He noted that he hadn’t beaten too many people but he attributed that to a bad toe. He told Goodie: “It (the toe) hurt my concentration all through the race and cost many places. A week later I had it amputated in Augusta.” A few years earlier, he took a fall in a ski race, driving a splinter into his hip…He had plastic hip replacement surgery and resumed competing.

Slowing down and finishing in the back of the pack never bothered Ouellet in his later years, even telling Goodie that even if he finished last in races, “I will complete the course, and in any race that is the best victory of all.”

In his later years Sam Ouellet owned and ran a ski touring center in Ashland.