They share the same first name, have shared the same racetracks, and soon they might be sharing the same finish times.
That’s if Logan Boehmer can catch up to his training partner, Logan Roots.
Boehmer pushed himself to the territorial cross-country running championship title on the weekend, running close to his personal best in the 10-km event at the Mount McIntyre recreation centre.
He finished in 36 minutes and 57 seconds, besting second-place runner Simon Lapointe, who ran 41:55.
“For cross-country, that’s pretty good. I have run sub-36 before, I’m pretty sure,” Boehmer said.
His name-sharing teammate wasn’t at the event, having moved down to Vancouver Island to train through the winter, but the two worked together closely over the summer and Boehmer is slowly closing the cap.
At the Canada Summer Games in Sherbrooke, Que., earlier this summer, Roots and Boehmer ran to 13th and 17th respectively in the 5,000-metre track event. Roots posted a 15:23.21 time while Boehmer clocked 16:08.22. His previous personal best had been 16:33.
“I basically trained all summer for it, put my heart and soul into the training, and felt really good about my times,” Boehmer said.
It may seem a substantial margin, but consider that Roots has been training as a runner for more than five years. Boehmer has only been doing it for two.
“Logan Boehmer probably had a personal best improvement of almost a minute over the course of the year. Roots had an improvement of about 13 seconds, but that’s just the way it goes,” said the Logans’s coach, Don White.
White explained that the closer an athlete gets to their peak performance, the more difficult each successive improvement becomes. These diminishing returns mean that for a runner like Roots to shave even a few seconds off his times requires just as much effort as Boehmer puts into carving off whole minutes.
And neither Logan has shied away from hard work, though occasionally their approaches differ.
After the Canada Summer Games, Roots continued a grueling training regime, while Boehmer chose to rest and recover. They teamed up for the Klondike Road Relay earlier this month, and their team Scarecrow easily swept the field. They’ll meet up again for the Victoria half-marathon in a couple of weeks.
“Roots is more of a powerhouse,” White said. “But for Boehmer, resting has done him a world of good. He’s physically and psychologically allowed himself to recover from all of that, and to get into the headspace that he needs to be in for the marathon on Thanksgiving Weekend.”
With the territorial title under his belt, Boehmer said he’s happy with his performance, and excited about the upcoming B.C. race.
“It was pretty good. I kind of took a break after the road relay. The week before I was doing just sort of normal runs. Doing this one was kind of good to get back to running a bit faster,” he said.
There were only 16 runners at this weekend’s championships, down from 45 last year. There were no open women competing in the race, White said. The top female runner was Sue Bogle in the masters eight-kilometre event, who finished with a time of 41:28, ahead of Laurie Drummond, who finished in 50:20.
Once the Victoria half-marathon is over, Boehmer said he may do one other race in Vancouver to end his season. He’ll spend the winter going to school at Yukon College and focusing on snowshoeing to build up his strength for next season.
Contact Jesse Winter at
jessew@yukon-news.com