Jared Beasley on Al Howie, the runner who crossed Canada in 72 days

Al Howie is the sort of figure ultrarunning produces every so often and then quietly forgets: a runner whose numbers are barely credible, attached to a life that was chaotic enough to keep him out of the sport’s official memory. Jared Beasley spent several years tracking him down and talking to him, and this episode is the conversation about the resulting book, In Search of Al Howie, due out in October 2019.

The record that still stands up

Howie was a Scotsman who settled in Canada, and his output through the 1980s and 1990s is hard to take in at one sitting.

• He ran across Canada in 72 days and 10 hours — a little over 100 kilometres a day, every day — and the mark has stood since.
• Two weeks after finishing that, he ran 1,300 miles and broke his own world record for the distance.
• He holds the record for the longest continuous run without stopping: 360 miles around a standard track.
• He once ran from England, through France, to Sardinia, in order to run a marathon there.

Any one of those would make a career. Howie put them together while working itinerant jobs, sometimes unable to afford a bus ticket to the start line of a race he intended to win.

The life around the running

Beasley’s interest is not really in the splits. Howie ran under assumed names at points in his life to avoid attention from law enforcement. He lived with serious mental illness, and the interview does not tidy that up or use it as a plot device — the book’s argument is that the running and the illness were not separable, and that any account which treats one as an explanation for the other gets him wrong.

There is also the cancer diagnosis, and Howie’s insistence that a macrobiotic diet dealt with it. Beasley reports what Howie believed without endorsing it, which is the right call and, in a sport full of people convinced their diet is load-bearing, a useful example.

Why the book exists at all

The conversation keeps returning to how close these records came to disappearing. Howie’s peak predates the era when ultrarunning documented itself. He raced Yiannis Kouros head to head exactly once, which is the kind of detail that survives in a results database and nowhere else. Beasley found him late in his life, spent time with him, and got the account down while it was still possible.

Howie died in 2016. The book is the only sustained account of him there is.