Logan Roots twists the thin beaded bracelet on his wrist as he thinks. It’s a memento from the 22-year-old runner’s first trip to Kenya for training.

He was on his way to the airport at the end of the trip two years ago and poked his head into a store. The man there showed him a few bracelets on display, but they weren’t to Roots’ taste.

“He went and took this off his buddy’s wrist and brought me to a back corner and we bartered for this,” says Roots.

Initially the man charged him $20.

“I’d been there too long to get ripped off that badly,” Roots laughs. He got the price down and the bracelet hasn’t come off since. The real estate on his left forearm is firmly taken up by a Garmin watch that screams runner.

“Usually when I’m racing or before I’ll look at it,” he says, touching the simple beaded design. “It kind of reminds you how much work you’ve put in. Some people have a tough time convincing themselves of that before they race.”

Starting this fall, the local runner will take on a different kind of challenge as he joins the military and begins his attendance at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont.

Roots grew up in Whitehorse. An avid skier, at 13 he set his sights on attending the Arctic Winter Games. But a season of broken bones – wrist and arm – hindered his ability to pole, so he looked for another way to secure a ticket.

Cue snowshoeing.

He tried out for the team in front of running coach Don White and was welcomed aboard.

Roots quickly became hooked to running. It probably didn’t hurt that he had a natural talent for it.

“It’s brutally simple, which I like,” he says. “You can’t blame a slow race on your shoes, you can only blame it on yourself. Pretty much everything that can go wrong is within your control.”

Living in Riverdale, pretty much every run starts out his back door and up Grey Mountain.

“In the summer especially, this is the best place to run,” he says. “The winter, it’s a little tough. It’s always dark, there’s snow, it’s cold. I think once you get through a winter of running here you can pretty much run anywhere and be comfortable.”

For Grade 11, Roots moved to Vancouver Island, where he attended Shawnigan Lake School. His running talent bloomed.

But every summer he would always move back to the Yukon.

A typical week of training involves 120 to 140 kilometres of running.

There are two big workouts: a hill run and a long run, usually Sundays. That long run could take up to two hours and he covers between 20 and 30 kilometres.

Roots, a self-professed morning person, prefers to run at the beginning of his day.

He never runs with music.

“Once you get into it and it becomes something you do 10 times a week, you kind of just teach your mind to wander a bit, or to focus on what you’re doing and time just goes by,” he says. “It’s more enjoyable, plus no bear is going to come up behind you if you don’t have music in.”

When John Carson and his family moved to Whitehorse from Ontario a few years ago, Roots found he had a reliable training partner in Carson’s daughter, Lindsay.

And two years ago, Carson talked Roots into travelling to Africa to train at his running camp in Kenya for a few weeks.

Roots worked a roofing job to fund the trip. He loved it.

“I’m just a big running nerd and it’s the hub of world-class running. You see your celebrities, these guys that are really nice. Plus the roads are really soft and beautiful and there’s all these other Kenyans to train with,” he says. “You can focus exactly on running. You don’t have to think about everything else.”

To fund this year’s trip, Roots worked at Sports Experts, staking out the shoe wall to help prospective runners and walkers.

This time around in Kenya, Roots received an email from Canadian Forces, they wanted a phone number for him.

“I accidentally cut them off halfway through too because I ran out of phone minutes and I couldn’t call them back,” he says.

So he shot off a frantic email.

“They understood.”

Roots was accepted into the military and RMC in Kingston.

“It’s been a long time coming,” he says. “It was nice to just have it confirmed, all the details laid out.”

Roots first applied out of high school, but there was no need for pilots at the time. He hung tight, going to school for athletic therapy for a year before deciding that it wasn’t for him. He wanted to fly.

For the past couple years he has been going through interviews and tests with the military to become a pilot. Since it became an option to join, he has been growing his hair. His blonde curls are now shoulder-length.

“Flying is just super fun,” he says.

Roots would ideally like to fly jets, or with the Snowbirds, he says. While at school on the island, he saw the group fly at CFB Comox and has talked to a few of the pilots, even sitting in on a briefing.

“It was really cool,” he says.

“My dad was on board the whole way. Mom took a little longer to convince,” Roots says. “She’s come around. She’s encouraging now. Still don’t know if she knows I want to fly jets, but we’ll see.”

This summer, competitive running is going to take a backseat in Roots’ life. There are no specific races that he’s training for and he won’t be travelling for any either. He says he might do some fun trail races, but that’ll be on his own terms.

For now he’s looking forward to decompressing a bit, spending time with his family before he moves out east and enjoying all the activities the Yukon has to offer.

The first project on his list: planter boxes so that his parents can start gardening.

When he gets to Kingston in the fall, who knows. “I’ve heard Kingston is a good place to run,” he says.

This summer though, he says, twisting his bracelet, “I’ve got to do a lot more pushups.”