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Rory Egelus laughs when he says how old he is: “Thirty-four. Double the age when I was in my prime.”
Joking not joking. Egelus was 17 when he won his third straight Mount Marathon junior boys title by posting the fifth-fastest winning time in race history.
To be fair, he went on to run 10 straight senior races with considerable success: four finishes in less than 50 minutes, nine in less than an hour. Five top-15 finishes and two ninth-place finishes, including the one in 2012 when he ran a career-best 47:41.
Egelus, who grew up in Palmer, ran 19 straight Mount Marathons — nine junior races, 10 senior races — before his streak ended in 2014.
Since then he’s been busy raising children and running businesses in Bozeman, Montana, but he’s back for Wednesday’s races.
[Mount Marathon returns with a talented field and a nearly snowless mountain]
He’ll get an early start when he fires the start pistol for the junior race at 8:30 a.m. He’ll return to the Fourth Avenue start line at 3 p.m. for his first men’s race in seven years.
“There won’t be any record set, I can tell you that. I’m running it because it was a big part of our life growing up,” Egelus said.
Egelus is one of three sons raised by Rick and Peggy Egelus, who just celebrated their 50th anniversary. The family held a reunion to celebrate, and Egelus extended his family’s trip so he could run Mount Marathon again.
A trip to Seward for the race was a summertime centerpiece for the Egelus family, and for a few years, Rick and all three of his sons — Pat, Keegan and Rory — ran the race. Rick competed in six senior races, Pat did 12 and Keegan 11.
“My dad is this is straight-up Alaskan, he was a hobby bush pilot, so he’d fly an airplane down there and the rest of us were in a 1970s motor home and we’d pick him up at the airport,” Egelus said.
“... Our annual trip to see relatives in Michigan was always after the race. We always prioritized the race. It was just a big part of our lives.”
Now Egelus has three sons of his own with wife Lacey — Bennett, Jackson and Soren; the oldest just turned 4, the youngest was born June 8.
A skilled furniture maker even as a teenager, Egelus ran Rory’s Rustic Furniture and an event rental company in Bozeman before selling both businesses in 2019. He continues to work as a real estate investor, which lets him and Lacey stay home with the boys.
“I’m busy running 10Ks and 5Ks with the double stroller. I gotta find a triple stroller now,” he said. “My days are really limited to stroller racing.”