Brian Ladeau’s vocation and craft requires him to be meticulous, precise, deliberate, solitary.

He is a picture framer with a shop and studio in Middlebury, right in the middle of town.

Brian has owned Otter Creek Custom Framing for 21 years. Before that, he worked for Shirley Neal, the previous owner, for 15 years. “After graduating from Mt. Abe,” he told me in a conversation last week in his shop, “I was building custom furniture with my grandpa and we heard she was looking for some help.

“I thought with my woodworking skills and experience, I might be good at it.” His grandfather, Clayton, was the owner and proprietor of Deerleap Furniture in Bristol.

Now, his other identity, his avocation: It’s quite different — night and day different!

Brian is an endurance athlete, an ultramarathoner —an “obstacle course racer (OCR),” to be more precise.

In June of last year, Brian competed in the Infinitus 100, held at Silver Lake Campground in Goshen, Vt., hosted by the Endurance Society. In last year’s event, the 100-mile race with about 17,000 feet of elevation gain and loss, was run “through mud, relentless rain, and some of the worst conditions the race has seen,” according to the website of the Bristol Fitness Center.

It took Brian 36 hours, and he finished seventh of 34 competitors.

He has participated in this event six times and finished four times, his DNFs (Did Not Finish) resulting from “trench foot and extended nausea.”

The Endurance Society is the brainchild of Andrew “Andy” Weinberg, a member of the physical education faculty at Vermont State University at Castleton and an ultra marathoner par excellence himself. He once completed the Quintuple Ironman: 12-mile swim, 560 miles on the bike, and 121 mile run over four days.

I spoke with Brian, 55, last week at the frame shop. “I have probably done 150 or so of these OCR races, mostly when I was in my 40s. Now I probably do two a year.”

He was an athlete in high school at Mt Abraham High, class of ’89, and enjoyed conventional team sports at that time, playing baseball under Bill Stetson and basketball with Coach Bill Leggett.

He has always been fit, combining weight training and running and hiking before concentrating on these endurance challenges. He loves to hunt and be in the woods.

Though his roots run deep in Bristol, Brian lives in Vergennes now, with his wife Megan Allen Ladeau, a photographer, and their son, Cameron, 6, and her daughter, Averie, 14. His parents, Brian and Pam, still live in Bristol as do Brian’s two sons from his first marriage, Noah 20 and Logan 21, both graduates of Mt. Abe and accomplished athletes themselves.

Ten years ago, Brian and his friend, Steve Beckwith, saw a “Spartan” race in Killington and decided to compete in a forthcoming event called “the Beast.” (Spartan is the world’s leading obstacle course racing organization: Joe De Sena, its founder and CEO, a legend in this area of endeavor, lives with his family on a farm in Pittsfield, Vt.)

The Beast is a 13-mile race, with a number of obstacles, military style: sandbag and bucket carry, barbwire crawl, rope climbs, monkey bars, a Tarzan swing over water, and so on.

“We thought it would take us about three hours — it took us nine. Our wives thought we had died. But I was hooked and so was Steve. He and I race a lot together, with a good core of friends!”

Since then, Brian has competed in the Spartan Ultra Beast (two laps around the course) on four occasions, two with Steve. That’s 30 miles with about 60 obstacles.

In 2015, Brian and Steve attended the World OCR Champions in Dayton, Ohio — and traveled together with six friends to the World Championships in Toronto in 2016 and 2017, competing in all three events there, the short course, the long course, and the team event.

This kind of enterprise is good for building camaraderie. “It’s a family,” Brian said. “I see a lot of the same people year to year. The majority of my best friends are the result of OCR.”

At the moment, Brian is training his friend, Tim O’Toole, who is competing in the next Endurance Society activities at Silver Towers coming right up in May. Tim is running in the 50-mile event, his first race of over 18 miles. Brian will run the whole way with him, as his “pacer.”

I asked Brian if he were being paid for this training and support, and he scoffed. Silly question.

Okay, now we must ask the question which is being begged: Why? Why punish yourself so? To what end?

“It makes me realize what the body is capable of,” Brian answered. “You want to quit, you’re sleep deprived: your brain wants you to stop . . . but I like the mental aspect, testing what I can and cannot do. I race for me. For the satisfaction of finishing. I don’t care if I win.

“I’m only doing a 100-mile race. Others are crazy — they’re doing so much more. My mom would say I have a screw loose.”

That said, I asked about his DNF in the 100-mile Endurance Society race in Goshen two years ago when he was 53.

“I don’t know what was wrong,” he said. “From mile 20 to 70, I couldn’t keep anything down. It was probably about nutrition. I lost 13 pounds. You know what your limit is. You have to live the next day. I had family and work responsibilities.

“Failures are a good thing. You don’t always succeed.”

As for me, upon finishing this piece, having exhausted my physical and mental limits with all this cogitating and keyboard tapping, I headed down to Shiretown in Middlebury for a creemee.

And a little nap in my car.

Karl Lindholm Ph.D is the Emeritus Dean of Advising and Assistant Professor of American Studies (retired) at Middlebury College. He can be contacted at [email protected]