Minnesota Runner Plans to Carry a Canoe Through 52 Marathons in a Year

Most runners at the Twin Cities Marathon on Oct. 4 were trying to carry as little as they could get away with. Travis Meier, a 38-year-old from Minneapolis, brought an 18-pound carbon-fiber canoe, held it up for almost the whole route from Minneapolis to St. Paul, and covered the distance in just under six hours.

A race director told the Star Tribune the next day that Meier would be disqualified, which can’t have surprised him much. He had asked Twin Cities in Motion several times over the years for permission to run with a canoe and never got it, so this year he registered like anyone else and brought the boat anyway, he told Outdoor News. The organizer’s rules of competition ban “costumes or props extending beyond the perimeter of the body,” and he had to set the canoe down before the finish line.

“I’m waiting to be banned permanently, but if that happens, it was worth it,” Meier told Outdoor News.

Why He Carried It

Meier spends several weeks every year in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, and the sticker on his canoe read “Protect BWCA Forever.” Twin Metals Minnesota, a unit of the Chilean mining group Antofagasta, wants to mine copper, nickel and cobalt near Ely and Babbitt, roughly a dozen miles from the edge of the wilderness, and Meier wants that stopped for good.

“Someone has to speak for the public lands,” he told WCCO.

In January the House voted to overturn a 2023 federal order that had closed 225,504 acres of the Superior National Forest to mineral leasing for 20 years, the Senate followed 50-49 on April 16, and President Donald Trump signed the resolution on April 27. Gov. Tim Walz answered in August with an executive order barring state agencies from reviewing or permitting non-iron mining in the Rainy River Headwaters watershed, though a future governor could reverse it, and a lasting ban would need the Legislature.

The Portage Marathon at Ely

The Ely Marathon, up near the Boundary Waters themselves, has had a canoe portage division since 2018. Drew Boysen holds the men’s record there at 4:11:04 and Victoria Ranua the women’s at 5:25:34, both set in 2024. Meier has run the Ely course with a canoe three times and calls it a good deal harder than Twin Cities; last year he was seventh of seven finishers in the full portage race in 6:45:29.

Organizers put the Ely Marathon on pause for 2026 because of money, which left him without the marathon built for what he does.

He trains with a 55-pound Grumman aluminum canoe, about three times the weight of the carbon boat he raced with, and on race day in St. Paul his bigger worry was the wind. “A canoe could become a sail and be absolutely miserable,” he told Outdoor News.

52 in 52

Within a few days of Twin Cities, Meier was on Instagram asking which marathons were coming up, and he has since set himself the goal of 52 portage marathons in 52 weeks. He has already carried the canoe through the Gandy Dancer Marathon in Wisconsin and the Mankato Marathon in Minnesota, Paddling Magazine reported. Because he works full time, he plans to cover the distance on his own in the weeks he can’t get to an organized race.

After Mankato he wrote on Instagram that he was continuing “my quest to make Pete Stauber unemployed,” a reference to the Republican congressman from northern Minnesota who sponsored the resolution that ended the federal ban. Stauber won re-election on Tuesday with about 53% of the vote in unofficial returns, beating Democrat Trina Swanson.

“I need to focus on my battles here locally, and then hopefully it’ll be a bigger movement of protecting our public lands,” Meier told Paddling Magazine.