A professional Kenyan marathoner now has a running experience perhaps more memorable than some of his greatest athletic accomplishments.

Moninda Marube, a 38-year-old student at the University of Maine-Farmington who won the 2013 Maine Half Marathon, said he encountered two charging black bears in the woods while on an 18-mile training run Wednesday at Whitman Spring Road Trail in Auburn, Maine. Upon spotting the black bears on his path and undergoing a brief stare-down, Marube said he sprinted away from the bears — narrowly outpacing them — and dashed toward a vacant house where he eventually hid for protection. After the bears sniffed around for a while, Marube said they went away. But he didn’t leave without a heart-jolting story.

“I’ve been running this road for four years. I’ve never thought of meeting a bear here,” Marube told the Lewiston-Auburn (Maine) Sun Journal. “I don’t fear lion. I don’t fear anything else. But a bear is scary.”

Wardens advise people who encounter black bears to make themselves appear big, make noise and back away slowly. But they recommend people stand their ground if a black bear charges and say if the bear attacks, then fight back. But it was Marube’s instincts as a runner, rather, that saved his life. He could have run toward the lake, but he couldn’t swim. And he knows that black bears can climb trees, so that ruled that out.

“I had to think very fast,” he told the Sun Journal. “The only solution I had at the time was to be able to run.”

Marube lives with Maine-Farmington track coach Dan Campbell and has been in the U.S. for the past seven years. In 2015, he ran coast-to-coast from Maine to California — a four-month trek totaling 3,700 miles — to raise awareness for human trafficking.