A man from Grande Prairie, Alta., had an unnerving encounter with a full-grown grizzly bear and two cubs while training for the Canadian Death Race.

“We were very, very lucky,” Phil Troyer told CTV Edmonton.

Last weekend, Troyer and a group of 12 others were practicing on a leg of the race’s route near the Rocky Mountain town of Grande Cache. Running between Aug. 3 and 5, and spanning 125 kilometres and nearly 5,000 metres of elevation change, the Canadian Death Race bills itself as “one of the world's toughest ultramarathons.”

Troyer and a friend eventually got ahead of the pack. Then they heard rustling in the bush.

“I saw the bear's head pop up,” Troyer recalled. “And I'm like, yup, that's a grizzly.”

Troyer said the grizzly came straight at them before two cubs emerged too. Soon, the runners found themselves surrounded by bears.

“It was mass chaos,” Troyer said of the nearly two minute encounter. “Like, there were bears everywhere is what it seemed like.”

Troyer managed to keep the grizzlies at bay with bear spray -- until the can ran out.

“That's when it changed from trying to scare the bears away to trying to get out of there and trying to survive,” Troyer said.

The pair threw rocks at the animals and Troyer even used his hiking pole as a weapon.

“I just took a big old long swing and it was kind of the Hail Mary,” he said. “Between that and throwing the rocks at it, it went up in the woods again.”

According to wildlife expert Matt Besko of Alberta Environment and Parks, the two runners did everything right.

“I think that bear spray saved their lives,” Besko told CTV Edmonton.

When encountering a grizzly, Besko added, you should “appear as large as you can, remove yourself from the situation (and) use whatever means are available to you.”

Despite the unsettling meeting in the mountains, Troyer says he still plans to run in the Canadian Death Race in August -- even though that means returning to the exact location where he saw the bears.

“I’m going to finish the Death Race,” he said. “And I’m going to get past that spot again.”

With a report from CTV Edmonton’s Bill Fortier