Her Kind of Victory Just Never Gets Old

They grimace and groan, pant and sweat. Sometimes they vomit. Their legs cramp, their backs ache, their eyes glaze. They don’t hear the cheers, they reach wordlessly for a cup of water to splash on their heads or throw down their throats. They don’t feel or taste the cool liquid.

That’s how it goes for most marathoners. Not for Tatyana Pozdnyakova.

Pozdnyakova revels in the arduous race. She smiles at the miles as they accumulate. She runs easily, 105 pounds of relentlessly natural motion, legs and arms bobbing together.

Mainly, Pozdnyakova thinks during marathons. She thinks of her 16-year-old son, Eugene, and her husband, Alex, who is her coach. She thinks of Lake Baikal, a beautiful, sparkling place in Russia, where she says she grew up as a “normal girl,” the daughter of a notary and an auto mechanic who followed in the light footsteps of her older sister, a runner too.

Sunday, the other women eventually felt their feet turn leaden, their arms turn to clumsy sausages while their minds melted into little voices saying, “Are we there yet?”

Pozdnyakova ran smoothly and happily, all the way to her first Los Angeles Marathon title in a time of 2 hours 29 minutes 40 seconds. She crossed the finish line twice -- the second time for the cameras, because the first time she missed the tape.

Pozdnyakova is one day from her 48th birthday. She is the oldest winner, man or woman, of a big-city marathon in the history of record keeping.

Why does someone run a marathon? Why go 26.2 miles when it is such misery?

“Because I love running,” Pozdnyakova said. “Because it keeps me young. Because it is what I do.”

It is an hour before the start of the L.A. Marathon.

Nearly a hundred people -- young and old, men and women, thin and husky -- are mingling in the lobby of the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. The starting line is a couple of blocks away.

“Why am I doing this?” a woman asks the man standing next to her.

That is the sound of fear. You hear that sound a lot before a marathon begins. “What was I thinking?” It comes from a man in a long-sleeved T-shirt and sweat pants who hands his keys to his wife and says, “I’ve got my cell phone, you’ve got yours. I’ll call you if I need you to find me.”

There aren’t many sports where, before you begin competing, you must make arrangements to be rescued. There seems more torture than joy during the course of a marathon, more angst, more pain. There is much clutching of hamstrings, grabbing of backs and heads.

Men’s winner Mark Yatich of Kenya had the best moment of pure joy. With fewer than 150 yards to go, and still in second place, Yatich threw up a hand with one finger raised, telling everybody he was ready to sprint to the finish. And he did, surging past Stephen Ndungu within yards of the finish line.

Pozdnyakova didn’t have to sprint at the finish. She took the lead around Mile 22 when she passed Lioudmila Kortchaguina. Kortchaguina, who is 31, said she was not surprised to be passed by a 47-year-old. “Tatyana is strong, strong and strong year after year after year.” Finishing third was 23-year-old Zivile Balciunaite of Lithuania. “She could be my daughter,” Pozdnyakova said of Balciunaite.

Besides defeating all the other female runners, the indefatigable Pozdnyakova also did the translating for the other two medal winners.

“Poz” has been living and training in Gainesville, Fla., for five years. “I like the warm weather,” she said, “and there are other Russians who are training there as well.”

Nowadays, whenever someone of an extraordinary age, young or old, accomplishes an extraordinary athletic feat, there are whispers something must be wrong, that some sort of illegal substance must be used.

“Only hard work,” Pozdnyakova said, “that’s what I use.”

Pozdnyakova gave a recitation of a week’s training: “One day I do, eight times, three kilometers at a pace of 3:30 per kilometer. Next day I run about 20 miles, next day, rest day, run only eight miles, next day just work out, next day long distance run again, next day rest, eight miles only.”

While the rest of us begin shaking at the thought, Pozdnyakova smiles. “It is OK. I like hard work.”

Pozdnyakova didn’t run her first marathon until she was 39. “I just thought I’d like to try,” she said. She had started running in college in Russia, shorter distances on the track.

In 1982 she met her husband at a U.S.-USSR track meet at Indianapolis. Love brought her first a running partner, then a coach.

“How can I say about Tatyana,” Kortchaguina said, “except that she is so strong and so great.”

A year ago, Pozdnyakova, who has become a Ukrainian citizen, finished second here to Lyubov Denisova, also coached by Alex Pozdnyakova. Denisova didn’t run here this year.

In six days Pozdnyakova says she plans to run a 15-kilometer race in Jacksonville, Fla. Her son ran for Gainesville High over the weekend, finishing fourth in the 1,600. “But he won’t run marathons,” Pozdnyakova said. “He doesn’t like to run that far.”

Not many of us do.

But if you see Pozdnyakova, you may change your mind. There is not a gray hair on her head. Her face is tanned and smooth and unlined. Her smile, on her face and in her eyes, is ever present.

“I love to run, only and always,” she said. “To me, the marathon has always been beautiful and never painful.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.