Women Run Against and for Each Other

At 67, Bess James retired and found herself wondering what she was going to do with her free time. She started walking and, with the encouragement of her children, began jogging.

“I never even thought about running. It wasn’t anything I planned on,” said the 76-year-old San Jacinto resident. “I thought, ‘At 69 you’re going to start jogging? You must be crazy! You can’t start jogging now.’ But it was a challenge. I love challenges.”

Eight-year-old Deshna Plumer of Irvine has been involved with running most of her life, having been taken as a baby to watch her sisters, Patti Sue and Polly, streak across many a finish line. Deshna decided Sunday that it would be fun to give running a try herself and entered her first race--the second annual Success Run All Women 8K at the Irvine Marriott--in which Patti Sue, 23, placed first overall.

“I’ve been running since I was Deshna’s age,” said Patti Sue, who, after crossing the finish line, went back onto the race course to run back in with her sister. “I want to do it for life. I think I have a talent for it, and a talent is something you can’t run away from.”

This desire to run is why James and both Plumers as well as 780 other women entered Sunday’s race, organized by Women in Business of Orange County to raise money to fund job training and other practical-skills classes for “women in transition” who will be staying at the soon-to-be-built YWCA Hotel for Women in Santa Ana.

‘Women Running for Women’

“Part of what makes this event unique is that it’s women running for women,” run director Carolyn McGrew said. “It gives women an opportunity to see what we can do when we all work together.”

According to race spokesman Dee Gaynor, the basic criteria for determining the beneficiary of this year’s race proceeds was that it be a program that “benefits women and preferably includes some type of rehabilitation or training program.” Last year the $1,500 raised went to Human Options, a shelter for abused women in South Laguna, to purchase video equipment for teaching women job interview skills.

This year, according to Gaynor, the approximately $4,500 raised will serve a similar purpose. “With the (large number of) homeless women in Santa Ana, most of our money is to go to rehabilitation and training so that they can be employed. A lot of these women don’t have job skills. Through the YWCA program, they will be trained and brought back into the working world so that they can support themselves and find a place to live.”

$1-Million Goal

Executive vice president of the Program for Women Foundation, Harriet Harris, who served as hostess of the run and handed out prizes said the foundation was organized to finance projects to benefit women. The group’s first project, Harris said, is to raise $1 million to build the 40-bed YWCA Hotel for Women to be constructed in February on the top of the gymnasium of the YWCA facility in Santa Ana. Harris said that more than $400,000 of the $1-million campaign goal for the facility and programs has already been raised by the foundation.

“The response to the project has been extremely positive,” Harris said. “The lack of a facility for homeless women is one of the major problems facing women in Orange County. This race is a good example of women working together to help alleviate that situation. We’re thrilled at the response that the run has generated. I’d like to think that the larger turnout this year was largely due to the attention focused on our need and project.”

Although many of the runners at the 8K run said they came because they enjoyed running, many of them, like 42-year-old Harolene Walters of El Toro, said the fund-raising aspect of the race was an added incentive to appear.

“I thought the race was for a very good cause,” Walters said. “My husband really didn’t want me running because I had already committed myself to another race the following weekend, and he wanted me to take it easy. But I decided I wanted to run in the race anyhow. The reason for the race means a lot more to me than just winning.”

The focus on women was a major reason that the second-place winner in last year’s race, Liz Baker of San Diego, came back to participate in the event again this year. “I just had a wonderful time last year,” said Baker, who placed sixth in this year’s run. “The event was really well organized, and all the ladies involved were very nice and took good care of me. I was more than happy to come back this year.”

A distance runner for the last six years, Baker, who “likes to set high goals” for herself, has a bachelor’s degree in geology and works part time at Scripps Institution of Oceanography reading and interpreting satellite photographs.

Likes Races for Women

“I think that races (for women) like this are a good thing,” she commented, “although I find I’m usually a lot more tense. When you’re out in an all-women’s race, especially in the lead pack, you have to take responsibility for setting the pace. But in mixed races it’s harder to concentrate. A lot of men refuse to let you pass or if you try to pass them they start racing you.”

It was the absence of male runners that Angeles Ramirez--who with her mother and three sisters make up the Rainbow Runners team from Santa Ana--found appealing about Sunday’s race. “I thought it was interesting that it was an all-women’s race,” Ramirez said. “We had never been in one before. My mother (Teresa Ramirez) complains about how she always gets pushed by men in mixed races, so I said to her, ‘Well, this race should be great, then.’ We really did enjoy the race and we want to enter again next year.”

Ramirez, a 34-year-old paramedical examiner, started running three years ago. “My mother started two years ago when she was diagnosed as having arthritis and couldn’t walk,” Ramirez commented. “So my advice to her was to start walking. So she started walking and then worked up to running. She does very well. Right now she does five miles three times a week.”

Sharing running with her sisters is something that Patti Sue Plumer has grown up with. Not only has she now seen Deshna enter her first race, she has watched Polly set national prep records as well. However, running is not without problems, as the Los Angeles resident discovered earlier this year.

“I was hit by a car in Japan in March and broke my fibula,” said Patti Sue, who was in Japan for a race. “I just started training again regularly in October. I ran my first race since the accident in early November on a whim to see where I was at. I ended up beating (well-known distance runner) Ruth Wysocki.”

In Sunday’s Success Run, Patti Sue also beat Wysocki’s winning time in last year’s race by almost a full minute, dashing across the finish line with a time of 27:19. Although she said prior to the race that she couldn’t make “a real tough effort” in the race because she was running in nationals for cross-country the following weekend, Patti Sue’s “I’m-going-to-run-not-race” attitude still paced her a good stretch ahead of second-place winner Ngaire Drake of New Zealand.

‘I’m a Good Example’

When she was still recovering from her injury, Patti Sue said, she found herself questioning whether she should continue in the sport. “For a while there, nothing was working out at all,” she said. “But things have been really picking up. I feel that I can’t walk away from running until I’ve done what I can do in the sport. Because I’m from a small town--because I wasn’t a big success in high school as far as running was concerned--I think that I’m a good example for a lot of people.

Another runner in the Success Run who feels that she can help set an example for other women is 45-year-old Shirley Matson of San Diego, who, in addition to holding the American record in the 44-year-old bracket, set a new American 8K record of 28:47 in the 45-49 age bracket when she crossed the finish line Sunday.

Matson, who started competing in races when she turned 40 as a way to keep fit, enjoys “excelling at running. I really like running,” she commented. “Some runners say that they hate it. If that’s true then they shouldn’t run. I run because I like it.”

One aspect of Matson’s life, that seems to echo the experience of other women runners is that her coach is also her boyfriend. “Running brought us together,” she said. “Our life styles fit. I’m sure that there are men who aren’t runners who can understand how a woman runner feels, but it’s nice to be with someone who also runs so they understand why running is so important to you.”

Harolene Walters, who began running at 37 as a way to keep fit, won the Masters Division of this year’s Boston Marathon. Like Matson, she met her husband and coach at a 10K race she entered a year ago.

Although Fred James, Bess James’ husband, may not be a runner, he claims that he’s her “biggest fan. When she started running I didn’t see how she could continue it because of her age,” he said. “But she’s a very remarkable woman. People are always telling her what an inspiration she is to them.”

Coach John Reardon of Santa Monica City College isn’t married to a runner, but he understands women runners quite well, having specialized for the last 10 years in coaching them. On Sunday two of his runners placed in the 8K Success Run, with Mary Tracy coming in third and Bobbie Shipper placing eighth.

“Ten years ago there weren’t any women’s coaches,” Reardon remarked. “Since then things have changed a lot, especially with the Olympics last year drawing attention to women runners. It’s not so much that the athletes themselves have changed. It’s the women who have changed. Women have always been fairly competitive, but now they’re being accepted for being that.”

One of the reasons that Reardon likes coaching women is that they are more vocal about how they feel about running. “Women like more interaction than men,” he said. “Men come to practice, do the workout and go home. Women come to the workout and give feedback. Sometimes they even call you up in the middle of the night to give you feedback.”

Reardon also finds that all-women races are a real boost for the runners. “As a coach I like them because they let a woman know exactly where she rates without a man to speed up the pace, get in the way or whatever. The women like it because when you win you win. You don’t win the women’s and finish 27th in the race. Quite often they get their best results racing with other women. Men always go out too fast. Women pace much better.”

The oldest runner in Sunday’s race, Bess James, also enjoys running with women. Constantly encouraging other women to start running, James claims that she feels better at 76 than she did at 50.

Sunday’s crowd at the post-race awards ceremony seemed to be as enthusiastic as James about the sport and its 70-and-over participants, cheering loudly when 70-year-old Judy Simon of La Mesa received first place in that age group with a time of 44:40 and James claimed second with a time of 50:32.