It’s Not a Long and Whining Road : Racing Team Will Let Pain Set Pace in L.A. Marathon

The team motto is: Veni, vidi, ouchi.

The team colors on the uniform are black and blue.

The insignia resembles a traffic sign--a slash cutting across a Band-Aid.

Many diverse groups and individuals will be among the approximately 7,500 competitors in the inaugural Los Angeles Marathon a week from today, but none more original than the Pain Running Team. The expected 8 to 12 runners wearing the team uniform will participate on their own terms.

Their Own Doo Dah Parade

Some of the members support the team methods in principle only, but for the two founders, every marathon is their private Doo Dah Parade. They run to a different drummer. But they always finish.

Hitting the Saloons

At about mile 20 of the 26.2-mile course, many competitors begin to fall apart, or “hit the wall.” At just about that point is where some members of the Pain Running Team are hitting the saloons.

“Take the New York Marathon last October,” Jack Lasater said. “Bruce Mosbacher and I were running together, and at about mile 18 we came to a tavern.”

Being lawyers, they knew how to get admitted to the bar, and promptly were, and they put away a beer before rejoining the race.

Lasater, 37, is a partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Stephens, Berg, Lasater & Schulman. Mosbacher, 32, is in private practice in the Northern California town of Menlo Park. They are friends from their days at Stanford.

Mosbacher’s wife happens to be Nancy Ditz, who will also be in the big race Sunday, albeit with a different approach. She is ranked No. 2 in the nation among women marathoners.

“While Jack and I were in the bar in New York, we were watching the TV set, and there was Nancy crossing the finish line,” Mosbacher recalled. “We still had eight miles to go.”

Ditz said that when people ask her husband if his wife defeats him in marathons, his standard reply is: “Only by about 2 1/2 hours.”

Anyway, after he and Lasater had quenched their thirst in Manhattan, they ran about a mile and found that they were hungry.

“We stopped at a deli and each of us got a Snickers candy bar,” Lasater said. “But that was only good for another mile. I got hungry again. So we stopped again and got some chocolate cupcakes.

They Doggedly Continued

“Later, while we were passing through Harlem, we made our fourth stop, at another bar. They were great. They set us each up a beer and gave us each a bowl of chili. Before we left, we bought drinks for the house.”

As they doggedly continued, so did the jokes with which they pantingly regaled each other.

“After it was all over, the only place I was hurting was in my rib cage, from laughing,” Mosbacher said.

The stops, according to his watch, had consumed 1 hour and 17 minutes. Five hours and 27 minutes after the founding fathers of the Pain Running Team had started the race, they finished--and ahead of some others in the field.

“One of our secrets is sleep deprivation prior to any marathon,” Mosbacher disclosed. “We feel excessive conditioning is harmful to the body and should be avoided.”

The Los Angeles Marathon will be the fifth such event for Mosbacher, the ninth for Lasater.

“The Pain Team proves anybody can run in a marathon,” the 31-year-old Ditz said. “I have to hand it to them, they have so much fun.”

One of the newest team members is Dr. Edward O’Connor, 42, of San Marino, chief of neurology at White Memorial Medical Center and a veteran of four other marathons, including Boston’s.

Defies Notion of Seriousness

“My plan in this one is to run seriously for the first half, and then finish in the tradition of the Pain Team,” the doctor said. “I think the whole concept erases the notion that you have to be totally serious to participate in a marathon.”

All the team members are friends, and the idea is that this should be social pleasure--for some, before and during, for the others, at a celebration party afterward. Next Sunday’s will be at Exposition Park.

One of the team members is Barbara Flammang, 36, a Santa Monica architect.

“If I stop, it will be for water only,” she said. “I’ll be wearing the team uniform, but I don’t plan on any extracurricular consumption along the way.”

Flammang, incidentally, has a deal with her husband, architect Wade Killefer. While she runs, he takes care of their two young children. Then in June, while he participates in a triathlon, she reciprocates.

Another team member is Jack

Alustiza, 37, who runs a courier service in Stockton for attorneys. His background includes being a running back at Stanford, and being part of an ascent of the east face of Mt. Everest (as the cook, inasmuch as for decades his family ran a Basque restaurant).

“Los Angeles will be my seventh marathon,” he said. “I have, such as in New York, taken a drink offered by someone along the route. But I don’t feel I could stop somewhere. I might not get going again.”

Echoing those sentiments was still another team member, Gerry Plunkett, 34, of Atherton in Northern California. If the name is familiar, it is because she is the wife of Raiders quarterback Jim Plunkett, also formerly of Stanford.

“Bruce and Jack have their own running methods, and that’s fine,” she said. But she echoed Alustiza: “If I stopped for something, I wouldn’t get started again.”

L.A. Will Mark Comeback

For her, the inaugural happening here will be a continuation of her comeback. She said she ran until 1982, took time out to have babies the next two years, then got on the marathon trail again last fall in the Big Apple.

Said her husband, the quarterback: “I won’t be running in Los Angeles, but I’ll be there to cheer Gerry on.”

Not that he couldn’t participate. Indeed, the Plunketts were part of the platoon that set out in a rented Winnebago in 1982 toward the village of Weott in Humboldt County.

The purpose of the journey was participation--and completion--by everyone in the Avenue of the Giants Marathon, beneath the redwoods and along the Eel River.

Finally Asked ‘Why?’

“I wasn’t even planning on completing the course,” Mosbacher (who was on the rugby team at Stanford) recalled. “But off we went. After quite a few miles, I asked Lasater: ‘Why would we possibly be doing this?’ ”

“For the pain,” came the reply.

“We decided right then and there that pain is the friend of the long-distance runner,” Lasater said. “We came up with the team name because we were in such agony.”

There followed, not with any formalities, the uniform, the insignia, the slogan, and a current membership numbering about a dozen.

Ditz and Mosbacher have, you might say, a pro-am marriage.

‘Painful to Run Slowly’

“I ran in the Avenue of the Giants with what now is the Pain Team,” said the nationally ranked half of the partnership. “It was the worst I’ve ever felt. It is painful to run that slowly.

“For me a marathon is a 20-mile warm-up and a six-mile race,” she added. For her husband it is a 26-mile warmup.

Lasater (who was Plunkett’s wide receiver at Stanford) prefers to refer to his progress as a “conversational pace.”

With a week to go, the out-of-towners on the Pain Running Team are counting on the locals--Lasater in particular--to scout the Los Angeles Marathon course and come up with appropriate meaningful pauses, for those members so inclined.

At the conclusion, the record will show, they took the blows, and did it their way.