Sport of Running Is Taking a Different Direction in L.A. : The Field Grows Here as Age, Other Activities Thin Out the Ranks Elsewhere

About 16,000 die-hards expected to compete in Sunday’s Los Angeles Marathon might think otherwise, but the sport of running has lost steam in the last few years.

Interest has surged in Los Angeles’ big run--which drew 11,000 entries last year and has registered at least 12,700 participants for Sunday--but marathon competition has stumbled elsewhere.

Meanwhile, middle age is creeping up on the average runner, even as the casual jog is losing ground to weight training and aerobics among the young and the trendy.

“The big growth stage when everybody was running because it was the thing to do is over,” said Joe Henderson, West Coast editor of Runner’s World. “There’s been a shake-out (and) the sport’s leveled off.”

Facts and Figures

Figures compiled by the National Sporting Goods Assn. show that roughly 6.5 million Americans are running twice a week or more--a number that experts believe has held steady since 1983, following huge annual increases in the late 1970s. Running-shoe sales, another indicator, have been dropping; and Thomas Doyle, the association’s information and research director, said he expects 1986 data, when it is complete, to show that shoe sales and running participation declined last year.

Still worse, the number of marathon finishers plunged in 1986 to 73,000, down from 157,000 in 1983. Marathon races in the United States fell by nearly half, to fewer than 200 in the same years--perhaps hinting that serious runners, as they get older as a group, are dropping out of the pack.

According to the National Running Data Center of Tucson, Ariz., the average man running in a 10-kilometer race was 34.4 years old in 1985, up from 29.8 in 1978. During the same period, the average age of women in 10K races shot to 31.9 from 24.4.

The age shift has come about as runners who got hooked on the sport in their 20s remained loyal, while younger exercisers took advantage of a range of options, including brisk and race walking, bicycling, weight training, cross-country skiing, swimming and triathlons. The biggest winner has been aerobics, which in 1985 had almost 24 million participants--90% of them women. “Five years ago,” said Doyle, “many of these women would have gone into running. Five years ago, who ever heard of aerobics?”

As the Los Angeles Marathon is showing, however, plenty of runners are refusing to give up a habit that has become, more than exercise, a way of life.

Not untypical of the sport’s devotees are the 260 members of A Running Experience, a Long Beach club formed in 1979, when Jim Fixx’s running book was selling millions of copies, and new magazines dedicated to the sport seemed to pop up everywhere. Mirroring the sport’s participants in general, “We have a lot of teachers and nurses, doctors and lawyers,” said club member Tim Smith, 51, an attorney. “About 98% of us are white-collar, college-educated professionals.”

Over time, the club has evolved into a confederation of smaller, informal groups with one common interest: running. There are “the hill runners, the 5K, 10K and marathon runners, and those without any particular goals,” said Joe Carlson, 35, the club’s founder and director of the Long Beach Marathon. “Then there are those whose focal point is their outside interests: children or no children, or social and political leanings--which are very definitely a dividing line.”

Roberta Dill, a marriage, child and family counselor in her 30s, met her future husband, Tom, a 42-year-old insurance agent, at one of the club’s Sunday Fun Runs in 1985. It was the 16th or 17th marriage to grow out of the club’s runs, she said. In her previous relationships, she had been the only runner--a source of tension that left her resolved to become involved with someone “who enjoys being active” the next time around.

Another member, Rose Ornellas, speaks vividly of the club’s motivational value. “I never could have run marathons on my own,” said Ornellas, a Korean-American in her mid-50s. In fact, Ornellas, who runs 20 miles in a normal week and 50 miles when training for a race, said she couldn’t “go one lap around the track” when she started running at the age of 48.

It is a further conviction of some club members that the young, once they’ve exhausted the gamut of sports clubs and exercise videos, will come back to the simple pleasures of running.

“When you get to be 35, you don’t have time for a lot of the things you did in your 20s,” said Carlson. “Running is still the most convenient and least time-consuming way to exercise. It only takes 30 minutes, and all you have to do is step out the door.”

(Runners can register for the Los Angeles race through Saturday by calling (800) 4-LA-RACE.)