Coming Back, Again : La Jolla’s Woodland Keeps on Running After Numerous Injuries

The question clings to marathon runner Jeff Woodland like an Ace bandage: “Where does it end for you, Jeff?”

He stops.

He thinks.

He does not know.

Perhaps it is because Woodland, 26, has not achieved the success he desires. More likely, it is his love of competition that compels him to continue running despite a series of serious injuries.

In the last nine years, Woodland, who is from La Jolla, has had major surgery three times, a partially torn Achilles’ tendon and two stress fractures in the same foot.

Yet he still is taking this game seriously.

Woodland, a former distance runner at San Diego Mesa College and San Diego State, will be trying to make his umpteenth comeback Sunday in the San Diego Marathon. He will be running only six months after his third operation. Also, he started massage therapy to relieve pain caused by scar tissue in his hamstring just five weeks ago.

Woodland also will have to try to overcome the memory of his last marathon, the 1985 Mission Bay Marathon. He held a substantial lead over Jerry Marsh but was forced to walk the last three miles because of a severe muscle cramps and finished second.

But exactly why Woodland returns to running time and time again is not an easily explained.

“If I knew all this stuff would happen to me 12 years ago, I would have thrown away my running shoes right then,” Woodland said. “The overall picture is terrible. But when you’re going through it, you don’t look at it that way.”

Two of Woodland’s former coaches said that he was always determined to be the best, no matter what the cost.

“He had a natural instinct to go out and be No. 1 and be No. 1 the whole way,” said Chuck Boyer, who coached Woodland at La Jolla High School from 1976-79. “He needed someone to pull the reins a little. We had to sit down with his parents and set some goals that were realistic because I told him, ‘Jeff, I don’t think your body can take (so much hard work).’ ”

Boyer recalls how Woodland overcame the first stress fracture during his senior cross-country season.

“He destroyed the two exercycles (exercise bicycles) his parents bought him because he rode them so hard,” Boyer said. “He’d ride a good hour every day.”

Four months after his injury, Woodland won the high school two-mile race at the Michelob indoor track meet at the San Diego Sports Arena, one of San Diego County’s most prestigious races.

“That he could come off that injury and win that race, is one of the greatest tributes to perseverance I have ever seen,” Boyer said.

The foot had still not healed when he became the first person to win the San Diego Section two-mile title consecutively with a time of 9:03.9 on a dirt track at Mt. Carmel High.

“It looked like I was running with a cast, really, I had so much tape on (his foot),” Woodland said. “I could hardly lift my foot.”

Woodland ran cross-country for UCLA, but he underwent surgery to remove excess bone from the joint in his right big toe, and eventually transferred to Mesa College where he planned to concentrate on academics.

Soon after he got to Mesa, doctors diagnosed a tear in his Achilles’ tendon. He began a strenuous program of cycling and physical therapy seven days a week “just to get it back in shape.” He couldn’t run for four months, but after that . . .

“It felt so good, I thought, ‘Why not run?’ ” Woodland said.

Six weeks later, he finished second in the 10,000-meter race at the state community college meet.

Woodland transferred to San Diego State in 1982 where he ran both cross-country and track.

“He was definitely an over-worker,” said Dixon Farmer, the former Aztec coach. “Jeff believed if X was good, two times X was better. If I ever yelled at him, it was to tone him down, to tell him to quit running.”

Farmer said that work ethic has contributed to Woodland’s success. It also probably contributed to the injury that forced Woodland to undergo surgery for the second time in late 1982, Farmer said.

After visits to several doctors, Woodland went to Dr. F. William Wagner because of severe pain in the same toe that had been operated on before. Wagner, an orthopedist who performed surgery on basketball star Bill Walton’s feet, reconstructed the joint.

If there was a time when Woodland came close to giving up running, it was right after that surgery. He sat around his room a lot, he said, and thought about what to do.

But, he started training as soon as he was able.

“It’s one thing to retire after you win a gold medal,” Woodland said. “But I was 23 and I hadn’t achieved the kind of success I wanted out of running. I was bitter.”

After a nine-month layoff--doctors said it would take a year to heal--Woodland came back to run a 29:41 in his first road race, the Ocean Beach 10-kilometer run. A few weeks later, he set a personal record in the 10K, a 29:28 at Del Mar.

Woodland ran virtually injury-free until that January day in the Mission Bay marathon.

“I guess it’s my fault in some ways that I’m injured so much,” Woodland said. “You have to have hard training to succeed. But if you train too hard, you can get hurt. You have to rest for injuries. But if you rest, you get beat. It’s a tightrope I walk.”

Boyer and Farmer said the marathon race may help get running out of Woodland’s system. It’s the race that offers hin the best opportunity for success.

“I’ve always thought Jeff was a natural (long) distance runner,” Boyer said. “It was apparent when he was a 10th-grader.”

Said Farmer: “His training clearly indicated that his best event would be the marathon. He has inherent speed, and that’s a plus. A lot of guys move up to the marathon because they have endurance, but no speed. Jeff has both.

“It’s clear that he has had some success. But it is clear that he has not gotten to where he wants to go. It is important for him to play this out to the end.”

Woodland’s goal for Sunday’s race is to qualify for the 1988 U.S. Olympic marathon trials by running faster than 2 hours 20 minutes. He said he would race as many times as necessary to reach that goal.

“I just don’t like to give up,” Woodland said. “A lot of people have told me I should be a marathoner. I’m finally starting to believe them.

“I feel like I have a new start, a new beginning. “

So, where does it end?

“I guess that’s my question, too,” Woodland said.