Madsen Made Sure He Was Fit for Marriage

It was a prenuptial agreement of another kind. Unconditional love with a twist.

While most of these unromantic pacts center on keeping esteemed family estates or vats of money intact, Dixie Madsen wanted neither castles nor cash.

As an ultra-marathon runner and successful body-builder, Madsen knew that her eventual partner for life would have to take an active interest in her training and understand the discipline needed for her to turn in consistent peak performances.

So before she would exchange marriage vows with Kendall Webb, the San Diego Section CIF commissioner, she had one simple request.

“I told him he had to run a marathon,” Madsen said while relaxing in the modest Mission Valley apartment they share.

Asking someone to squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom is one thing. Asking someone to run 26.2 miles is, well, quite another.

“I was very serious,” Madsen said. “If you have goals that you’re interested in, you need a companion that can at least experience some of it. If your mate’s sitting at home, too much can come between you. I wanted him to understand the scope of my training and my commitment to it.”

Webb, now 56, was a veteran of 5K and 10K races and no stranger to fitness. He just needed to raise his mileage.

“The idea intrigued me, “ Webb said. “I think it’s always in the back of every runner’s mind, ‘Gee, can I run a marathon?’ ”

On Dec. 11, 1985, Webb consummated the agreement, finishing the Honolulu Marathon in 3 hours 28 minutes, better than 8 minutes per mile.

“She trained me well,” he said.

A week later, they were married on the island of Kauai, where they stayed and honeymooned.

Now, they can be found working out from 5 a.m. to 6:30 daily.

“We get up, work out together, run, leave for work together,” Madsen said. “If I wasn’t married to someone like Kendall, I’d see him an hour in the morning and an hour at night.”

Their routine includes lifting weights and running, and encouragement when needed. Together, Webb explained, they are less likely to slack off and are more fitness conscious then ever.

“Not much has changed (from before we were married),” Webb said. “We do have a stronger commitment to health, though. If one of us starts to slip, we get the other one back into it.”

At 51, Madsen is in better shape than many athletes in their prime and more fit than she was 20 years ago, when she was playing semi-pro softball in Utah.

She moved to San Diego in 1970 and quit softball to spend more time with her children. A sedentary lifestyle temporarily set in.

“I was a typical middle-aged person,” Madsen said. “Our social life was the scope of everything.” So Madsen joined a gym, which eventually led to her involvement in running and body-building.

Since 1985, Madsen has won four body-building titles, most recently the state master’s title for women in August. She has been named “Best Poser” in four contests and “Most Muscular” in two others. Now she is training for her final season, which she hopes will culminate with an appearance in the national master’s competition.

Since body-builders usually compete in weight divisions, Madsen, 5 feet 4 inches and 120 pounds, is usually pitted against women in their late 20s and early 30s. Why, she is constantly asked, would a woman her age be competing with women their age, in a sport where vanity seems to be the primary motivator.

“Part of it is vanity,” Madsen said. “I like to look the way I do, and I like the appreciation I get from people who know what I have to do to get this way. People see me and think, ‘Hey, look at Dixie.’ Just because you’re not young doesn’t mean you can’t keep your body. It just takes a lot of hard work and resistence.”

She likens the transformation of her body--in the 8 weeks before the August contest she dropped from 127 pounds to 114 1/2--to the carving of a sculptor.

“It’s like what I think a sculptor must feel,” Madsen said. “They start carving, and they have something in mind that they want it to look like. With me, there was this image of how I wanted to sculpt my body, and as the fat came off, I could see the look I wanted unfold.”

She admits that donning a bikini and flexing in front of virtual strangers is unusual for a woman with two grandchildren, ages 9 and 3: “If anyone told me that I’d be in front of thousands of people, in very little clothes, posing, I would have told them they were out of their minds.”

Webb fully supports his wife’s venture. “I love it,” he said. “I think muscles look great on women. I like hard bodies.”

After the next season, she will continue to lift weights--”I will always lift, just to stay in shape,” she said--but has added some off-beat challenges to her repertoire.

Beginning next September, she hopes to run a marathon a month. Her best time is 3 hours 18 minutes, in the Mission Bay Marathon in 1983, and on Dec. 12 she ran the San Diego International Marathon, her 18th in 6 years.

Before her 55th birthday, she plans on running the Western States 100, a 100-mile endurance road race that covers the Sierra Nevada in Northern California and Northern Nevada.

“Usually ultra-distance people won’t run anything under a marathon,” Madsen said, “but I run anywhere from 2 to 50 miles.”

In 1984, she broke the women’s course record for the Lake Murray 50-mile race in 7 hours 53 minutes, a month after she raced in the San Diego Marathon and 7 weeks before she ran the Heart Marathon. She was using the Lake Murray race to qualify for the Western States but couldn’t compete that year after entering the world of body building.

She finds the sports do enhance one another, but admits that there are hindrances in the cross-training.

“Body building helps my upper body strength,” Madsen said, “and that gets me through the final miles when my legs give out. But I will never get the definition in my legs that I need (for body building) because of my running.”

But running gives her an inner pleasure like none other.

“It satisfies me,” Madsen said, “being able to meditate, think about the things I want to think about. But competition is the pressure point in both. Getting ready (for competition), I enjoy.”

She also enjoys competing. After the California masters competition, she had to start loading up on complex carbohydrates because she had decided to run a half-marathon the next day.

“I started carbo loading right after I got off stage, and the next day I ran the North County Classic,” she said.

And then there’s the track thing. “I like to throw the javelin. I’d like to do a pentathlon in a few years,” she said.

Webb and Madsen ran in a 5K in Phoenix Saturday morning. But this week marks a different kind of milestone in Madsen’s training odyssey. Foot surgery will curtail her training for 8-10 weeks.

Said Madsen: “This may be the time I’ll find out how my body looks without any running.”