Young Marathon ‘Joggler’ Intends to Keep Running Toward the Spotlight--and Grabbing for the Laughs

Mike Hebebrand was quite a sight running down the street in the recent Los Angeles Marathon. He was juggling three balls and a lot of people were laughing, but that’s exactly what he wanted.

“I’m an entertainer and a performer who wants to make people laugh,” said the 23-year-old Fullerton resident, who worked in a circus as a juggler while attending junior and senior high school.

He said most people laughed or clapped as he passed by. “They get a kick out of it,” he said. “I’m sure they think of me as being different, but not weird.”

But there was a serious side to his running the marathon. “I really wanted to break the world’s record for marathon joggling, but I wasn’t in the best of shape,” he admitted.

He ran and finished the Los Angeles Marathon without juggling in 1987 and 1988.

The joggling record is 3 hours and 22 minutes, and Hebebrand missed it by 10 minutes. Joggling is a combination of juggling and running. If a ball drops, “I have to go back to the spot it first dropped and start running again.” He dropped a ball 10 times during his run. “I knew after 13 miles I wasn’t going to break the record,” said Hebebrand, who teaches physical education in South Hills High School in Covina. “I only averaged about 6 miles a day in training, and you have to go 10 to have a chance.”

He trained by running along the Balboa Bay beachfront, Fullerton horse trails and Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

The one-time trapeze artist, wire walker and juggler with the defunct Great All-American Youth Circus has set his sights on breaking the record next year.

“I’m going to be in the best shape of my life,” said Hebebrand, who is in training for the October Iron Man Triathlon in Hawaii. He competed in the event in 1984 but failed to finish because of an injury.

But he said juggling in the recent marathon gave him more fun than any of his other races.

“I’m not a showoff, but I want to entertain people and make them laugh,” he said. “It’s like when the lights come on and the audience is in their chairs. Something starts to click in me.”

0 Hebebrand has run in many parts of the world, taking spins around the Egyptian Pyramids and the Masada fortress in Israel. In another challenge, the Biola University graduate hitchhiked across the United States. He was 21 at the time.

“I’m a pretty big guy (6 feet, 1 inch) so I felt I could take care of myself during the trip,” he said.

But he also likes to care for others.

Besides coaching disabled children at the First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, “I stop on the freeway to help people,” he said. “God has given us a lot in America and we don’t tend to share enough, so I share the wealth that way.”

The rolling hills above the Coast Highway between Laguna Beach and Corona del Mar are slowly being ground away by bulldozers, a prelude to development.

But watercolorist Christine Sullivan, a Corona del Mar landscape artist, is out there with paintbrushes to record the pristine beauty before the heavy-equipment operators take it away.

“I thought of tactics like carrying a sign with a personal message to show my anger,” she said, “but then I thought, ‘Why don’t I make a statement by doing a series of paintings of the area?’ ”

Sullivan, one of the 160 artists and craftsmen who will exhibit their work at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts starting July 7, said she has been been making daily trips to capture the scenes on canvas.

“Some people might call it development,” she said. “I call it digression. That whole area was a particular favorite of mine that sort of served as my psychological safety valve.

Acknowledgments--First place Bank of America Achievement Awards of $2,000 each were presented to Fullerton’s Sunny Hills High student Ronald Strauss in the science and math category and Santa Ana’s Foothill High student Joanna Brooks in liberal arts.