‘The Natural’ : Cross-Country: Kathleen Looney, 46, will be competing against runners half her age as a freshman at Rio Hondo College. But her coach says she has the talent to beat them.

Taut, pale legs carried 46-year-old Kathleen Looney around the dirt track as she prepared for her debut next month as a freshman on the Rio Hondo College cross-country team.

Though she will be facing runners less than half her age, Looney is given a good chance to be one of the top three women runners in the Foothill Conference. “She’s a natural,” said Rio Hondo Coach Fred Mascorro.

A mother of five, Looney took up running only six years ago when she found that she did not even have enough energy to do her gardening. “I was so unfit,” she said. “I couldn’t walk a half mile. I said, ‘Gosh, what am I going to do? If I feel like this at 40, what will the rest of my life be like?’ ”

But Looney, her shock of blond curls bouncing on her shoulders, was running easily Monday morning at Rio Hondo. When she slowed to a walk, she gestured with a freckled arm at her surroundings.

“This is lovely, isn’t this real nice here?” she said. The trees, the hills, a gray sky and a whistle from an unseen train reminded her of a distant home.

Ireland was in Looney’s soft voice, as distinctively as if she had left there only yesterday.

She moved to Whittier with her family in 1988, a year after surprisingly winning the Irish National Marathon in her first attempt.

Her running continues to be impressive--an eighth-place finish in the 1989 Long Beach Marathon (2 hours, 56 minutes); first in the 1989 Paramount World Masters 10-K run with a record 37:30 in her age category, and a victory in last year’s Carlsbad 5-K masters championship race.

Four of Looney’s children are runners, and they all ran before she did.

“The school I went to was small, with no athletics whatsoever,” she recalled.

When she became 40 and was finally jolted into running, the sport was not fashionable for Irish women. So she jogged along country roads where people could not see her.

After winning some races in her over-40 category, she acquired a coach and trained for a marathon. “We ran on golf courses when it was pitch dark, in rain and snow,” she said. “We’d fall into the bunkers.”

Looney was given little chance to be the overall winner at the Irish National Marathon Championship in 1987. “I was known as a masters runner (for competitors 35 or older), but I had never won anything big,” she said. “My coach said I was going to win. I thought he was out of his mind--there were three international runners in it--but I didn’t want to leave him down.”

Despite a dreadful day full of rain, snow and wind, the 5-foot-5, 118-pound Looney won in 2:58 before a crowd that included her family and parish priest.

“She was a huge story at the time,” reporter Brendan Mooney recalled by telephone this week from the Cork Examiner newspaper near Blarney. “She was a fun runner till then. But she went up to Galway and led all the way to win the race. It was a shock.”

Remembering that night when an account of her victory was on the national radio every hour, Looney said, “It was my best achievement ever.”

In Monday morning’s sunless light, her blue irises were so dark that the dots at their centers could barely be seen. Those Irish eyes smiled, though, as she pulled from her warm-up suit the medal that proclaimed her the Ireland marathon champion.

Looney lived in Blarney in the Republic of Ireland. She once kissed the Blarney stone, but the experience apparently has not changed her quiet nature.

“Kissing the stone is supposed to give you the gift of gab, but I don’t think I have it,” she said.

Life was good for the Looneys in Blarney. “We were well set up,” she said. “My husband was a nurse, which is quite a secure job in Ireland.”

But they began to think about leaving when Mairead Looney, the oldest daughter and Ireland’s youth 1,500-meter champion, won a scholarship to Western Kentucky University.

“I thought, ‘Gosh, it will be a long time before I see her,’ ” said Looney, who runs seven miles a day. “Then we saw in the local paper that the American government was going to offer 3,000 personal visas. We applied and six weeks later we got seven visas.”

They came to Whittier because Looney’s brother-in-law, Otto Looney, teaches at St. Paul High School in Santa Fe Springs.

Mairead, 21, has transferred from Western Kentucky and will run cross-country and track this year at UC Irvine. Looney’s youngest daughter, Fiona, 15, is on the cross-country team at St. Paul; daughter Eda, 18, who ran in Ireland, is a student at San Diego State; son Dennis, 19, is on the Cal State Fullerton track and cross-country teams, and son Shemaus, 22, who is not a runner, lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Jerry Looney, the marathoner’s husband who works in the maintenance department at St. Paul, also does not run. In her household of Looneys, “we need one sane person,” Kathleen Looney explained.

Believing the best way to continue running was to go to school, Looney enrolled last year at Rio Hondo College near Whittier. While attending a cross-country meet, she was introduced to Mascorro, operations manager at the junior college and a former successful cross-country coach at Rosemead High School.

“She showed interest in joining the team, and I encouraged her,” said Mascorro, 50, who this summer was named Rio Hondo’s cross-country coach.

In addition to attending school and working out, she teaches mentally handicapped adults in classes at Whittier High School, a job she says she loves as much as running.

Mascorro was at the track Monday morning for a glimpse of Looney.

“She’s a gem,” he said. “It’s like finding a diamond in the rough.”

The compliment put a blush on Looney’s cheeks, but he went on: “I’m a fairly good runner, but I find it hard to keep up with her. She beats me all the time. If we were to have a masters cross-country finals in her division, I believe she’d be in the top 10 in the world.”

The coach said he expects Looney, still considered a freshman because she took only 12 units last year, to run the three-mile cross-country events in just under 18 minutes. He said the top women in the NCAA 1-A university division turn in times just over 17 minutes.

Looney has already become an inspiration to her young teammates, who, Mascorro said, look at her with awe. It is a role in which she is comfortable.

“I try to encourage them as much as possible,” said Looney. “My main goal is let women of America know it can be done, that you can do anything if you try.”

Mascorro sees only one problem. “She has a tendency to overwork,” he said. “She attacks her workouts with so much strength and determination. But the season is a long one, so I have to try and slow her down and try to keep her from injuring herself.”

Previous injuries? “Never,” Looney said. “Touch wood.”

And she did, running her hand over the bleached grain of an old bleacher seat before getting up and running off to the gym for another workout.