Sticking Together to Finish : Lifestyle: When the tightknit Kearl clan of La Canada takes off on a family vacation, there’s no time to relax. The next stop: the New York Marathon.

La Canada anesthesiologist Sherman Kearl, his wife, Karen, and their five children will set a vacation pace few could match while visiting New York this week.

After three days filled with as many sightseeing outings as possible, the Kearls and their children, ages 17 to 27, will run the New York City Marathon on Sunday.

But the breakneck pace will not be the Kearls’ only vacation memory. They will be joined in the marathon by Karen Kearl’s sister and brother-in-law, making them the largest single family entry in the marathon’s 21-year history, said race director Fred Lebow.

The Kearls undoubtedly will be sore after the 26.2-mile race, but they say a few aching muscles are a small price to pay for continuing their longtime tradition of building closeness on family vacations.

“My father recognized that a lot of families that had successful children did so because they did things together,” said Gregory Kearl, 27, a third-year student at Chicago Medical School. “Our credo has been to work hard and play hard together.”

“That is what life is all about,” said Karen Kearl, 50. “The warm feeling you get when somebody cares when you spend time together.”

The vacations began when the children were young and the Kearls traveled with scores of families to Aspen, Colo., in the winter and to Lake Powell in southern Utah in the summer.

As the children grew older, the family turned to more exotic pursuits. The Kearls took some or all of their children to Africa, Alaska, Australia, Europe and Hawaii. They have rafted on the Colorado River and kayaked from Catalina to San Pedro.

In 1985, Sherman, 53, and son Matthew, 21, drove a dune buggy to victory in the challenger class of the Baja California International 500-mile off-road race. The family has also walked the 175-mile stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexican border to Palm Springs, and in 1987 all the Kearl children ran the Los Angeles Marathon.

That marathon was the last time the family gathered in the same city, however, and Sherman and Karen wanted a reunion.

The New York City Marathon came to mind. Sherman Kearl met Lebow when Kearl worked as commissioner of shooting events for two years prior to the 1984 Olympics. He extracted Lebow’s promise that if the family ran the New York Marathon together, the race executive would present them with the medals distributed to all finishers. In the past, Lebow has presented awards only to winners.

The Kearls began training months ago, and on Wednesday night Sherman and Karen, an accountant, were scheduled to fly to New York. They were bringing their daughter Kristin, 17, a La Canada High School senior recently named Miss La Canada, and their son, Patrick, 19, a student at Glendale Community College.

Gregory was scheduled to fly to New York from Chicago. Bradley, 26, a construction worker, and Matthew, a premed student at Brigham Young University, were to come from Provo, Utah.

Gregory Kearl said he treasures his memories of early family gatherings.

“On weekends we would all get together and do all yardwork so we could finish it and then go out together,” he said. “We’d try to do family activities once or twice a week.

“Our church, the Mormon church, has a scheduled family night that usually takes place on Monday. It can be anything from ice skating to discussing gospel principles, but we always had a lot of fun together, and we’ve tried to build on that.”

Sherman Kearl explained the family unity this way: “I do not think we do things together because the church encourages it,” he said. “The church’s encouragement just makes it simpler. . . . We do things because we enjoy it.”

Sometimes the children preferred to spend time with friends and were reluctant to attend family outings. Matthew said he didn’t always want to go to Lake Powell but wound up enjoying the boating, water skiing and windsurfing.

“It might have bothered me (to have to go with my family and leave my friends),” he said. “But when I was with my family it didn’t bother me as much because . . . my family made it fun for us.”

Nor did the children and their parents avoid conflict at home.

“All this family stuff doesn’t mean that the kids don’t bicker or complain or refuse to cooperate,” Karen said. “We’re not the Waltons. It’s not ‘Good night, John Boy.’ ”

The Kearls have lived for 23 years in a 5,500-square-foot, Spanish-style home surrounded by 16 redwoods. A basketball court and a swimming pool with three- and one-meter diving boards sit beside the house. The Kearls do their own house and yardwork.

“Their issues would be, ‘I don’t want to do housework, I don’t want to clean the swimming pool,’ ” Karen said.

Sherman Kearl’s decision to spend time with his family began during medical school. The third-generation physician worked as a free-lance anesthesiologist, rather than affiliating with a hospital, for 20 years.

“If you hook up with one hospital,” he said, “You won’t have much say in how much time you can take off. If my boy had a game or my daughter was in a play, I wanted to be able to go.”

Now that his children are grown, Kearl works regularly for Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. Although he puts in as many as 100 hours a week, he recently found time to prepare his customary quiz on sites on the upcoming vacation.

In a memo to family members, he also listed sources where they could study for the 40-question exam. The family member who scores highest on the quiz earns $100; second place wins $50.

“Preparing for a quiz such as this not only results in extra spending money,” Kearl wrote in the memo, “but the brief study (for the quiz) results in ideas about what to see and do, as well as a better understanding and appreciation of the area. . . . “

After seeing as many sights as possible before the race, the family hopes to see more during the event.

“We are determined to stay together and run the race as slowly as the slowest one of us can go,” Sherman said. “They are going through Harlem, the Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn and a lot of Jamaican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.

“They will go past Yankee Stadium and the Verrazano-Narrows, the bridge with the largest main span in the world. . . . If there is something to stop at, we’re going to look at it.”

But Sherman Kearl will not be surprised if the race doesn’t go exactly as planned.

Late on a recent afternoon as they drove to the Rose Bowl to work out for the marathon, Kristin told her father that she wanted to attend a Billy Idol concert that evening.

“Is that one of those bad guys?” Sherman wondered. “Does he sing songs that you would be embarrassed to say? Kristin, you should think twice about this.”

After it became clear that Sherman would not persuade his daughter to stay home, he had another idea.

“Here’s what you do,” he said. “You take a Sony Walkman. Put on some Tchaikovsky in your earphones and listen to that and your friends won’t even know it.”