Changes on the Eve of the Race Pay for Knaub

Jim Knaub reached out for water at the 20-mile mark of the 26.2-mile wheelchair race Sunday of the Los Angeles Marathon.

What he got, instead, were congratulatory handshakes from spectators.

“All I wanted was water, and people wanted to shake my hand,” Knaub said, “but I had to get going because guys were coming up on me.”

Not fast enough, though. Knaub won the event in a course-record 1 hour 40 minutes 53 seconds.

And he did it with a redesigned “bike.” It wasn’t completed in every detail until 11 o’clock Saturday night, but Knaub, a former Cal State Long Beach pole vaulter, knew that he had a fast, reliable racing chair.

“The most disabling thing about having a disability is the chair because so much of the frustration other than the physical part of your body is dealing with the chair,” Knaub said.

“Basically, I changed my position, moving farther back and lightening the front end to make it work for me as efficiently as possible.

“The more efficiently that you solve the problems that exist for yourself without creating any new problems, the more efficient the chair is going to be.”

Knaub wanted to give his chair a test run, but persistent rain kept him off the streets.

Knaub, who won the event in 1989, is dedicated to his sport.

“I’m not on the same level as Magic Johnson, but I have put so much into it over the last 12 years, particularly the past two years,” he said. “It’s the last thing on your mind when your head hits the pillow.”

Knaub said he was in a huge pack for the first seven or eight miles and the pace was slow. Then, he broke away at Sunset Boulevard and Hill Street, the highest point in the race.

Alone now, he was racing with his own thoughts. “I began to feel every little bump on the road,” Knaub said.

Knaub, 35, was an Olympic trials finalist in the pole vault in 1976.

In 1978 he was struck by a car while sitting on his motorcycle at a stoplight.

Undaunted, he is as competitive now as when he was vaulting. He also works for a wheelchair company, doing, he said, “A little bit of everything.”

Sylvaine and Patricia Puntous of Canada are identical twins. They’re also elite triathletes.

When they compete they like to finish side by side. They will often wait for each other by slowing their pace.

They had a small problem Sunday that had to be attended to immediately. “It was impossible to finish together (Sunday),” Patricia said. “We were running together, but suddenly Sylvaine stopped and had to go to the bathroom. That was at about 13 miles.”

Said Sylvaine: “Patricia got too far ahead and I couldn’t catch her.”

However, at the 24-mile mark it was Patricia’s turn to concede to nature. So Sylvaine passed her and Patricia couldn’t catch up, spoiling their plans for an identical finish. As it was, Sylvaine finished 13th and Patricia 14th among women.

Notes

Fred Lebow, the organizer of the New York Marathon, finished back in the pack in the men’s portion of a special five-kilometer race. That he was running at all is amazing. He was diagnosed as having a brain tumor a year ago in February and the prognosis was that he had only three to six months to live. Lebow underwent three operations but was still dedicated to running. “I feel tired now,” Lebow said after the race, “and I sleep more than I used to. But I have plans to run in some marathons in the future, an exotic one, such as in Cairo.”

Olga Markova, from Leningrad, in the Soviet Union, finished third in the women’s portion of the marathon with a best ever personal record time of 2:33:27. However, three days ago she didn’t think she could even run. She had an infected tooth and had to have a root canal. The surgery was performed by Dr. Lennox Miller, the former world-class USC sprinter. What made matters worse for Markova was that she couldn’t take antibiotics because of the required drug testing after the race.