Drive to Succeed Lures Her Back to Track : Comebacks: After years of illness and injury, Cal State Los Angeles’ Wilcox is a winner again.

In spite of it all, Marlene Wilcox had to come back. In spite of the pain, the illnesses, the fatigue that thwarted her as Marlene Harmon, world-class track and field athlete in the early 1980s, she couldn’t stay away.

And so these days, at 29, Wilcox is competing again. Not on the international level, but competing all the same.

Now taking a more conservative approach to training and running for Cal State Los Angeles, Wilcox, a former heptathlete, won her new event, the 800 meters, in 2 minutes 7.15 seconds at the Division II meet in San Angelo, Tex., last month.

“Division II is a long way from Helsinki, but I am using it as a steppingstone and gaining confidence,” she said. “What separates me from the national leaders (in the 800) is just experience.”

Wilcox finished as the top American in the heptathlon in the 1983 World Championships at Helsinki, Finland, placing 11th despite competing with ruptured eardrums she suffered while flying to the meet with a severe head cold.

That, though, was only one example of the kind of medical difficulties that got in her way and finally led to her retirement in April of 1988.

Wilcox grew accustomed to pain during a career that began when she was 9 with the West Valley Eagles Track Club. There was tendinitis in her right shoulder, three bone chips in her right knee, a pinched nerve in her right leg, torn hamstrings, a dozen stress fractures in her lower legs and multiple stress fractures in both feet.

But none of that prepared her for the string of illnesses that began during preparation for the 1984 U.S Olympic trials at the Coliseum.

Wilcox was considered among the favorites to make the U.S. team in the heptathlon, which consists of the 100-meter hurdles, shotput, high jump, 200 meters, long jump, javelin and 800 meters. Instead, she came down with mononucleosis. She competed anyway but, in her weakened condition, finished sixth and failed to qualify.

Then in May of 1985, she got spinal meningitis, which resulted in a temporary loss of peripheral vision and a permanent hearing impairment. She says that the extreme fatigue caused by the mononucleosis weakened her immune system, making her susceptible to the meningitis virus.

“I made the mistake of over-training and kept on pushing and pushing,” Wilcox said. “I felt guilty about not training. It was like a sin to take a day off.”

Most of the effects of the meningitis ultimately subsided, allowing her to resume training at a normal level until the fall of 1986, when she got sick again. First it was pneumonia--she had it on four occasions--then got Epstein-Barr Syndrome, another disease resulting in extreme fatigue.

“I caught a lot of colds and I had a hard time keeping weight on,” Wilcox said. “I was down to 115 and eating everything in sight. It got to the point where I would get up in the morning and be exhausted.”

There is no known remedy for Epstein-Barr except rest. But Wilcox ignored her doctor’s warnings, continuing to train until finally she suffered a stress fracture in her lower leg when she stepped in a hole during a workout.

“I tried to train through it for a week, but the pain became too bad to handle,” she said. “I had so many letdowns from unexplained illnesses and injuries that resulted in erratic performances that I felt that it was not worth the effort.”

And so, the athlete who as a Thousand Oaks High senior in 1980 set a state record in winning the long jump at the state meet and also earned a spot on the U.S. Olympic team in the pentathlon, was out of competition.

By then, Wilcox also had family responsibilities--her husband Larry, the former co-star of the television series “CHiPs,” and her three stepchildren Derek, 21; Heidi, 16, and Wendy, 10. She channeled her competitive energies into a real estate career and competition as an amateur equestrian show jumper.

“Real estate was very lucrative and I was very successful,” said Wilcox, who lives in Bell Canyon. “I enjoyed the challenge of problem solving and negotiating. I rode horses three or four times a day. I didn’t even jog or even look at a track during that time.”

But that changed during a business trip to Tempe, Ariz., with Larry in the summer of 1989. They passed Sun Angel Stadium at Arizona State.

“I was in street clothes, but I just had to take a jog around the track,” Wilcox said. “I realized how much I missed it and that a competitive flame still burned. I felt that I still had some unfinished business to take care of.”

So when she returned from that Arizona trip, she approached Greg Ryan, Cal State L.A.’s distance coach, about beginning a training program. She was unaware that she had college eligibility remaining but Ryan reviewed her transcripts, found that she had three years of eligibility and suggested that she return to school.

Wilcox was not overly thrilled about that and initially declined, then reconsidered the offer after discussing it with her family.

“We have always encouraged pursuing education,” Wilcox said. “This was an opportunity to finish my degree and something I never had time to do before. I decided to try it for a year.”

Ryan says he did not think her days at Cal State L.A. would last much longer than that year.

“She could be doing a lot of other things than running and going to school,” he said. “I thought just doing the schoolwork to keep herself eligible would be too much to handle, not to mention the 70-minute drive to school every day and working out. I thought she would be around for a year and that would be it.”

Wilcox says that she might not have been, had she not had the support of her family.

Everybody helps with the household chores and caring for the family’s five horses, five dogs, hamster, kitten and two goldfish to free Wilcox to pursue her goals.

“To exceed in an sport, you must have total self-indulgence without any strings attached,” said Larry, a partner in a telecommunications corporation.

“It was important for me to stay in the background and give her all the love and support I could to allow her to have her own arena, where she is the celebrity and the star.”

Still, it was an uphill battle for Wilcox when she resumed training with the Cal State L.A. cross-country team in the fall of 1989.

“I knew it would take a long time to get back in shape,” she said. “It was frustrating because the drive was there and I expected myself to be at the level I had been. (Ryan) is a real good balance for me. He holds me back, instead of allowing me to push too hard. We have real good communication and have figured out a system that has been working.”

In the beginning, however, Wilcox says it required a great amount of persuasion from Ryan before she accepted those principles.

“Marlene is such an intense competitor that she gets wired up in practice,” Ryan said. “She has such high expectations that she has a tendency to train more tenaciously than her body is capable of. We negotiate on things more than I do with other athletes, but she is very cooperative.”

The period away from track helped her recover from Epstein-Barr and Wilcox said that no symptoms of the virus have resurfaced.

Her condition is carefully monitored and her training is reduced or halted at the first signs of fatigue.

And there is no more heptathlon for Wilcox. She believes now that her ability to be competitive in the throwing events at an international level is limited.

“I do not see myself throwing 50 feet in the shotput,” said Wilcox, who has bests of 42 feet 44 inches in the shotput and 149-7 in the javelin.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the world record-holder and 1988 Olympic champion in the heptathlon, has marks of 55-3 and 164-5 in those events.

So it is the 800 for Wilcox now. And besides winning it at the recent Division II meet, she teamed with Darcy Richardes, Soccoro Vazquez and Margo Grant, running a 53.9-second 400-meter leg on the Golden Eagles’ victorious 1,600-meter relay team that was timed in 3:38.52. Runner-up Alabama A&M; finished nearly five seconds behind in 3:43.24.

Wilcox ran 2:09.23 in the 800 last season but hamstring injuries resurfaced, forcing her to drop out of her qualifying heat of the 800 in the Division II championships at Hampton, Va.

Thoughts of retirement once again crossed her mind, but left quickly.

“I was not going to let the setback affect my comeback,” she said. “I saw it as a three-year project. My first year my goal was to build a base, the second was to stay consistent and the goal next year is to go up to a different level.

“I have already surpassed what I was hoping to accomplish this year.”