Trainer Tries to Get Them in Shape for the Long Run : David Morrow, who’s preparing group for 8K race, works with people who want to ‘grow as individuals.’

When you’ve assaulted Mt. Everest, where do you go for your next challenge?

David Morrow came home to Irvine.

After a monthlong trip climbing four Himalayan peaks, including 18,500-foot Chekoong Ri, and making it as far as Mt. Everest’s Base Camp II, Morrow returned to the Sports Club/Irvine to face one of the most formidable tests of his fitness training career.

His assignment: take half a dozen successful corporate types, none of them particularly athletic and all of them with overloaded schedules, and train them in little more than a month to run an 8K race.

Morrow is a trainer for Team Phoenix, six people who--with some mild to severe arm-twisting from bosses, co-workers and friends--agreed to become runners, if only for a day. On July 14, they’ll be running, walking, and/or crawling through the seventh annual Sports Club/Irvine Bastille Day 8K race.

Meanwhile, team members are spending an hour at the gym with Morrow three times a week, as well as dedicating every Saturday morning to a practice run at the Newport Back Bay with marathon runner John Scully.

As a trainer, Morrow makes a point of warning prospective clients that he won’t work with just anyone.

“I am only as good as the company I keep,” he says. He usually chooses clients who have “a burning desire to be better, not just to look and feel better, but to grow as individuals.”

But with Team Phoenix, what he got was a group of clients for whom “getting in shape” was an item on their “To Do” lists, an item that kept getting pushed to the bottom of the priorities.

“I don’t generally work with people who are so out of shape,” Morrow says. For example, some team members began their training June 8 with a resting heart rate twice as high as Morrow’s, which is about 45 beats per minute, the result of 16 years as a serious athlete. This year he ran the L.A. Marathon as part of his training for the Himalaya trip.

Morrow still remembers his own days in the corporate world, however, working late, starting early, jump-starting himself every morning with caffeine. He also admits he hasn’t always been in such good shape.

“I was once 40 pounds overweight,” he says. “I know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night and go eat something.”

Aside from lack of exercise, the Team Phoenix members had some other bad habits to overcome.

Robyn Renner, a vice president at Sedgwick James/Irvine, is a smoker. Serena Hecker, a commercial underwriter with the Chubb Insurance Group in Newport Beach, treated herself to a chocolate break every afternoon. Marketing executive Ralph Rodheim, president of Rodheim Marketing Group in Irvine, had an affinity for mayonnaise.

Against Morrow’s advice, Renner still smokes, but she says she’s preparing herself mentally to stop cold turkey. Hecker now substitutes an apple or a banana for her snack, and Rodheim has learned to avoid not only mayonnaise, but other fatty foods as well.

“You practically have to have a calculator next to your plate,” says participant Serge Denis, general manager of Le Meridien Newport Beach. He admits he has never really been interested in fitness.

“But my wife is, and she’s been pushing me,” he says, “So I am doing this because I love my wife.” Denis admits that “I don’t know if I will be at the finish line, but I will definitely be at the starting line.”

When Renner asked co-worker Cece Block to join the team, the latter’s reaction was less than enthusiastic. “I looked at her like she had snakes coming out of her head,” Block says. “But after about 15 minutes, she convinced me. And I’ve had no regrets at all, except for that one really bad leg cramp.”

Block was already a Sports Club/Irvine member and used to attend aerobics classes there, “But I haven’t gone in about a year since we went to a compressed workweek and I had to be in the office at 6:30 a.m. There was no way I could keep going to my 6 a.m. aerobics class. I could have gone in the evening, but that seemed too difficult. Now I know it’s not.”

Renner admits she balked at first when asked to participate. “I said there was absolutely no way I could train four times a week. I have a full-time job, I’m a single mommy, and it’s enough just to try and manage some kind of a personal life with all that going on. But I figured, this is the chance of a lifetime. When am I ever going to get another opportunity to train for something this demanding, and have this kind of guidance?”

Renner says she’s already seeing results. “When I started, my resting heart rate was 85. I checked it this morning and it was 60.”

One team member has dropped out already, and another, Cecile Childress of the Irvine branch of Wells Fargo Bank, had to skip a couple of training weeks because of vacation plans. But the other five agree they’re seeing, and feeling, positive results already.

“It’s easier than I expected,” Hecker says. “You do push yourself, but you’re not pushed so far that you can’t recover. I’ve never been super-sore or exhausted.”

During each team member’s workout, Morrow stands beside the treadmill, giving them information on nutrition, injury prevention and other subjects, and checking pulses to make sure they don’t pass the anaerobic threshold, the point at which their body isn’t getting enough oxygen to burn fat.

“I listen to their heart, not their voice,” he says. “I’ll take everyone as far as their heart will take them.”

Morrow admits that if the team members were his long-term clients, he wouldn’t be emphasizing running so much. “I’d suggest they cross-train with cycling or something. Running is a weight-bearing exercise, and it puts your joints through a lot of abuse. It’s not for everyone.”

The race will mark the end of Team Phoenix members’ training, but Morrow says he hopes they’ll see it as the beginning of a lifetime of fitness. “I see people who’ve trained with me and a year later they’re right back where they were before they started.

“Their body goes back to where their mind is,” Morrow says of the people who backslide. To be successful, “their minds (needs to) change to adapt to their new body. And that’s difficult for a lot of people.”