Star Spanglered : No Longer Down and Out, Marathoner Hopes Her Star Reaches Its Zenith With Banner Run

She was running south along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago on an autumn Sunday when she ran into the wall, invisible but every bit as real as that built by the Chinese to keep out the Vandals or the one in Boston built to keep baseballs in Fenway Park.

It was the 20th mile of the 1994 Chicago Marathon, and tears welled in Jenny Spangler’s eyes as she slowed to a walk, then stopped, sat down and quit.

For about two minutes.

“Then I said to myself, ‘No, you’ve never quit on a race before, so get going,’ ” Spangler says.

She slowly made her way along the last six miles, finishing in 2 hours 43 minutes 2 seconds, pedestrian enough for 14th place but fast enough to qualify her for a back-in-the-pack spot in the U.S. Olympic women’s marathon trials.

Sixteen months later, she won the trials in 2:29:54 and finished a three-year quest that had turned a 26-mile 385-yard event into a personal hurdles race.

“Who is that?” Linda Somers, the second-place finisher, asked Ann Marie Lauck, who was third, at the 18th mile during the trials at Columbia, S.C., on Feb. 10.

Who indeed?

She was No. 61, wearing a Santa Monica Track Club singlet and running with a ponytail swaying.

And she wouldn’t go away.

“I know what they were saying,” says Spangler, laughing as she sits in the sun in Santa Monica. “I’ve done that before when I’ve been a seeded runner and seen a No. 61. I’ll say, ‘What are you doing here? Go back where you belong.’ And I remember in the latter stages of the race, when you are trying to think of other things besides how you feel, I was thinking NBC must be going crazy, trying to figure who this was.”

She is a 32-year-old former junior marathon champion from Gurnee, Ill., who had run 2:33:52 in Duluth, Minn., in her first try at the distance and wondered why everybody thought it was so tough. She spent the next 13 years finding out.

It was 13 years of college success at Iowa, racing failure in Chicago and Houston and Pittsburgh, loneliness, injuries, a marriage and divorce, personal burnout and finally victory built on the ashes with a foundation laid in Chicago and Santa Monica.

“Sometimes I still have to pinch myself,” she says.

It’s easy to see why. She had been the fastest runner in high school and the kid with the best grades, and she carried the baggage of self-imposed pressure as a perfectionist in an imperfect sport in an imperfect world. First place or no place, she races the field and the course, not the watch.

College mixed well with running, but marriage to college boyfriend Tom Gesell didn’t. A master’s degree in business offered a future, but without the passion she felt from running.

“I think I tried too hard,” she says. “My husband understood my running, but he didn’t really understand what it took to get to the level where I wanted to be. He didn’t run, so it was me, wanting to run all the time, and it was him, wanting to sit home and watch TV. It didn’t work too well.”

The running part didn’t work at all after the Olympic trials of 1988 in Pittsburgh, a personal disaster that made her a full-time housewife in search of a career that didn’t involve sneakers and singlets.

By 1993, the rest didn’t work. The marriage was over and divorce left her at loose ends. Time in front of the television watching the Barcelona Games tied them up.

“I remember in ‘92, watching the Olympic marathon on TV, when I was hardly even running, and it just seemed so impossible,” she says. “I was working full time and, well, I don’t know. It just seems crazy.”

The burnout of ’88 nagged at her because, if she was finished with marathon running, she wanted it to be on her terms, with at least one good race to prove to herself that she hadn’t peaked at 19.

“I had reached a point where things couldn’t get any worse,” she says. “I’d been through a divorce and I thought, ‘Why not just give it a shot? You want to do it. You’re not married any more. You don’t have any children. You have no responsibilities. Go for it. At least you can say you gave it a shot and you can get on with your life.’ ”

She retreated to Iowa, where memories were better, to begin a program and then came to Chicago for the marathon disaster. And then suffered yet another in a series of stress fractures to her foot that made her wonder if it was all worthwhile.

She was lonely and broke when she put Iowa behind her a year ago, going back to Chicago for a job as a computer programmer. Then she met Willie Rios.

He was a lawyer in the Cook County public defender’s office and, on the side, he coached four women who had qualified for the Olympic marathon trials, working with them on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays in an atmosphere that included pasta with his secret sauce.

He heard about Spangler from his best runner, Ann Shaefers, who would finish 27th at the trials. Rios called Spangler with an invitation.

Spangler didn’t respond for a week. She was still licking her wounds.

“I had gone to Chicago [for the marathon] with too high expectations,” Spangler says. “When I had a bad race, I was devastated. I kept thinking about that ’83 win and how easy it felt for me. I guess I expected to lah-de-dah back into it and I couldn’t.”

Guilt took over, and she got off the couch and drove over to see what he had to offer. Rios saw what she had to give at Lake Geneva, Wis.

It’s a 10-mile course with 17 hills, and he runs the first mile all-out, then hangs on. Rios had run 59:21 on the course and Shaefers had run 61:30. Spangler went through the first mile in 5:03 and finished in 58:28.

The next day, Rios called Joe Douglas in Santa Monica. There were eight months until the trials. Rios’ club was called Sunjoy--”run for fun in the sun”--but there would be neither sun nor joy in the Chicago winter that would consume many of those months.

Douglas is the impresario of the Santa Monica Track Club, for which Rios had once run. Together they planned workouts to prepare the women for Santa Monica.

On Dec. 15, it was time to move.

Living off money donated by Olympic great Carl Lewis, a Santa Monica Track Club member and patron, they were set up in an apartment and began workouts, beginning in Pacific Palisades and including runs in the grass under the coral trees of San Vicente Boulevard through Brentwood and beyond. Douglas drove alongside, correcting flaws and exhorting every mile out of his new charges.

“I had told Joe, ‘We’ve got a flyer on our hands,’ ” Rios says. “He didn’t believe me until he had seen her a while and then he called me and said, ‘You lied to me. She’s not a flyer, she’s a monster.’ ”

A somewhat overwhelmed monster at first, wondering why she was camping out in California and who was that man yelling at her from the car to keep her elbows in tighter? But she quickly got in step with the 110-mile weeks, hard runs on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. An easy week was 80 miles.

Spangler was homesick, calling boyfriend Miki Tosic twice a day and trading Chicago stories with her roommate, Shaefers.

“After we settled in a week, she got more comfortable,” Shaefers says. “Then I began to notice, ‘Boy, is she fast. She has a shot.’ ”

But the knowledge was closely kept. Even Spangler wasn’t sure.

“Even the night before the trials, I’m looking at a list of competitors and you have Joan Benoit-Samuelson and Ann Marie and Gwen Coogan and Linda Somers and Kim Jones, and I’m thinking how in the world am I going to make this team?’ ” she says.

She and Rios had videotaped the Columbia course, plotting strategy for attacking its plentiful hills. They were hoping for third place and a spot on the Olympic team.

On race day, “I was thinking, ‘See if you can stay up with these women for the first seven miles and see how you feel,’ ” she says. “I was playing little games with myself.

“And I said, ‘See if you can stay up with them a little longer, and then when I broke away [at 16 miles], I really expected a bunch of people, like Ann Marie and Linda to go with me and they didn’t.”

Instead, they followed her across the finish line, with Spangler becoming the 12th American woman to break 2:30.

She had gone to Columbia broke and came away with $45,000 for winning. She had bought her own shoes to run the race. Now a shoe and apparel company pays her for wearing its product. She was unknown, even in Chicago, and now she can be seen on television there, hawking luxury cars for a local dealer. A film company uses her in a commercial for its product.

She has celebrity, which she finds difficult but at which she is a natural.

Were the trials the end . . . or a beginning?

She and Rios went to Atlanta, sneaking past a no-trespassing sign into the Centennial Olympic Stadium in March. They taped the tunnel through which the runners will exit the stadium and they taped Atlanta’s 4-H course: hilly, humid and hot as hell.

She still plays games with herself. The tunnel out of the stadium is also the tunnel in.

“Sometimes when I’m running on San Vicente, I dream about coming into the stadium with Uta Pippig with me and we’re coming into that last lap and going for the gold,” she says. “But I haven’t actually visualized getting the gold.”

Pippig of Germany has been considered the world’s best for three years now, with three Boston Marathon victories as her credentials.

Spangler is ranked 21st after her run in Columbia.

“But she’s still making rapid progress,” Douglas says. “It’s hard to say what she will do, but if she continues to get better, I think, even in the heat, she’s under 2:30.”

Spangler is still a bit overwhelmed by it all, and her perspective is still affected by an autumn Sunday when she sat down in Chicago, and by loneliness and injury in Iowa.

“Maybe it was all meant to be,” she says. “Maybe the stress fracture in my foot making me go back to Chicago, then meeting Willie and then Joe, maybe something was meant to be.

“But sometimes you get scared and say, ‘This is all too good. Is it going to last?’ ”

Her hope is that it lasts at least 23 more days, until July 28, when she runs back into the tunnel in Atlanta.