Long Road Ahead

Dave Reynolds has warm memories of a cool morning a year ago when he ran 26 miles along the coastline with his girlfriend, Shirley, who was competing in her first marathon.

Things went so well Shirley is now his wife.

Jennifer Duke also gets a glow when she recalls the same day. She finished fourth in the women’s division of the inaugural Pacific Shoreline Marathon, running up to the Huntington Beach Pier finish line feeling remarkably refreshed.

“It had been raining really hard, but it just drizzled during the race,” said Duke, a Fountain Valley resident. “It was perfect, cool, comfortable running weather. And it’s such a flat, fast and beautiful course.”

Duke, who wound her way to victory over steep trails in the Saddleback Marathon in November, couldn’t resist the lack of elevation changes on the Huntington Beach course, so--despite a recent case of the flu--she’ll be back for the race’s second running Jan. 25.

“I’ve been pretty sick and haven’t been able to train, so I’m only going to run the half-marathon,” she said. “I don’t know how well I’ll do, but you can’t pass up the chance to race on your own training ground, especially on that course.”

Reynolds, co-owner of A Snail’s Pace running store in Fountain Valley, won’t be competing this year, but the majority of the 250 members of the Snail’s Pace Running Club will be spending Super Bowl Sunday morning either volunteering or running in the 5K, 8K, the half marathon or the marathon.

“The crowd wasn’t that big last year because the weather was so threatening, but the people who were there were very enthusiastic and vocal,” Reynolds said. “We’ve got a lot of different training groups getting ready to run. It’s such a beautiful locale, we’re all hoping it will be around for a while.”

That was certainly the master plan for Herb Massinger, president of Race Pace Promotions in Dana Point, who boldly predicted last year that he would someday see “world records set on this course.”

But local runners, who have seen other Orange County marathons come and go and are still mourning the 1995 demise of the Long Beach Marathon, are looking more for longevity than headlines.

The race, which is offering prize money for the first time this year--$700 for first place in the men’s and women’s marathon divisions--is probably a long way from attracting the type of elite distance runners who could establish records. But few of the competitors care about that.

“It’s logistically very difficult to put on a good marathon and it also takes a lot of money,” Reynolds said. “You have to have good volunteers in key positions, you have to have the support of the municipality, and just a few irate residents can make a lot of noise in a city council meeting. But the biggest problem, obviously, is that it’s so difficult to get and maintain sponsorship.”

The Pacific Shoreline Marathon seems to be running on shaky ground in a number of those areas.

Its original seed money came in large part from a local pub. Its sponsors are a suburban newspaper, an area cable company, a county radio station, a local car dealer and a gym. And it was given a less-than-enthusiastic approval from the Huntington Beach City Council last year, when Mayor Ralph H. Bauer was the dissenter in a 6-1 approval vote.

The council wanted to make sure the closure of Pacific Coast Highway from Beach Boulevard to Warner Avenue between 5 a.m. and about 2 p.m. was worth the cost and trouble.

“Well, we won [Bauer] over anyway,” Massinger said. “He sat in on our first planning meeting this year. The first race accounted for the rental of several hundred hotel rooms, so pretty much everything we’ve heard this year has been favorable.”

Massinger has worked for more than a decade to “make a marathon stick in Orange County.” His first attempt was a 1985 event sponsored by the county and the Irvine Co. “That one went by the wayside and it took 12 years to get [one] back,” he said.

The survival of this race seems to hinge on securing a national sponsor willing to defray the costs for association with an event embraced by the community and competitors and, for the time being, willing to settle for a minimal amount of exposure.

Massinger, who has dipped into his savings more times than he likes to recall to promote races, believes he is very close to a deal with John Hancock. It’s a deal he hopes to close next year in time to properly promote the event.

“You can hold a 5K and get thousands of people to sign up on race day,” he said, “but marathoners typically make their plans months in advance. You have to have your entry forms ready to pass out at the expos across the country. But we can’t afford to do that out of my back pocket.”

Massinger thinks the Pacific Shoreline race has what it takes to attract a national, even international, field despite a relatively tiny pot of gold at the end of the looping, 26-mile figure-eight course. What could be more enticing to a frostbitten East Coast distance runner than a jog along the beach in Southern California in January?

“I’m hoping this will one day be a destination race,” he said. “The Honolulu Marathon is now the largest convention in the state.”

Last year’s sparse spectator crowd and humble turnout of race-day sign-ups was clearly a less-than-auspicious debut and not the picture Massinger envisioned when he stood on the Huntington Beach Pier a few days before, basking in sunshine with Catalina and the snow-covered San Bernardino mountains clearly visible on opposite horizons.

Race-day morning, however, he drove through a downpour to face the cold realities of putting on a first-time marathon. There was some confusion and controversies about whether the distances of some races were correct, but most of the participants were issuing thumbs-up reviews and many will be returning.

Preregistration numbers are up about 30% from last year, according to Massinger, who estimates as many as 4,000 runners will hit the pavement if the weather is good.

Consider Duke. She’ll be back even if it means running in the rain with tissues clutched in one hand and throat lozenges in the other.

“They had some problems last year, but they did a pretty good job for the first time around,” she said. “It seems like so often the promoters of these races throw in the towel too soon, so it’s important to do anything we can to keep this race going.

“This is such a great county for runners, hopefully this race can find its niche and survive.”