Jog it loose
We left our downtown L.A. office, heading north on Spring Street. Two middle-aged women on the loose at lunchtime, straining against time and gravity, one an avid marathoner and patient guide, the other a slow but determined jogger. We turned on 1st Street, ran past City Hall, through Little Tokyo, and a few minutes later we were trotting across the 1st Street bridge, taking in a rare view of the Los Angeles River -- on this day, the concrete sluice was a swollen gray torrent, roiling along at a clip unimaginable in August or September.
This was no marathon. It bore little resemblance to the grueling 26-mile challenge that awaits the thousands of athletes and fools who will turn out Sunday for the 20th L.A. Marathon. But it felt great. As just about every run does ... especially when it’s over.
There are a million places to run in this city, and every avid runner has a favorite. In Pasadena, it may be a run around the Rose Bowl; in the San Fernando Valley, the Sepulveda Dam. In Long Beach, it might be the bike path that starts at the Queen Mary and ends in Belmont Shore. For years I’ve preferred the beach paths of Santa Monica, Venice and Marina del Rey. Lately, I’ve begun to discover the joys of the downtown lunch-hour run; seeing on foot what one normally sees out the window of a moving car is revelatory.
Our recent downtown jog came on a day that the sun finally dared show itself after what seemed a month of rain. The air was clear and nicely chilled, and, most beautiful of all, there were very few hills on this four-mile loop through the core of the city. We ran up 1st into Boyle Heights, turned left on North Boyle Avenue, and left again on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. At Vignes Street, as we waited for the light to change, the twin towers of the Men’s Central Jail hunkered down on our right and the 26-story, dun-colored MTA headquarters loomed before us. Traffic lights are one of the joys of urban running and lend an air of delicious unpredictability to things. Will the light turn red when you need that little moment of rest the most? One can only pray.
We crossed Vignes, then darted up some steps at the MTA building, across the multicolored bricks of Patsouras Plaza and down an escalator right into Union Station.
To paraphrase the poet Maya Angelou: And still we ran.
Past tunnels leading to platforms, past travelers on their way to San Diego, San Bernardino, Santa Clarita. Past the lunchtime crowd at Traxx restaurant, where no one seemed surprised to see us. We burst out the train station’s front doors, crossed Alameda Street to Olvera Street Plaza, then ran back to 2nd and Spring, with a little teeny kick at the end. Forty-five minutes after leaving the building, we were back at our desks, a little sweatier and very content.
And frankly, for closet slugs like me, that’s what running is all about.
Pat Connelly totally gets this. “You go out for three miles four days a week,” he says, “that’s all you have to do and you are in the upper half of 1% of physical fitness.”
But Connelly also has a more ambitious agenda. He is a retired Los Angeles cop and veteran running coach who many years ago devised a program, L.A. Roadrunners, to help non-runners become marathoners. “If you can walk and don’t have disabilities,” he says, “you can run a marathon.”
Last Saturday morning, in a large clearing on the Venice Boardwalk, he was standing like a messiah in the middle of a large crowd, the focus of hundreds of runners who had come for a final training session before the big race.
The idea of running at all seemed nothing short of a miracle to many of the first-timers in the crowd, including Pam McCrae, a 40-year-old Santa Monica mother of three. McCrae swam in college but has since done “nothing.” In the marathon, she’ll be part of a pace group that runs for three minutes and walks three minutes.
For all the people wondering how a completely non-athletic person can transform him- or herself into a marathoner in a matter of months, this is important: Many of the people who will be on the course on Sunday -- including McCrae and running partner Elizabeth Southard, 38, a former half-pack a day smoker who is nearly six months pregnant with her first child -- will alternate between walking and running, in tightly coordinated fashion. The slowest of Connelly’s marathoners will jog a minute and walk three, and he expects they will cross the finish line in six hours.
Off and running
Many runners don’t realize they are beneficiaries of a movement rooted in the late 1970s, when Jim Fixx penned the bestselling “The Complete Book of Running.” The running population has increased every year since then, except for a brief period after Fixx died of a heart attack while running, at 52. “That set us back a little bit,” says Runner’s World executive editor Amby Burfoot. But since the early 1990s, says Burfoot, “particularly with the women’s running revolution -- which has been dramatic -- running has been on the upswing by all measures.”
It’s nearly impossible to know exactly how many Americans take up running each year. But we do know they’re buying shoes: In 2004, sales of shoes marketed strictly for running accounted for 28.9% of the $16.4-billion athletic shoe industry, according to the NPD Group, a consumer data firm. (Running shoes were the largest single category, followed by basketball shoes.)
Between 1993 and 2003, the number of registered participants in road races grew from 4.8 million to more than 7.7 million, an increase of just over 60%, according to USA Track & Field’s Road Race Information Center. In 1993, 28% of those racers were women. By 2003, women accounted for 52% of registered racers.
Marathoning has increased dramatically in popularity; the number of finishers in the U.S. has increased 46%, from 274,000 in 1993, to just more than 400,000 in 2003. This is due in part to running coaches like marathoner Jeff Galloway, a former Olympian who has pioneered the concept of alternating running and walking in order to avoid the kind of muscle pain and fatigue that makes people just want to stop. “Anything goes in a marathon,” says Galloway. “If you want to crawl, you can crawl.” The formula is valid, he says, for any kind of running.
Along the way
Except for a minor investment in running shoes, which you probably already own, running is free. You don’t have to join a gym to do it. You don’t have to drive anywhere to do it. You can do it alone or in a crowd. If you like to go in circles on artificial surfaces, just about any school track will accommodate you gratis.
If you love the beach, the Santa Monica/Venice Boardwalk offers miles and miles of flat surfaces. Start by parking in the public beach lots south of Pico Boulevard. If you run south on the Boardwalk toward Venice, you will be rewarded with, well, Venice Beach in all its wacky glory.
If you run north, you will be entertained in other ways. Beachside Santa Monica is celebrity city. Two luxury hotels push up against the boardwalk at Pico. My longtime running partner and I like to peer into the restaurant Shutters on the Beach. We’ve seen Ron Howard eating breakfast; we’ve seen Kevin Bacon. Farther north, we’ve seen Arnold Schwarzenegger on bikes with his kids. We watched Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez film part of “Gigli” in a parking lot north of the pier.
Harry Perry, who wears a caftan and turban while rollerblading on the Venice Boardwalk playing his guitar, runs every day on this stretch, in shorts, minus the caftan.
If you love shorebirds and real estate, there is a footpath on the east side of Ballona Lagoon in Marina del Rey that offers not only a peek at new cheek-by-jowl mansions of the Silver Strand Peninsula but also an often stellar view of herons, egrets, cormorants and ducks. There are no red lights, but I have often stopped to take in the sight of an egret slowly trolling the water for a finned morsel. The well maintained public footpath is fragrant with coastal sage and jasmine, and if you run south, you can turn right at the base of the lagoon and run out onto the jetty that is the northern bank of the Marina del Rey channel. This is a pleasant run, full of the kinds of distractions that help a resentful runner pass the time.
To get there, drive west on Venice Boulevard, turn left at Via Marina, right on Marquesas Way and left on Via Dolce. You will see the lagoon on your immediate right. The footpath begins at the first big house, in front of the “Northpointe” sign.
If you love the mountains, any number of trails in the Santa Monicas are accessible. If you love urban nature, there is Griffith Park. If you love small bodies of water, there is the 3.2-mile loop around the Hollywood Reservoir. And if you love your neighborhood, well, there’s the door.
Outfoxing the body
Bernd Heinrich is one of those very serious runners who has something to offer those of us who are not. Heinrich, 64, is an entomologist and former ultramarathoner who has done amazing things to himself in the name of trying to figure out how to run long distances with efficiency and speed. (Like downing a quart of honey or a quart of olive oil to see what effect it would have on his run. Not a good one, as it turned out.) Heinrich’s 2001 book, “Why We Run: A Natural History,” is a sometimes poetic chronicle of his training for a 100-kilometer (62-mile) race in 1981 with many digressions about athleticism and survival in the natural world.
In all his years of running, Heinrich says, he never experienced what he would consider an endorphin high, which frankly should come as good news to those who are beginning runners.
“People are induced to think they are going to have these clairvoyant experiences -- floating on clouds and stuff and it’s touted as an experience that is so pleasurable, when in fact it’s a lot of work,” says Heinrich, a professor at the University of Vermont. “People feel the pain, then they quit.”
This, generally, is what separates people who have tried running from people who run. Becoming a runner, which just about anyone can do, is about outfoxing the body. “My body is screaming at me to stop,” writes Heinrich, “and it would always win if it did not have a mind to play tricks with it, boss it around, delude it.” He quotes the always apt Yogi Berra: “It’s ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.”
Burfoot, who won the Boston Marathon in 1968 at 21, has written a book for beginning runners that should be in stores this month. “I’ve recognized that there has always been a latent appetite for this kind of book,” he says, “but no one wanted to write it.”
After apologizing for the “unsexy title,” Burfoot says he is proud to say that “The Runner’s World Complete Book of Beginning Running” does not contain a single chapter on marathons. The book does offer, among other things, a 24-week schedule for someone who is “a little older, a little overweight and has to take a lot of time to get in shape,” says Burfoot. “It holds you by the hand and says, ‘We are mostly gonna be walking, but in six months we are gonna be running for 30 minutes.’ ”
To inspire beginners, Pat Connelly often focuses on running’s benefits. “The first thing I do with my beginning runners is tell them not to think about the distance they are going to run,” he says. “I take a great amount of time to identify the intrinsic value of running -- what it’s going to do for your quality of life, your self-esteem. You’re gonna lose inches and pounds, but you’re also gonna have more healthy body organs -- lungs, heart, kidneys, spleen. Running will be like your Prozac -- you can handle stress better, and because of that you are a better partner at home, better at work, a better parent. I am not gonna tell you you are going to live two years longer, but I think you will.”
Funny. This was exactly not what I was thinking as I ran up a particularly pernicious stretch of Temple Street nine days ago with my chipper guide, the marathoner. This time, we were on our way to Echo Park -- a little lunchtime jaunt around the lake -- and I was pretty sure that early mortality was not only possible but might even come as a relief.
Eventually, the hill relented, and in short order, we were jogging around the deliciously flat Echo Park Lake, which would have been lovely but for the cold rain that began to pelt us as soon as we got there. Men huddled under the eaves of the park’s restrooms. With rain slapping at my glasses, I couldn’t see very well.
But we kept running, and for good reason. It was too cold and we were too wet to stop. Back at my desk, I was a little soggy for the rest of the afternoon, and my smudged mascara did nothing for my looks, but, oh, what a high. And I got it for free.
