Fresnan moves at the speed of life

.Despite losing a leg, 72-year-old Fresnan still lives in the fast lane

Published online on Saturday, Aug. 22, 2009

You can usually pick out the old dirt-track motorcycle racers because they have mangled shoulders, bones jutting out in all directions like a sack of nails.

Marsh Runyon is a bit more distinctive. He's also missing a leg.

He told the doctor to cut it off in 1982. It was slowing him down anyway. No joke.

They made Marsh take a 500-question test in the hospital to make sure he was competent to make a call like that. He was.

Frankly, it was merciful. That left leg had taken more abuse than any appendage deserves. Marsh first broke it in a car wreck in 1955. He broke it again in a motorcycle race in 1960. That time they patched it back together with "pins, nuts, bolts and screws."

In 1973, he broke it again in a motorcycle race. Hard to say whether it was the falling or the other motorcycles running over him that hurt most. The last time was in a race in Tulare in 1982, and that time it was bad. Really bad. There are limbs on giant sequoias that haven't weathered as much as that leg.

He was in the hospital 30 days while they discussed skin grafts and how to save as much of the foot as possible. Cut if off at the knee, he told them.

"Those things happen," he says of motorcycle racing. "If you don't think it can happen, you shouldn't be there."

Marsh Runyon is 72 years old these days. His beard has thinned and grayed, his big body limps on a prosthetic leg, and so of course he decided it was time to go faster than he's ever gone. The stubborn doesn't wear off with age.

So Runyon built a 1928 Model A Ford roadster, squeezed in a motor from a 1958 GMC truck, and then he took it to the famous Bonneville Speed Week in Utah and set a world record in the XO class -- 153.688 mph.

Runyon set the record on the morning of Aug. 9, and if you're thinking that trying to set speed records is at least safer than racing Harleys on a flat track, a driver died at Bonneville this year. Barry Bryant, another California man, lost control of his car doing 200 mph the same day Runyon set his record. He was just 46.

It was the second attempt for Runyon. He took the car to the Bonneville Salt Flats last year, too, got it up to 130 mph and blew up the motor.

"He's been racing motorcycles since he was 10," says his wife, Mary Jane. "Plan B, I guess, is Bonneville."

Is there a Plan C?

"A wheelchair with a motor in it."

Marsh and Mary Jane were first introduced for no other reason than they were both really tall, and they've been married for 36 years. They own a humble place on the west side of Fresno they call Crippled R Ranch. Marsh's adventures in cars and motorcycles are officially known as Crippled R Racing. It's on their business cards and painted on the car. The logo has a crutch that makes up the leg of the "R."

It's not only a reference to Marsh, but also to Mary Jane. In 1982, the year his leg was amputated, Mary Jane had an equestrian accident that she explains by saying, "I went through the jump and the horse didn't." It busted her face so badly she looked like something out of a science-fiction movie. Family members half-joked it might not even be safe for them to be around each other.

Twenty-seven years later, the name still works. They took it, and a whole lot of friends to Utah this year, Joe Boghosian, who helps with the engine, and Daniel Shuken, who built the frame and acts as crew chief. He has sponsors, like Digger Helm, who got his name because he's a mortician.

Marsh wasn't even the only local guy to set a record. Shaen Magan of Bass Lake broke his own record in his class, doing 199.6 mph in a 1929 Ford.

At Bonneville, the flats themselves are hard to comprehend, so massive and flat and the salt is so white it feels like you're under a 1,000-watt spotlight. There isn't a lot of strategy. You smash the gas pedal to the floor and drive at absurd speeds for miles. You drive over the top of all that salt, and you don't do anything crazy with the steering wheel. Even with 300 pounds of lead in the bottom, Marsh's car still floated back and forth. Air was coming so hard over the top of the car that Marsh couldn't hold his head forward and had to drive with one hand and hold his head steady with the other.

"That wind is unreal once you get over 150," he says.

His bifocals were jumping all over his face, something he plans to fix for next year, along with a strap from the seat to his helmet.

Oh yes, there are plans for next year. You don't even win prize money, it seems, just a commemorative metal plate to put inside your car and some level of immortality.

Marsh has never doubted his decision about the leg, even mentors other amputees, explains how their lives aren't finished, tells them stories about his life, the endless possibilities ahead.

It's an honorable legacy, even better than your name next to a speed record.