When you run with the pros, you win

Published online on Sunday, Nov. 08, 2009

It is the only sport, as far as I can tell, where you can swipe your credit card and face an Olympic champion.

Sure, if you ran into Clyde Drexler at a playground, you could challenge him to a game of HORSE. Or you could fly to China and convince Zhu Qinan to have a one-on-one shooting competition.

But in marathoning, you can compete against the world's best, in a major professional event. You might not have heard about this -- it was somewhat under-publicized, in my opinion -- but Kenyan Sammy Wanjiru and I dueled at the Chicago Marathon in October.

He, being the Olympic champion from the Beijing Games. I, being a running medalist as well, if you count a 14th-place finish in a JV cross country meet in 1991.

In the end, he pulled out a narrow victory, somewhere around 2 hours and 51 minutes. I'm being silly, of course, but the point is still good. I could have beaten him, you know, if I were fast.

It has happened. At the Nike women's marathon in San Francisco this year, a schoolteacher named Arien O'Connell had the fastest time, beat all the elite runners, and put the race directors in a weird position because the elite runners started 30 minutes ahead of the regular folks.

The Eye-Q Two Cities Marathon does not have Olympians. At least not yet. The prize pool isn't bad, though, and the fields and the competitiveness for Sunday's race were better than last year.

I ran again, this time with some actual training and it went better. OK, it was still extended torture -- on par with a villain trying to get secrets out of you with special instruments for a few hours -- but at least it was finished quicker.

It still amazes me how emotional a marathon can be. I'm convinced that people don't come to marathoning, it just grabs hold of them and won't let go. If something changed your life, could you walk away?

You stand at the starting line and all around you are stories, men and women raising money for disease research, cancer survivors, people just trying to get healthy for the first time in decades. Or for the first time.

Rudy Montoya is one of those great stories. He is a Fresno police officer. Ten years ago, he was 200 pounds and smoked. Now he is 143, body carved from stone.

On Sunday, he finished the Fresno marathon in 2 hours, 59 minutes, good for 15th overall. And if that wasn't impressive enough, it was his 18th marathon. Not of his life. Of 2009.

Distance runners often have a lifetime goal of running 100 marathons. Montoya's going to do it in three years.

He was a football player back at Sanger High, never a runner, but the sport fit him later in life. But it wasn't until the past three years that he's gotten absurdly fast.

Most running books and experts recommend doing four or five marathons a year, at most. Montoya, 41, just kept doing them this fall, almost every single weekend, and somehow going faster in each one. He ran his two fastest times, under 2:50, two weekends in a row, one a third-place finish at the Silicon Valley Marathon.

He'd been sick the past couple weeks, so sick he actually had to skip a marathon he'd signed up for at Hoover Dam. So Sunday didn't go exactly as he had hoped, and he was mortal for a moment, suffering at the end like the rest of us.

And there was plenty of suffering. Fresno's marathon was immeasurably better in Year 2, and will just keep growing. But it has this darn hill on Mile 22 that puts its hand against your forehead.

But we survived again, made it to the finish to tell the tales and be inspiring, and to be inspired in return.