RUNNERS ‘TAKING THAT EXTRA STEP’
One participant honors mentor killed during a robbery in 2013
Some ran to get fit. Some ran to raise money. Some ran just to see if they could finish.
Whatever the reason, Sunday’s Houston Marathon wasn’t just another race.
Samuel Lopez ran for Robert Peck, a blind athlete he would have guided through the race, had Peck not been struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver two weeks ago. Lopez carried his shoes during the run.
Tom LaHouse raised more than $31,000 for the Star of Hope Mission, a service for the homeless. It was part of more than $2 million raised for charities.
Jonathan Ochoa, 29, traced the start of his marathon to three years ago at a Denny’s restaurant in Houston, where he lay on the floor with the barrel of a gun to his head.
Ochoa had always hated Denny’s, but his friend and mentor, Greig Placette, 64, had talked him into going yet again.
Placette, a veteran, businessman and grandfather, was the one stable presence through Ochoa’s college years.
Ochoa had been a standout football, track and baseball player at Navarro High School in Seguin. One week before opening the 2005 season as quarterback for Texas A&M University-Kingsville, he tore a ligament in his knee. He pitched for Arkansas for a season then transferred to Texas State, where he threw javelin. Then his coach got fired. He transferred to the University
of Houston and sat out in 2008.
He began working at Placette’s company, Houston General Trading Group, an exporter of oil field products. It was one of three jobs he had while taking classes, throwing javelin and working 70 hours a week to support himself. He hardly saw his family back home in Central Texas.
In 2010, his senior year, he was training with Tom Tellez, the former Cougars track coach who trained Carl Lewis and revolutionized the sport. Ochoa was eyeing the Olympic trials in javelin. Then he blew out his elbow.
Turning lives around
For five years, Placette was behind him, coaching him on life, preparing him for a business career, picking him up when he wanted to fall down and quit. He’d do it over talks at Denny’s. Through cards, inscribed with his beautiful handwriting, which he sent religiously as thankyous to family, friends and strangers in return for even the smallest gesture of kindness. Through his own example, volunteering at soup kitchens.
“He always wanted to see people go from a bad situation to a good situation and turn their lives around,” said his sister, Renee Placette.
Ochoa was finally getting to a good place in 2013. He’d come to terms with the way his athletic career ended, had settled in to a job doing logistics for an energy company. He was going to graduate school and could see his career headed toward management.
‘Get down!’
They’d just paid their check at their latest dinner when Ochoa saw panic sweep over Placette’s face.
He’d seen them coming in the entrance, guns drawn.
“Get down!” he yelled at Ochoa, whose back was to the door.
Ochoa fell to the floor. He already had his phone and wallet out.
“I’m not giving you anything,” he told the masked figure standing over him.
The gun came closer. Ochoa recalculated. He threw the phone and wallet away from the table to get the men away from him, turned his head toward
the wall and prayed.
After the gunfire, Ochoa found Placette on the floor, in shock, bleeding from a wound in his chest. He clasped his friend’s hand.
Placette died; one restaurant employee was injured.
Later, watching the surveillance video, Ochoa saw Placette crawling toward a booth in an effort to shield some children.
“They thought he was a cop or something and they shot him,” Renee Placette said.
For the past three years, Ochoa had a choice: Shut down, and wrap himself in a shell, or keep going for Greig.
“I’m finally getting to the point where I can talk to people about this, and when people are going through really hard things, and feel like they can’t get through the next day, I try to tell them this story,” Ochoa said. “You can get through anything. … He’s dying right there and can’t talk to me. You never forget that. But you
can help people through that. That’s really what this year is about, taking that extra step.”
Raising money
Three weeks ago, Ochoa was accepted into a doctoral program in organizational change and leadership at the University of Southern California. He used the race to raise money for a scholarship in Placette’s name at the University of Houston, where Placette occasionally lectured in business.
For all his track and field experience, Ochoa had never run this far. He dedicated portions of the race to relatives who recently died, but he reserved miles 21 through 26.2 in memory of Placette.
The segment took him near the Denny’s. He knew they would be his slowest miles, where he most wanted to quit.
He finished in 4 hours, 30 minutes.