Need to run drives two marathoners
It’s his 27th L.A. Marathon, her first. They run for different reasons, but it fills a need.
Eladio Mendoza developed a love of running while in the military. Samantha Gutierrez got a health scare that inspired her to run. Her first marathon will be Mendoza’s 27th Los Angeles Marathon.
Eladio Mendoza’s predawn run began at 4:45 a.m. as a full moon hung overhead and a rooster just up the street from his Canoga Park apartment was still asleep.
With a red cap pulled tight over a head of thinning black hair, he started his usual route:
West on Valerio Street, north on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, east on Saticoy Street, south on Reseda Boulevard, then along the Orange Line and back home just before 7, when that rooster was crowing and sunlight was glazing the top of his apartment.
He has run that 12-mile route for eight years, and he has run that distance at least once a day since 1966.
Mendoza, 65, has also run in every L.A. Marathon since it began in 1986. This Sunday, the race’s 27th edition, may be his last.
For Samantha Gutierrez, 33, of Mar Vista it will be the first.
They don’t know each other. They’re just two faces among the 20,000 or so who will try to put 26.2 miles behind them.
They sit on opposite ends of a spectrum: an old-timer and a newcomer, tied only by running and their emigration from Mexico to L.A., nearly 30 years apart.
Running became part of Mendoza’s life when he joined the Mexican military in 1966.
Three days a week from 5 to 8 a.m., his troop would run about 20 miles, he said. And three nights a week, from 5 to 8, they’d run 20 more miles. He loved it. He even ran on his days off.
His legs had grown strong before he joined the military; he grew up on a remote 300-acre ranch in southwestern Mexico, in Michoacan, with his father, nine brothers (he’s the second-oldest) and a sister.
They were a three-day walk from the nearest public road, where they might see a pushcart pass.
“It was very wild,” Mendoza said.
In the military, along with running, the Spanishspeaking Mendoza also learned to speak parts of nine other languages: English, Hebrew, Russian, Armenian, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Punjabi and Vietnamese.
He moved to L.A. in 1973, holding odd jobs while raising a family that has grown to seven children and eight grandchildren.
As the family tree kept branching out, running became catharsis for Mendoza when money was tight.
He ran short races, but not a marathon until the L.A. Marathon began in 1986 — and he ran that with the intention of winning.
Gutierrez had thought about running a marathon for a few years but didn’t decide to do it until last year, when she thought she might not have another chance.
She was sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in Mexicali in February 2011, next to her father, as he explained the MRI results taken from a test on her brain, a test she took after years of migraines and an irregular menstrual cycle.
Her father was a retired gynecologist, so, very professionally, as if she were a patient, he told her that the cherry-tomato-shaped mass sitting on top of her pituitary gland and just below her optic nerve was a tumor.
She didn’t want to worry her sister and her mother, who were also in the room. She tried to stay calm. But inside, she was a wreck. She became physically ill.
“I’ve never gotten that sick,” she said.
There was a 10-day period between that diagnosis and her visit to a neurosurgeon at the Ronald Regan UCLA Medical Center to hear more about what the tumor meant.
In those 10 days she thought a lot, and she told herself this:
“You were just totally sailing away, ‘Oh, I would love to do this or that,’ and then, all of a sudden, it’s, ‘What if I don’t have a chance to do anything else?’ ”
She decided to change, and that included running a marathon.
At UCLA, the neurosurgeon brought good news.
He told her that if she was going to have a tumor anywhere in the brain, it should be exactly where hers was located. He said she had won the “tumor lottery.” He said it was benign and could be treated with medication.
“Walking out, I was so happy; so, so happy,” she said.
She’s taking medication. Her headaches have stopped. Her menstrual cycle is normal again. She expects good news at her next checkup, which she plans to have not long after her first marathon.
Mendoza finished his first marathon in 3 hours 58 minutes. The winner did it in nearly half that time. Mendoza decided to not to try to win anymore, but just to finish.
He has run every L.A. Marathon since.
“If I had 20 cents a mile, I’d be rich,” he said, standing in front of the apartment he shares with his wife, a son and a daughter-in-law. “Plenty for a down payment on a house.”
He’s retired but still takes on floor contracting jobs once or twice a month. He drives his dark blue 1973 Chevy truck to work.
There’s speculation in his family that he might retire from running marathons, that this might be his last. As such, as many as eight family members may run with him this year.
Will he give up? “I don’t think so,” he said, smiling from beneath a thick, jetblack handlebar mustache.
“It’s my habit.”
Gutierrez would like to make marathons her habit.
“I started running with the motivation to do it, but running, it changes something in you,” she said. “It’s the statement of being alive.”
She tries to run every day, getting in her workouts between long shifts at a Manhattan Beach bookstore, where she’s a merchandise manager.
She ran the Santa Monica Classic, a 10K, a few months after her MRI exam and last September she joined LA Roadrunners, the marathon’s official training group.
She said that a year ago she couldn’t even run a mile without falling apart.
Now, she has run more than 20 at a stretch and is more than ready to run 26.2, and she’ll do it with what she calls her source of inspiration:
“The best thing that could ever happen to me was to have that tumor in my brain.”