Still Running Against the Wind

Ready for No. 35 are (left to right above): Gary Kane, Alan Musante and Harry Wessel. The three are the only runners to have finished every OUC Half Marathon since 1977.

by Harry Wessel

There are three of us left. Of the 667 runners who completed the inaugural Tangerine Bowl Road Race in December 1977, only Alan Musante and Gary Kane, both of Winter Park, and yours truly, of Orlando, have made it an annual rite of passage ever since.

This month – barring crippling injury or life-threatening illness – we’ll each finish the annual downtown Orlando half marathon for the 35th consecutive time.

We’ve seen many changes as the race – now called the OUC Half Marathon – has grown in popularity and prestige. The clothes, shoes, timing systems, even the liquids we ingest to survive 13.1 miles, have become increasingly high-tech. But the most notable changes have been demographic, with exponential increases in older runners and, even more dramatically, female runners.

The three of us have changed too, of course.

Gary, a certified public accountant who owns a Winter Park accounting firm, was married without children in 1977. By 1980 he was a father of two; by 1996 he was divorced and remarried.

Alan, who didn’t marry until his early 40s, was a law student in 1977. He switched careers a few years later to become a history teacher at Oviedo High School. He’s still there, 26 years later.

I was a fledgling Orlando Sentinel Star staffer in 1977 and wrote a first-person account of the inaugural T-Bowl race. I married a few months later, had a couple of kids and now, retired from the Sentinel, work as a magazine editor.

What hasn’t changed for me is a two-word creed I’ve followed since early childhood: Keep Moving. I’m reliably told I was a hyperactive toddler, and as a kid I harnessed the excess energy with whichever playground sport was in season.

After high school I started running as a way to maintain fitness and stay competitive on the playground, but I had no interest in competitive running. Catching a pass, beating out a single, scoring on a fast break: That was fun. Running wasn’t fun; it was a means to aerobic fitness, not an end in itself.

That changed with adulthood, career and family. None of my athletic activities were as time-efficient as running, the only sport I could keep up on a daily basis. Besides, every run felt like an accomplishment, and every run made me feel good. I didn’t always like to run, but I always liked having run.

By 1977 I was putting in enough miles to do reasonably well as an age-group competitor in local races, but I had never run more than 10 miles at a time. The prospect of a half marathon so close to home was too much to resist. And after I made it through the first one, I figured I’d keep coming back.

So did Gary and Alan, although it was many years before we became aware of each other’s existence. We didn’t meet until 2001, when we were honored for finishing the first 25 OUCs.

We still barely know each other, but we have a few things in common besides our marital status: We’re all in our 60s, exercise at least six days a week and have been remarkably lucky to avoid untimely injuries and illnesses. We’ve also all run full marathons, although Alan’s last one was in 1993 and mine was in 1984. Alan now bikes more than he runs, pedaling close to 100 miles a week, while I supplement running with swimming and tennis.

Gary just runs. He’s finished 27 marathons, expects to finish many more, and once went 14 years without missing a day of running. But in early 1977 he was a confirmed couch potato, carrying well over 200 pounds on a 5-foot-7 frame. After a friend predicted the extra weight eventually would kill him, he started running, at first unable to make it once around a high school track. Six months later he finished the T-Bowl race in a respectable 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Alan, like me, was already a veteran runner in 1977 and was relatively well prepared for a 13.1-mile challenge. As it happens, we were both accompanied by siblings in that first race: Alan by his younger brother, Jim, and me by my sister, Ellen, who wound up second (out of 11) in her 26-30 age group.

Ellen has long since given up running for yoga, but Jim is still at it. He’s completed the OUC Half 18 times, while Alan’s other brother, Carl, a competitive cyclist, has completed a dozen. Alan’s sister, Linda, a serious triathlete who lives in Tampa, has completed two. That adds up to 66 Musante OUC Half Marathon finishes since 1977, which surely puts them first in the OUC’s Most Family Finishes division.

And while Alan has the longest streak of his siblings, Jim has another running streak that may be even more impressive: He has completed 31 consecutive Boston Marathons.

That it’s three guys who have run every OUC Half is a bit ironic, given that more women now run in half marathons than men. But very few of today’s middle-aged women were running road races in the late ‘70s, and those who did tended to stick to shorter distances.

There also weren’t a lot of half marathons back then. Although there were a handful up north and out west, a 13.1-mile race was new not just to Florida, but to the entire Southeast. Orlando organizers actually wanted to host a full marathon, but it was too expensive and logistically difficult. They settled on a half marathon, largely because downtown Orlando streets were already going to be closed for the city’s annual Christmas parade.

Central Florida had a thriving running community in 1977, very much part of the nationwide running boom sparked by Frank Shorter winning the 1972 Olympic marathon. But the boom, nationally and locally, was largely a guy thing. Emulating Shorter, runners pushed for higher mileage and faster competitive times.

“In the 1970s, for almost any road race of any distance, if more than 10 percent were women, it was an anomaly,” says Ryan Lamppa of Running USA, a national non-profit for the distance-running community that maintains a huge database of road-race statistics. (Orlando’s 1977 T-Bowl race was slightly anomalous, with 83 female finishers representing 12 percent of the field.)

Winter Park’s scenic streets (above) are ideal for training runs. Preparing for the upcoming OUC Half Marathon with historic Casa Feliz in the background are (left to right): Courtney Holst, a civil engineer; Kerry Girona, co-owner of Orlando Fit Body Boot Camp; and Marissa Hatcher, an accountant.

Although the Shorter-inspired running boom tailed off in the 1980s, a second, far-bigger running boom exploded in the mid-’90s – and it’s still going strong. Lamppa largely credits Oprah Winfrey, who very publicly trained for and ran a marathon in 1994.

Unlike the young, whippet-thin Shorter, Oprah was a full-figured, 40-year-old woman. Many of her fans figured if she could run a marathon, so could they.

But Oprah wasn’t the only spark for Boom No. 2. The mid-’90s also saw a huge increase in charity-inspired group training programs, which offered a structured way for out-of-shape newcomers to sensibly prepare for a marathon while supporting one another in the process.

There was just one problem: Oprah and the training programs focused on the marathon, which at 26.2 miles is about 6 miles farther than the human body is designed to run. While many newbies reached their goal, many others either burned out trying or gave up afterward.

“We saw a lot of ‘one and done’ marathoners. It was a killer,” says veteran race director Jon Hughes, co-owner of the Track Shack running store in Orlando. Half marathons still represented a daunting physical challenge, but compared to marathons there was less training needed beforehand and less recovery time needed afterward.

Since 2000, “the number of [annual] half marathon finishers in this country has nearly tripled ... no other race distance comes close to this type of growth,” reports Running USA, which adds that of the 1.4 million half-marathon finishers in 2010, 59 percent were women.

Hughes attributes the popularity of half marathons among women to their wise realization that the distance is “half the run, twice the fun.”

Alan and I might quibble with the fun part. It may indeed be half the distance of a marathon, but 13.1 miles is still an awfully long way to travel on foot. Alan certainly is no fan of the distance: “I wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for the streak,” he admits.

I probably wouldn’t either, since my ability to run comfortably seldom lasts more than 8 miles. Only Gary seems to like the distance. Maybe it’s because he takes regular one-minute walking breaks during his races.

Walking breaks have become a popular strategy for men and women, and are another reason half marathons have become so popular. For example, the venerable OUC Half Marathon, which this year expects at least 2,600 entrants, isn’t even in the Top 100 of U.S. half marathons in terms of size.

Florida Hospital executive Samantha O’Lenick (above center), who formed a women’s training group two years ago, triumphantly crosses the finish line of the 2011 Disney Half Marathon with fellow team member Alison Polejes. In addition to running together on weekends, O’Lenick’s “Females in Training” raises money for Florida Hospital for Children.

OK, so the OUC Half isn’t all that big. And though old by regional standards, it’s still a youngster compared to America’s oldest half marathon, the Fontana Days Run in California, which debuted in 1956, or for that matter the Kungsbackaloppet Half Marathon in Sweden, which debuted in 1898.

But nobody has finished every Fontana Days Run or every Kungsbackaloppet Half Marathon, while the OUC Half still has three guys who’ve done them all. If there’s an older half marathon that can make this claim, it’s news to Running USA.

Gary, Alan and I pledge to help the OUC Half maintain its unique status as long as we can. Nothing lasts forever, but rest assured we have our priorities straight. Gary recalls one year in which his current wife planned a weekend getaway that would have meant him missing the race.

“I told her I couldn’t go, and she said, ‘You love this race more than me.’ And I said, ‘What’s your point?’”

OUC HALF MARATHON UPDATE

Among the 1,085 women and 1,070 men who finished the 35th annual OUC Half Marathon on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011 were three runners who’ve run all 35 -- Alan Musante of Winter Park, and Gary Kane and Harry Wessel of Orlando. They competed in the 60-64 age group, which had 39 runners and was won by Octavio Diaz of Mount Dora in a time of 1:44:15.

Their times:
Alan:    2:20:42
Gary:   2:58:49
Harry:  1:57:37

The overall winners of the OUC Half Marathon were Paul Nielsen of Orlando, 1:09:11; and Jessica Kennedy of Leesburg, 1:22:07.

A GUIDE TO CENTRAL FLORIDA'S TOP RACES

There are scores of races held during Central Florida’s non-summer months, with at least one organized event virtually every weekend from October through April. Here’s a sampling of some of the best and brightest.

Walt Disney World Marathon (January, 26.2 miles). Florida’s biggest marathon, currently ranked as the sixth-biggest marathon in the nation, draws runners from all over the world who yearn to earn a coveted Mickey Mouse finishing medal.

Walt Disney World Half Marathon (January, 13.1 miles). Florida’s biggest half marathon, it takes place the same weekend as the full Walt Disney Marathon. With “the Half” on Saturday and “the Full” on Sunday, hundreds of diehards take Goofy’s Race-and-a-Half Challenge and run both.

Dick Batchelor Run for the Children 5K (January, 3.1 miles). One of the region’s oldest 5Ks, for many years it was held in downtown Orlando in late October. Now it’s a late January event, held at Universal Studios Orlando.

Florida Hospital Lady Track Shack 5K (February, 3.1 miles). This females-only event, which for a time was the largest female-only road race in the Southeast, is staged in Winter Park’s beautiful Mead Gardens, with all participants receiving a flowering plant after the race.

Disney Princess Half Marathon (March, 13.1 miles). Launched just two years ago, it’s already one of the nation’s biggest half-marathons. Although technically not a women’s-only race, women make up at least 95 percent of the field.

Zimmerman Kiser Sutcliffe Winter Park 10K (March, 6.2 miles). It’s not just Central Florida’s oldest 10K, it also offers the region’s prettiest route, winding through some of Winter Park’s toniest neighborhoods with a downhill finish on Park Avenue.

Easter Beach Run (April, 4 miles). Central Florida’s oldest race – founded more than 45 years ago as a diversion for college kids on spring break – isn’t run on pavement but on the hard-packed sand of the World’s Most Famous Beach.

IOA Corporate 5K (April, 3.1 miles). Orlando’s biggest 5K race, always held on a weekday in the late afternoon, gets support from hundreds of local companies and thousands of their employees.

Watermelon 5K Run/Walk (July, 3.1 miles). Few runners enjoy racing in Central Florida’s summer heat and humidity, but this family-friendly Independence Day event, staged at Mead Gardens, has been going strong for two decades. Ice-cold watermelon never tasted so good.

Miracle Miles 15K (September, 9.3 miles). Central Florida’s racing season doesn’t really begin until the cooler days of October, particularly for races longer than 5 kilometers, but this fundraiser for Arnold Palmer Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit draws thousands.

Disney Wine & Dine Half Marathon (October, 13.1 miles). Two other half marathons held on Disney property are bigger than this one, but Wine & Dine still attracts more than 7,000 runners, and it’s a rare nighttime road race, with a 10 p.m. start and post-race parties continuing until 3 a.m.

Space Coast Marathon (November, 26.2 miles). Florida’s oldest marathon, it features long, scenic straightaways along the Indian River. Space-themed aid stations pay homage to nearby Kennedy Space Center.

OUC Half Marathon (December, 13.1 miles). Downtown Orlando’s oldest race is an end-of-the-year test for many runners. It also serves as a tuneup for many who compete in the Disney Marathon in January.

RUNNING IS A SOCIAL SPORT

Although loneliness is often associated with long-distance runners, theirs is a highly social sport. Most training runs are paced so that runners can converse, and even serious competitors enjoy sharing tips and information. If you’re looking for support, check out a local running club.

Orlando Runner’s Club - orlandorunnersclub.org

Orlando Women Runners - orlandowomenrunners.com

Orlando Runners - meetup.com/the-orlando-running-meetup-group

Downtown Orlando YMCA Running Club - ymcarunner.blogspot.com

Winter Park Dawgs - wpdawgs.org

Lake Monroe Roadkillers (Sanford-Deltona) - roadkillers.com

West Volusia Runners (DeLand) - meetup.com/westvolusiarunners

Daytona Beachcombers Running Club - daytonabeachcombers.com

Daytona Track Club - daytonatrackclub.org

Florida Striders Track Club (Orange City) - floridastriders.com

Space Coast Runners (Melbourne) - spacecoastrunners.org

Titusville Runners Club - no website

Tohopekaliga Running Club (Kissimmee) - no website

WHERE RUNNERS GET THEIR GEAR

You can find running gear at big-box sporting-goods stores and assorted websites, often at excellent prices. But specialty running stores offer something more: knowledgeable, personalized sales help from experienced runners. Locally owned stores typically go beyond just selling stuff to serving as resource and training centers for their clientele.

Track Shack - Orlando
407-898-1313 / trackshack.com

Fleet Feet Orlando - Altamonte Springs
407-772-2233 / fleetfeetorlando.com

Front Running Sports - Lake Mary
407-322-1211 / frontrunningsports.com

Tri & Run of West Orange - Winter Garden
407-905-4786 / trinrun.com

Running Zone - Melbourne
321-751-8890 / runningzone.com

Island Stride Sports - Indialantic
321-984-2111 / islandstridesports.com

CHECK OUT THESE ONLINE RESOURCES

In addition to informative websites maintained by running stores and clubs, here is a sampling of other sources of online information for Central Florida runners.

garycohenrunning.com. Apopka’s Gary Cohen, a top local competitor for decades, has run more than 100,000 training miles with no major injuries. On his website, Cohen offers training advice, thoughtful essays and in-depth interviews with legendary runners such as Harrison Dillard, Gayle Barron and Jeff Galloway.

flrunning.com. Race calendars and results for road races and triathlons in the state and region, from the official publication of U.S.A. Track & Field / Florida.
runflorida.com. Calendars and results for road races in the state and region, largely centered on Florida’s west coast.

fleastcoastrunners.com. Calendars and results for road races in the state and region, largely centered on Florida’s east coast.

triflorida.com. Clermont’s Sommer Sports has been organizing triathlons in Central Florida since 1984. Its website includes calendars and results for many local road races.