The 20th OC Marathon will be run Sunday and serve as the national championship for the Road Runners Club of America, the nation’s oldest and largest distance running organization.
The marathon has drawn 3,500 entrants, including more than 200 from the from the nonprofit youth marathon training program We Run Our Community’s Kids (WeRock), race publicist Dan Cruz told City News Service.
The 26-mile, 385-yard marathon course begins in front of the VEA Marriott Resort Hotel & Spa, then goes through Corona del Mar and the Newport Harbor area.
The runners then enter Costa Mesa, pass the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, go around the South Coast Plaza and through Segerstrom High School.
The course continues for one mile in Santa Ana, then turns onto the Santa Ana River Trail for 1.5 miles, exiting at the Gisler foot bridge to run through the Mesa Verde neighborhoods and then the “Bird Streets.”
The race ends at the OC Fair and Event Center in Costa Mesa.
The fields for the four races that comprise the Hoag OC Marathon Running Festival include 25 runners who have run a race each year the event has been held. They have been dubbed by organizers as “marathon legends.”
“Their commitment showcases not only personal endurance but also the history of this event as a community tradition, which has seen its fair share of memorable moments, from inclement weather to record participation in 2024,” race director Gary Kutschar said, referring to the inaugural 2004 race which was run in a cold rain.
The marathon heroes include Vikki Richardson, an 84-year-old former Playboy bunny, Tara Razi, a U.S. history teacher at San Marcos High School in San Diego County and Richard Eimers, a retired aerospace information technology specialist.
Richardson began running when she was 50 when she decided to run a marathon to celebrate the milestone birthday.
The West Covina resident said she stuffed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the inaugural race.
“That’s where we carried a lot of things,” Richardson said. “It was the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich ever.”
Richardson employs the run-walk method, alternating running for one minute, walking the next minute.
“The fun for me is the ability to move myself under my own horsepower,” Richardson said. “I can speed up. I can slow down. I can run hills. I can run down hills and that amazes me. I don’t need to slow down. I’m already slow enough.”
The 34-year-old Razi is the youngest of the marathon heroes. She ran the half marathon in 2004 when she was 15, a sophomore at Aliso Niguel High School and was training for a marathon.
Razi kept her legacy streak alive one year despite undergoing toe surgery a couple weeks before the event. While a student at Chico State, Razi scheduled her study abroad program to Australia in the fall semester so she would not miss the race.
Eimers began running in his late 40s, inspired by watching his son Matthew run on the Newport Harbor High School cross-country team.
“I said, `Gee, he lost a lot of weight. He’s slender. I can do that,”’ the Newport Beach resident said.
The 79-year-old Eimers has run 38 half-marathons, 22 marathons and 12 ultra-distance marathons.
Eimers has maintained his streak despite having a wooden post fell on his big toe when he was building a retaining wall two weeks before the race
Eimers had his slowest half-marathon time that year, 2 hours, 54 minutes. His fastest time is 2:02.
Richardson, Eimers and Razi are among the 11,000 entrants for Sunday’s half-marathon, set to begin at 6:30 a.m., an hour after the marathon.
The festival’s other two races were run Saturday, both selling out. The 5K drew 4,400 entrants and the kids’ mile run 6,000.
The event has helped raise over $9.5 million for a variety of charities and nonprofit organizations.
The charity partners for 2024 include:
— Outreach To The World, which seeks to equip and empower a rural Kenyan village to care for the orphans and widows, the sick and the poor through sponsorships. It provide the children with school fees, uniforms, school supplies, health care, supplemental food and social worker support.
— Project Possible, founded in 2009 by Bonner Paddock Rinn, who was born with cerebral palsy. It raises funds to help fund early learning centers that provide various types of therapies for children with disabilities, along with support for their families.
— Project Youth OC, a nonprofit committed to keeping at-risk youth in school, healthy and drug-free through education, counseling, mentoring and family strengthening.