it’s impossible to design a course that will please everyone. But what the McCourt team has managed to do is incorporate an alluring combination of visual nuggets that will appeal to both natives and out-of-towners who are visiting the city for the first time.

“Tf any marathoner looks at that route, they’ll want to run it,” says Abraham. “The last 3 1/2 miles are downhill. You finish at the beach. I challenge any runner to look at this course and say they don’t want to run it.”

“No matter what it took, I was going to do that race the first year,” says Johnson, describing her initial reaction when she heard of the new layout. “There’s no way I wanted to miss out.”

One of the first hurdles the McCourt team had to overcome was the reluctance of many in the local running community to fully embrace the race. Although the LA Marathon has always been on the cutting edge of innovation—for instance, it was the first major U.S. marathon to adopt field-wide chip timing, water stations at every mile, personalized bib numbers, and a battle of the sexes challenge, among other things—many veteran runners felt that the race was geared more toward novices than themselves.

“Tt wasn’t particularly runner friendly,” says Johnson of the old race. “Some of the logistics were good, but I think some of it was cruel—especially the way they always had the late start.”

To address that perception, one of the McCourt team’s first decisions was to eliminate the bike tour. This allowed the marathon start time, which has always been a bone of contention for runners because midday weather in Los Angeles even in March can get toasty, to be pulled in an hour earlier, to 7:20 a.m. Part of the brilliance in the new course design, too, is that temperatures toward the coast will always be cooler than temperatures downtown, which is ideal for longdistance running.

To be sure, the 2010 race was far from perfect. There was bedlam at the start, which featured a poorly conceived lap around the baseball stadium.

“The loop—it was my idea,” Curl confesses. “I did triathlons back in the early ’80s, and back then the question was always how can you make an event so that the participants, spectators, and sponsors can see more of the event?”

The concept was a noble one: allow the tail of the field an opportunity to see the head. The runners in the rear of the pack could watch the wheelchair athletes, then the elite women, and so on. What race organizers failed to anticipate, though, was how race-day traffic would affect the participants’ ability to reach the staging area.

“What I didn’t realize was that 90 percent of the traffic on race day would come in on the Harbor Freeway,” says Curl.

While one route to the stadium, the Golden State Freeway, was wide open, the second major artery, the Harbor, was completely clogged. Even runners who

had obediently boarded shuttle buses in Santa Monica to be transported to Dodger Stadium found themselves helplessly mired in standstill traffic as the clock kept ticking toward race time. It was a classic L.A. snafu, and the start, much to everyone’s chagrin, had to be delayed.

“T couldn’t start any race because then I would have a condition where I had runners crossing the live course,” says Curl.

The McCourt team has spent months trying to iron out the kinks associated with the start. Gone is the loop around Dodger Stadium. Greatly diminished is the runner’s ability to be dropped off by personal vehicle virtually adjacent to the staging area. Curl is quick to point out that transportation schemes that might work in, say, New York, simply won’t work in Los Angeles, a vehicle-dependent region. “Yeah, we’d all like to see the subway and transit system get better and more extensive and less people driving in cars, but for the foreseeable future the LA Marathon is going to have to have 10,000 available car spaces.”

Curl also cites the marathon expo and finish line festival as other areas that are in the process of being reformatted. The former was staged next to Dodger

a oc ° & oe

A The elite men’s field sweeps down world-famous Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

Stadium. Yes, this made for a unique venue, but the design was cramped and poorly executed. “The layout for the expo was horrible,” Curl admits. “It just wasn’t done right.” And as for the latter, the vast majority of finishers were uninterested in undertaking the downhill/uphill out-and-back required to get close to the festival near the ocean. “We were hoping that the runners would really dig being on the beach,” Curl says. “They didn’t.”

“Last year was a huge experiment,” says Abraham. “It was the first time on this course, the first time we finished at the beach, the first time we had to shuttle tens of thousands of runners . . . It was a big experiment.”

Marathoners who understand and appreciate the monumental effort it took to pull off L.A.’s first citywide point-to-point affair are more than happy to give organizers a mulligan—at least this time around.

“Most of the runners have given us the honeymoon blessing,” Curl says. “They’ll give us a pass this year, but not next year.”

Something to build upon

Epiphany #4: We emerge from the grounds of the sprawling Veterans Affairs hospital and make a quick right-hand turn onto San Vicente Boulevard. With its grassy islands and striking coral trees, every runner who has ever lived in the vicinity of L.A’’s Westside has at some point or another trained along this picturesque thoroughfare. But my fellow marathoners and I have never experienced San Vicente like this before. Never. Legions of cheerleaders and spectators will us toward the finish line. And I tell myself that this is our reward for all of those predawn miles and ice pack treatments—to be feted like parade heroes on a beautiful Southern California morning.

For the first time in its 25-year history, the LA Marathon sold out in 2010, reaching its cap of 25,000 on March 12. While it remains to be seen where the race will go from here, the McCourt team is united in its belief that growth is not the primary objective.

“Whether we have 25,000 runners, like we had this year, or we have 35,000 runners, that’s not the important thing,” says Curl. “First and foremost, the runner experience has got to consistently be the best that it can possibly be.”

“Tt was a really cool course,” enthuses Johnson of the 2010 race. “You saw so many different parts of Los Angeles, and it was well run once it got started. I think it has great potential.”

One thing organizers will implement for the first time in 2011 is a wave start, which addresses another concern that fell on deaf ears in years past.

“T think the event should grow, and it can grow,” says Abraham. “It could be areally big marathon. But the minute the runner experience starts being compromised because of the size of the race, it’s time to stop growing.”

It’s a given that as awareness of the spectacular course spreads, marathoners will start writing LA on their to-run list. Historically, most of the previous fields have been made up of Southern California runners. But Abraham, for one, has already begun to see a shift in that demographic.

“We’re now a destination marathon,” says Abraham. “There will still be a large number of runners from the region, and that’s great because we want to be relevant here, but I’m excited that people will be coming in from all over the world to do this event.”

Curl and Abraham are also united in their commitment to make the LA Marathon part of the fabric of Southern California, just as other big-city marathons have taken hold of their communities.

“All of these different communities in Los Angeles haven’t worked together in the way they have for the marathon since the 1984 Olympics,” says Abraham, who admits that he was as taken aback as anyone by the number of spectators who lined the new course. “I didn’t expect that level of crowd support. It was fantastic, and it will be even bigger next year. To be around that energy—that’s inspiring to me and something that’s unique to major big-city marathons.”

“Do I want to be like Carey’s [Pinkowski] race in Chicago or Mary’s [Wittenberg] race in New York?” says Curl. “No. Why would the L.A. Lakers want to be like the Boston Celtics? Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t.”

Dodger faithful, of whom there are many, have been on edge ever since Frank and Jamie McCourt became embroiled in a bitter, highly publicized divorce that will determine which of them, if either, will assume control of the major league franchise. A court ruling is imminent. How that decision will affect the future of the LA Marathon is anyone’s guess. It would certainly be a shame if a race that has progressed so far in the last 30 months finds itself again thrown for a loop.

But Curl is convinced that there is no turning back. The course has been set, the excitement has been ignited, the momentum is unstoppable, and there are even greater things in store for the future of the race.

“We just want to get better,” says Curl. “We want to raise more money. We want to have a better experience for the runners, and we want to have a better experience for the cities.”

Eo * * Epiphany #5: We’re moving along Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica with whatever energy we haven’t yet expended, and I realize as we make our way along the bluffs overlooking the beautiful Pacific Ocean that we’ re now virtually running in Joanie’s footsteps. The Santa Monica Pier, with its famous solar-powered Ferris wheel, is right there, like a hazy mirage. We all feel as if we’ ve come a long way, and so has this race. The finish line moves into sight and I’m beaming, beaming, because I realize that this, finally, is an accurate reflection of my city, warts and all. This is

the Los Angeles I’ve always wanted my marathon brethren to experience. [¥\p