(And what | learned from it.) BY TANNA FREDERICK

OS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, March 21, 2010—OK, so we have all run a lot

| marathons, or by a lot, I mean that I’ve run three and know many people

who have run a /ot more. But this story is not about running a specific number

but about running one particular marathon that has created a special place in my

memory. This story is about what makes us become a better runner, what makes

us strive to excel, what drives us to wake at 5:00 A.M. to run three hours straight. This story is about Shia LaBeouf, the “Transformer Man.”

The pronunciation of his name is something I don’t get right very often, as many people don’t get mine. Nonetheless, he inadvertently was a stalwart training companion for my training buddy, Ron Vignone, and me for eight months solid, without even knowing us or having ever met us. For those who steer clear of Hollywood, Shia played Louis Stevens in the Disney Channel’s Even Stevens, for which he won a Daytime Emmy. He also played Indiana Jones’s greaser son, Mutt Williams, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). But he’s probably most famous for playing Sam Witwicky in the Transformer movies—you know, where cars turn into giant, scary metal monsters, some of them good and some of them not.

I don’t know exactly how the competition between me and Shia ignited, but I think it began with a simple yet powerful Google alert. Yes, I get Google alerts, and I’m not afraid to admit it, though maybe I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it. In any case, I got a Google alert three years ago, saying something along the lines of, “Celebrities Shia LaBeouf and Tanna Frederick to Run LA Marathon.” I want to first thank whoever called me a celebrity in that article and second say that from that moment on I was prepared to kick Shia’s butt—not that I’m normally competitive, not me, not at all.

Thad one marathon in my pocket at that time—the Chicago Marathon—and the upcoming LA Marathon was turning into something of a disarray of training and trying to balance theater and film commitments while attempting to squeeze in daily runs. In the end, I did no sprints, did no hill work, and certainly didn’t set myself up for a PR. I just said daily, “I want to run fast enough to beat Shia.”

So I trained as fast as I dared; I trained hard when I could. Vignone and I took our long runs up and down the Santa Monica/Venice boardwalk and wondered aloud, “Has ‘Transformer Man’ run his 17-miler yet?” Truth be told, it became an obsession. For no apparent or logical reason, we entertained an increasingly clever set of skits about our invisible running competition, who we were convinced was now conspiring to destroy any chance of a successful race—sort of like one of those complex but lame plot twists in a fast-moving action/suspense film. Each run we took became the stage for a new vaudeville act, which revolved around a series of dilemmas in which Shia was the antagonist mounting a complex plot against our success. We laughed and pondered, “Why? Why the growing obsession with our invisible competition, and why in our minds would he conspire against us?” But something deep down inside really did make me wonder if Shia was on the up and up with his training schedule, how fast he was, and if, indeed, it would be my booty struggling in the dust thrown up from his New Balances. And then it became clear why he haunted our every run: he had become the everpresent competitive force that gets us all to go beyond ourselves. He was, in fact, our inspiration. And as all of you know, boy, oh boy, when we’re training for a marathon, we do need our inspirations or we wouldn’t get out the door.

Now, to further complicate life and undermine my training, during this allimportant training period, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. I missed a week of running so I could be with him in the hospital after he had radical cancer surgery. My dad had always been my inspiration for achieving and maintaining fitness. I had grown up running, swimming, and biking with him in the Iowa countryside. I decided I would dedicate this marathon to my dad toward his future health and recovery and in the hope that we would soon be running side by side once again.

After that week of missing heavy training mileage, I almost gave up running the marathon. I was emotionally and physically exhausted from it all. At one point I told Vignone, “I can’t do this.” But running buddies are a special breed—when they fear their partner is going down, they get very clever, and Vignone was no exception. He opened his computer and, without saying a word, showed me the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen trailer. On the screen, Shia was jumping off a crumbling building clutching the AllSpark as Megatron was in hot pursuit. (Ah. You have to see the movie to understand this reference.) Vignone closed the computer, looked me in the eyes, and said, ““You’ve come this far. You’re not going to fold. Shia wouldn’t.” Of course, he was right. And bizarrely enough, it was the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen trailer that kept me in the race.

So I pushed harder and harder. Some might say this is an unhealthy way to approach racing and bad sports psychology. I say, most likely they are correct. But who the heck really knows? What works for one person might not for another. Besides, I was desperate here.

Then race day came. By now my dad was wheelchair bound, having developed a massive blood clot that filled his entire leg. But that didn’t stop him from coming to the race to cheer me on.

So Vignone and I squeezed our way into the crowd of 26,000 people, doing the obnoxious “push-yourself-up-to-the-front-of-the-line” thing, which gets you nowhere but somehow psychologically makes you feel better because you are too darn nervous to do anything else. I mean, you need to do something to stave off the jitters. Finally, we settled into a spot, realizing that if we tried to get any farther, we were risking getting jacked in the face by someone in the nervous crowd, which would not be good before running 26.2 miles.

Packed in like sardines among the tens of thousands of runners, we anxiously awaited the gunshot through the preannouncements from Mayor Villaraigosa, Chris what’s-his-name from Batman, and so forth.

With her dad as her inspiration and Shia LaBeouf as her “competition; Tanna Frederick pushes

to a PRin the LA Marathon.

© Event Photography Group

Finally we do the strip down, throwing the sweats and layers of extra clothing off and passing them to the side where the LA Marathon volunteers so honorably collect the discarded clothing of its 26,000 participants and then donate them to those in need.

Now, this is where the story gets weird.

Itake my ratty sweatshirt off and chuck it over the fence. In midchuck, I notice something strikingly familiar about the person next to me—so striking, in fact, that it was like that shot in Jaws where Roy Scheider is sitting on the beach and realizes the shark is lining up his afternoon snack of Amityville swimmers, and the whole world bends apart behind him. What were the odds, the serendipity, that after all that had passed, among thousands of people and just a minute before the race, he was there, literally side by side with us. It was him: “the Transformer Man.” Lined up next to us, right next to us, Shia was ready to run.

Now, in normal circumstances, I would meet this situation with excitement— a fellow runner, a fellow actor, and heck, we two were the ones they wrote the article/posting about! You know: the celebrities. I wanted to talk to him, to tell him how he motivated us, how we loved and hated his endless plots to destroy our planned finishing time . . . but I couldn’t. With just a minute before the start gun and after eight months of creating our own competitive training villain out of this man, it wasn’t possible. I whispered to Vignone, “Look to your right.” He did and then immediately looked back at me with eyes that screamed the same thing I was feeling: “It’s on!”

We ran the race and I landed my PR. At the finish line I saw two things: the clock that read 3:46, and my dad in his wheelchair. And somehow, in that moment, I knew Dad would be OK and come back stronger than ever.

And just to be a complete brat, the first thing Vignone and I did after limping into the house was check Shia’s time. He had run a fast marathon time, but he helped us run a faster one. Go, Shia!

And what | learned from it

Competition can be healthy and positive. What had become a strange obsession ultimately became the motivating magic juice in my veins that helped me cope with my father’s cancer and set my PR.

And even though I was just six minutes from a Boston-qualifying time, I knew that I would be able to qualify someday, thanks to my hero of a dad, my buddy Vignone, and that archvillain Shia LaBeouf. oe