Long Beach Marathon Legacy Runners may be slowing down, but they are a determined bunch who keep going and going for the finish line.
Call them crazy or call them inspirational. They are tenacious and unstoppable Their moniker comes from having competed in every Long Beach Marathon in some way since the first one started in 1982.
They will once again line up for the 40th time at the Marathon’s starting line today (Sunday) along with thousands of others competing in the grueling race. (The math is not a mistake. There was no race for two years because of financial problems).
One of the runners, John Sumpter, just turned 80.
“It’s difficult trying to get my head around the fact that I am starting my ninth decade and still participating in a marathon,” he told me. “My goal now is to get to the fiftieth. With the way my knees are, I may have to do that in a wheelchair.”
Because of his shaky knees, Sumpter, former head golf coach at Poly High, has broken up his marathon participation into walking two half-marathons over the weekend on the course just outside his house.
Because of the inevitable aches and pains from advancing age, not many of the 14 current Legacy Runners will actually run a full marathon. There will be at least seven at the start line on Sunday, but only two are registered who finished the full marathon last year–Kenneth Williams and Lorenzo Herrera. To no one’s surprise, they are the youngest of the Legacy Runners, Williams at 62 and Herrera at 67. Most of the others will walk in half-marathons.
One of the most disappointed runners who will not be in Long Beach this weekend is Jim Warnemunde, 84, who spent 35 years at Long Beach City College as a speech communication teacher and dean of the creative arts department. He retired in 2000 and moved to Redding, where he built a new home after his former one was destroyed during the devastating 2018 Carr wildfire in Northern California.
He has since moved to Sacramento where he suffered a broken back falling while working outside his house last year.
“Breaking my back impaired me more than any other injury I have had while completing over 300 marathons,” Warnemunde told me. He said he did not need surgery but recovered by wearing a back brace for four months. However, the brace “turned my core to mush and disrupted my balance,” he said.
He is getting better now by running and walking around a lake near his home, using a walker. “I have just come to a place where I no longer have the strength, energy, desire or need to compete anymore,” he said. “I think that breaking my back was God’s way of telling me that I had run enough marathons, and I decided to listen to Her. I’ve decided I’m going to be an 84-year-old elder. I’m lucky to be alive.”
Sumpter has worked on staying fit all his life and enjoys the challenge of marathons. But he had a misfortune in 2020, which almost kept him from running in anything, let alone a marathon.
An avid cyclist, he was riding through a residential area in Buena Park when he hit some kind of obstacle and was thrown from his bike. He was knocked unconscious, separated his shoulder and suffered severe bruises. Fortunately, he was wearing a helmet which prevented even worse injuries. He’s back at the marathon and working toward 50 in a row.
Sumpter enjoys the marathon so much that, when he bought a new car in 2012, he wanted a personalized license plate. He chose “42195 LB” with “Int’l City” on the top of the frame and “Legacy” on the bottom.
He said if you don’t know what 42195 is, you should Google it.
(Tip: It has to do with a unit of measurement.)
Tom “Frosty” Frost, 71, of Rancho Santa Margarita will be in Long Beach Saturday, once again running in honor of his daughter, Lisa Anne Frost, who was 22 when she boarded United airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. She was heading home from Boston University before starting a job in San Francisco.
Two months after losing his daughter, Frost said he remembers vividly the then 50 Legacy Runners.
“They all wore Lisa’s photo on their shirts,” he said. “A runner passed me, saying, ‘What you’re doing is the most courageous thing I have ever seen. I’m running the rest of this race for your daughter. I’ll never forget both.”
Frost said he is still participating in the marathon to honor his daughter. “She was watching me in a stroller in 1982,” he said. “She would not want me to quit.” He added: “The Legacy guys have always been special to me, especially Ken Williams, who still wears my Lisa on his shirt every year.”
Another Legacy Runner, Ken Purucker, 87, has run/walked in his last marathon.
“I’m fast-walking with a cane now, but my son, grandson and great-nephew are carrying on the marathon tradition,” he said.
Purucker, a retired Long Beach dentist who lives in Leisure World in Seal Beach, said he got involved in running about 15 years before the first Long Beach Marathon and after his father had died of a heart attack at age 50. He said he felt he needed to take precautionary measures to keep his heart healthy.
What kept him running? “My Christian faith. When I run, I feel God’s pleasure,” he said.
Unfortunately, Purucker’s older brother, David, who also was a Legacy Runner, died earlier this year.
Wayne Fong, the oldest Legacy Runner at 92, will not be in Long Beach, but is doing a virtual half-marathon from Los Angeles. Fong said he started running when his doctor told him to lose some weight. He said his health was good, except for his balance, which requires him to use a walker.
Gordon Watson, 89, will be walking in a half-marathon today. He remembered his first Long Beach race in 1982. “I had just finished the race which ended in a parking lot and looked up at a clock and smiled. Why did I smile? I had just finished another marathon three weeks before in exactly the same time: 3 hours, 11 minutes and 25 minutes. Quite a coincidence!”
Current Legacy Runners who could not be reached included, Calvin Lau, George Wallims, Phil Newberg, Tom Pontac, Steve Harvey and Michael Benov.
Another Legacy Runner who has not been running since 2000 is Audrey Hauth, who just celebrated her 91st birthday. She ran in her first Long Beach Marathon when she was 49.
She quit running after surgery for two replacement hips because of arthritis. At the time, she said she was “made of titanium.”
In later years, Hauth became a “course rover,” but that ended when she fell off her bike and broke her leg. She walks about three-to-six miles a day around her home in Seal Beach.
She remains active with the marathon by dispensing information and advice from a chair in the marathon’s information booth on race day.
“I just love the Long Beach Marathon, and I will do anything I can to help it and cheer on the runners. After a while, a marathon kind of becomes part of you.”
