Takin’ It to the Streets

40TH ANNUAL PALISADES WILL ROGERS 5 & 1OK RUN

By STEVE GALLUZZO | Sports Editor

If it’s true that life begins at 40, the Palisades Will Rogers 5 & 10K Run may go on forever.

On Tuesday, the local Fourth of July race celebrates its 40th birthday and director Brian Shea is pulling out all the stops to make this a milestone to remember.

Shea has invited past champions back to relive their glory days, including hometown favorites David Greifinger, Katie Dunsmuir (now Dunsmuir-Younger), Peter Hogan, Peter Gilmore and Kara Barnard. Hoping to make a bit of history in the milestone run will be reigning 10K titleholder Tonny Okello, who is determined to make it four wins in a row.

Race day registration begins bright and early at 6:30 and ends at 8 a.m., 15 minutes before start time. The half-mile Kids’ Fun Run follows at: 9:30, also at the Palisades Recreation Center entrance.

Parking will be available on both sides of Temescal Canyon and shuttles will transport participants to the start/finish area.

One of the most popular and most challenging 10K courses in California, the route begins at the intersection of Alma Real and Toyopa, winds through the Huntington neighborhood, down Sunset Blvd. and up the switchbacks at Will Rogers State Historic Park before returning up Sunset to the finish back at the Rec Center.

Jennifer Rogers-Etcheverry of the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation and great granddaughter of  Will Rogers, is entered along with three of her gilrfriends who will run as “Team Gypsy” through the park where the actor once lived.

Singing the national anthem for the 5/10K will be actress Kelley Jakle, best known for her role as Jessica in “Pitch Perfect,” its sequel “Pitch Perfect 2” and “Pitch Perfect 3,” which is set to hit theaters in December. Her uncle, John Jakle, is a member of the race committee and ran in the very first Palisades Will Rogers Run.

Singing the national anthem for the Kids’ Fun Run will be  native Palisadians and Calvary Christian School students Grace and Emma Holscher.

Net proceeds go to support Optimist Club youth charities.

As the 40th anniversary of the race approaches, here’s a look back at the event that has become a perfect start to a patriotic day…   

It all started in 1978, a year after Shea and fellow Ridge Runner Chris Carlson came up with the idea of a local road race while picknicking after running in the now-defunct Brentwood 10K. “Wouldn’t it be great for the Palisades to have its own 10K before the [Fourth of July] parade?” they asked each other.

   Over the next 12 months, the Ridge Runners mapped out a course and fought through all the bureaucratic red tape—two City permits and one State permit—to get the event off and running.

     Fitting for a town like the Palisades, actor and comedian Walter Matthau was the official starter for the inaugural race, which was won by Drew Mearns, a University of Virginia law student who was working for a Los Angeles firm during the summer while living with his sister in the Palisades. Shea and Carlson called it “most successful” and with that a holiday tradition born.

In 1979, David Greifinger broke the tape after placing ninth in the inaugural race. A 1975 Palisades High graduate, Greifinger made the state finals in the mile as a senior, then walked on at UCLA and ran there for four years. He would be a familiar face in the early years of the 10K.

The sixth annual race in 1983  saw Russell Edmonds of Auckland, New Zealand, establish the still-standing course record of 29:46, smashing the previous-best mark of 30:26 held by two-time winner Charles Gray.    

        Edmonds said he entered the race “on a lark” and although he had never seen the course before he “got to the finish by following the pace car.” One might say his victory was a matter of fate. He had come to the United States three weeks before to run a few races and train. He had planned to run the Cascade run-off  in Oregon in late June but dropped out  when he sprained an ankle. As a result, he shrugged off the Diet Pepsi Invitational in New York and instead ran the Palisades race, flying back to his homeland a few days later. He vowed to return to America later that year and hoped to qualify for the Olympics in the 5,000 meters.

Edmonds ran shoulder to shoulder with second-place finisher Steve Bishop until they reached the infamous switchbacks at the entrance to Will Rogers Park. Halfway up the hill, Edmonds pulled away and never looked back, admitting the steep  climb helped him win: “That’s all we run in New Zealand!”

The women’s winner for the second year in a row was local phenom Dunsmuir, who had just won the Post Cup Award as the outstanding senior athlete at Pali High. She won in 35:09 to establish a course record that has yet to be broken. Dunsmuir outdistanced runner up Gladies Prieur  (a future teammate at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo) by 24 seconds. She  battled back from leg injuries suffered near the end of the prep season and Pat Cady, her coach at the Santa Monica Track Club, wasn’t going to let her run unless she was in top condition. Dunsmuir ran 12 miles  in 79 minutes the week before the race to convince her coach she was ready and the rest is history.

“I went out too fast in the first mile but about halfway through I started thinking about winning,” said Dunsmuir, who would go on to win the 10K four straight times from 1992-95.

The race continued to grow in popularity the next few years and 1986 marked the first running of the 5K. To no one’s surprise, race regular David Greifinger won in 15:22. His brother Richard was the first Palisadian to complete the 10K, finishing 14th in 14:49, but the champion by 15 seconds was Ray Cook of South Lake Tahoe.

Cook and a friend drove down the night before, arrived in LA at 5 a .m. and were up an hour later for the run.    

“When I got here I wasn’t even going to get out of the car, but I figured since I was already here I might as well,” Cook joked.

The 23-year-old was running for Adidas and had competed at Crespi High in Encino and at UC Riverside.

Mindy Ireland of Alpine (near San Diego) won the women’s 10K in 35:56 and 19-year-old Kiki Laborteaux became the first women’s 5K champion in 17:24. The youngest local finisher that year was 5-year-old Curt Toppel, who went on to become a volleyball All-American at Loyola High and Stanford University.

The 1995 race ushered in the Gilmore era. Running in front of his hometown fans, the Post Cup winner and freshman-to-be at UC Berkeley won his first-ever 5K road race, finishing his jaunt through the Huntington neighborhood in 15:19, some 31 seconds ahead of Newbury Park’s Pete Kaplan.

“I wasn’t paying any attention to the time,” Gilmore said. “To win, that’s what’s important. I hope I can come back next year and make it another win.”

Of course, Gilmore would become “King of the 5K” by taking the title seven more times and setting the course record of 14:10 in 2003.

Dunsmuir won the 10K for the third year in a row in 36:36 and Annetta Luevano of West LA, a club teammate of Dunsmuir’s, set  the 5K women’s record of 16:29 only eight months after giving birth.

As the race grew in prestige it attracted elite runners. Pali High alumnus Steve Kerr, fresh off winning the NBA title with the Chicago Bulls, sounded the air horn to start the race in 1996 and all four winners that year had impressive credentials.

Former U.S. Olympic team member Joan Hansen-Lester won the women’s 5K in 18:08. It was her third race in almost two weeks after suffering a torn calf muscle and kidney infection simultaneously. Hansen-Lester ran at Kerr’s alma mater, the University of Arizona, and after college set American and world two-mile records. She qualified for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and  in the infamous Mary Decker-Zola Budd showdown, Hansen-Lester fell 300 meters before Decker in the 3,000-meter race, only she  was left out of the headlines.

A 34-year-old doctor named Pat Williams won the men’s 5K in  15:55, beating Brendan Gallagher  by two seconds in one of the closest finishes ever. In her first race in over a year, former Irish Olympic team member Marie Murphy won the 10K by 17 seconds in 37:33. “I came out to run and enjoy it, then I found myself in the lead and the old competitiveness came back,” the 37-year-old Murphy said.       

A streaking comet also returned in 1996 after a 10-year hiatus—“Comet Ray” Cook of Nevada. He had won the 10K in 1986, skipped the race for nine years and returned to win again at age 33 in 32:13, besting defending champion Tim Berger by 14 seconds. The former All-American at Cal State Northridge was in town to visit his sister Victoria Chapus  (a fine distance runner in her own right) and said:
“I needed a workout and figured what could be better?”    

Kerr was happy to be back from the Windy City after “not having broken a sweat since we won the championship.” The three-point sharpshooter finished the 5K in a respectable 32:16, one second behind his wife Margot.

In a foreshadowing of what was to come, identical twins Jeff and Mike Tomlinson, 15-year-olds from Crossroads High, were fourth and sixth in the 5K. Jeff would finish first four years later.

Heroism was on display at the 20th anniversary race in 1997, when 54-year-old Bob Heilemann suffered a cardiac arrest one block from the finish line but lived to tell about it thanks to the efforts of medical personnel at the scene.

A local locksmith and resident for 30 years, Heilemann had run the previous 19 Will Rogers races and was on his way to finishing when he suddenly collapsed making the turn from Toyopa Drive to Carey Street for the final 100 yards.

He reportedly had no heartbeat for eight minutes, but Station 69 paramedic Dane Coyle led the effort to revive Heilemann, who fell only a few doors down from his own home. Coyle and several other doctors used CPR and electric shock to resuscitate him.

One of the first things Heilemann asked when he reached the hospital was whether he would he still get a t-shirt.

“That man was clinically dead,” Coyle would say later. “The Fourth of July is his lucky day!”

One person who did get his t-shirt was Gilmore, who won the 5K for the second time in 14:57, some 36 seconds ahead of anyone    else. He used a Marks-a-Lot pen to write” “Say: Go Pete!” on his shirt and glided to the lead as soon as native son and beach volleyball gold medalist Kent Steffes fired off the starting gun.

The women’s 5K winner was Barnard, who was about to turn 19 and had just completed her freshman season as a distance runner at UCLA. She, of course, would become the queen of the Palisades Will Rogers race, winning the 5K four more times and capturing the 10K six times for a total of 11 race victories.   

Gilmore won the 5K for the final time in 2006 and returned a few summers ago to run the revised 5K after the course was lengthened to the “official” 3.1-mile distance. Despite no longer competing regularly, he still finished fourth in 16:55.   

Highlighting the 2007 race was Nate Bowen, who won the 10K for the fourth time in eight years as a member of the “Fluffy Bunnies,” who topped the 6.2-mile leaderboard for more than a decade, with several other club members winning multiple times, including Tyson Sacco, Kevin Koeper and Kevin Purcell.

Palisadian Andrew Bland, a track and cross country standout at Loyola High, won the 5K in 2011 and 2014 and last year another local Cubs runner, Charlie Sherman, took the prize.

Okello, who won for the first time in 2014, repeated in 2015 and  made it three in a row last year, is planning to give it a go yet again Tuesday and hopes to make it four in a row to equal Bowen’s total.

“I have been running about 60 miles a week,” said Okello, who runs for the Santa Monica Track Club. “I was down with a knee problem so this is going to be my first race in over eight months. I am going to rely on my experience to try to defend my title.”