Sisters taking it all in stride for marathon

YAKIMA, Wash. — The marathon distance of 26 miles, 385 yards means that if your average stride as you run, jog, shamble and walk that distance is just under a yard, you’ll be taking roughly 50,000 steps on your way to the finish line.

Photos by ANDY SAWYER/Yakima Herald-Republic Identical twins Cynthia Gleich, left, and Sarah Reed head down Occidental Road on a training run for Saturday’s Yakima River Canyon Marathon. It will be Gleich’s first marathon and Reed’s third. (Andy Sawyer/Yakima Herald-Republic)

But considering that the vast majority of marathoners reach that finish line, it means they’re not listening to that voice. Something else is blocking it out.

Motivation.

And that’s a personal thing, unique to each runner.

For Cynthia Gleich of Yakima, this Saturday’s 10th annual Yakima River Canyon Marathon — specifically, the possibility of running it alongside her twin sister, Sarah Reed — was a carrot she put in front of her to achieve a personal goal.

“I wanted to get back in shape and I knew I needed something to motivate me,” said Gleich, 33, who had run off-and-on for years but never entered a marathon.

“We both love running, but … I need to have a goal, something to focus on to get me there.”

Gaining on her sister, though, wouldn’t be easy. Reed has run both the Seattle and Portland marathons, and early on in training for Saturday’s race, the two of them were running on gymnasium treadmills alongside one another when Gleich realized just how much further along her sister was.

“She was running so much faster than I was. I’m feeling like I need to throw up and she’s just running along smiling,” Gleich recalled.

“I felt bad for her,” Reed said. “But she has really, really stepped it up. I’m surprised at how great a shape she’s gotten into in such a short time.”

On a recent training run, the sisters ran a 23-mile road at a crisp 8:45-per-mile pace.

“I was thinking, you know what? I’ve caught up,” Gleich said, noting that her plan for Saturday is to run alongside her sister as long as possible.

“It’s a little bit competitive, but not in the sense that we need to beat each other. It’s more of an encouragement thing,” Gleich said. “Twins are competitive by nature, I think, but I would never want to see her fail.

“I want to see her do good, so it’s not a mean-spirited competition. We’ve talked about, ‘OK, we’re going to stay together as long as we can.’ But we’ve tried that before, and if one gets cramps or gets sore or tired, the other can go on.”

In a way, she said, that might be a good thing.

“If you’re still running together and you get near the finish line,” Gleich said, “it’s … OK, who’s going to finish first?”

In that situation, Reed said, the two would likely opt against finishing together, instead sprinting to the line, each trying edge out the other.

“We’ve done that in shorter races — run together, and then one of us has finished ahead of the other,” she said.

And who has the best finishing kick? Reed didn’t hesitate. “She does.”

*******

Nearly 500 runners take off at the start of the 2009 Yakima River Canyon Marathon. The 10th annual race, set for 8 a.m. Saturday, draws runners from around the country because of its combination of friendly volunteers and a scenic course. (Andy Sawyer/Yakima Herald-Republic)

Luke Gullberg, 26, had planned on being among the runners assembled at the starting line on State Route 821 just south of Ellensburg. While he been a student at Central Washington University, he had become taken with the canyon and the idea of running through it. “So,” Becky said, “he picked this marathon to run.”

But four months ago, Luke Gullberg and two friends died while attempting a winter ascent of the difficult west face on Mount Hood.

“Luke had never run a marathon but he was an

exceptional athlete, and this was going to be the marathon he was going to run,” said Becky, an English and math tutor who intends to go back to school for her master’s degree this fall. “So me and some friends, we were kind of thinking we should run this for him since he can’t.”

It will be the first marathon for Becky, who has run as far as 16 and 17 miles in training. She’s not sure how she’ll fare over 26 miles, including two thigh-killing hills at the 14- and 21-mile marks. “I would like to not have to walk,” she said, “but I’m just going to finish it.”

In addition to the handful of friends who intend to run the marathon, she said, her father and two others will be running the first half of the marathon, also in Luke’s honor. Becky had e-mailed race directors Lenore and Bob Dolphin to see if they could do that and be picked up at the midway point by friends, and the Dolphins said it wouldn’t be a problem.

*******

That very thing — the Dolphins’ accom-modating nature, and the general friendliness of what he calls the “Yakima canyon marathon culture” — is the reason Mark Moody will be in Saturday’s race.

This will be his 10th time in the canyon marathon, in fact, meaning the 47-year-old from Bellevue gets one of those special bib numbers that go to runners who have competed in each race since the marathon’s inception.

“I’m going to outlast all of them,” Moody said with a laugh. “During a race I’ll sneak up behind one of (the others with the special bib numbers) and say, ‘You know, one of us is going to have to die,’ because I’m going to be the last one standing, the grand old man who’s run them all.”

Moody said the Yakima race is special for all of the runners who refuse to miss it, and that seeing them at other races becomes like an old-home week of Yakima canyon marathoners — people who have run a gazillion marathons and people who love the Dolphins.

“You’ll see somebody in a ‘100-Marathon’ club shirt, and you’ll say, ‘Wow, 100 marathons, huh?’ And they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I got this shirt back in 1986,’” he said. “There’s just a thousand stories.”

One of them is the tale of the year Moody’s wife, an experienced Ironman triathlete, ran the canyon marathon. “You know how you start the race in Yakima and it’s cold as hell, and by the time you finish it’s baking hot,” he said.

So while out on the race course, Moody’s wife peeled off one of her layers of clothing, an Ironman Canada shirt, and gave it to someone at an aid station to be delivered to the finish area … where she forgot to retrieve it after the race.

Days later, the Moodys contacted Lenore Dolphin, wondering if the T-shirt was still around.

“She was like, ‘OK, sure, I’ve got it right here, I’ll send it to you,’” Moody said. “Sure enough, it comes in a Fed-Ex envelope, it’s obviously been washed and it’s all folded up in a little plastic bag, and a note with it. Where else are you going to find a race organizer who’ll go to that kind of trouble for you?”

*******
Perhaps that’s why Moody is one of only 25 runners who have run each of the first nine canyon marathons and plan to make Saturday their 10th. And they keep coming despite obstacles that make it difficult.

Steve Hamling, 41, of Auburn had back surgery four months before the 2009 race that made running the marathon difficult. He came anyway and walked the distance — precisely what J.R. Phillips, a 71-year-old Yakima runner, will do this year because of an injury. Ron Hayden, the 54-year-old director of the Tri-Cities Marathon, did the canyon race one year with his arm in a sling just to keep his string alive.

Two of Saturday’s entrants, 64-year-old David Jones of Seattle and 62-year-old Ron Fowler of Rochester, not only haven’t missed a canyon marathon; in more than 27 years, neither one has missed a day of running — at least one mile, in good weather or bad, good health or ill. Who’s ahead?

Well, Jones started his streak a month before Fowler did, but Fowler might have an even longer string except that, not long before, he intentionally took a day off after running every day for a year.

Which, in retrospect and comparison, turned out to be not much of a streak at all.

• Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com.