47th Space Coast Marathon set for Sunday
Sunday morning, Johnny O. will be at it again.
He will take off running from the streets of Cocoa Village to what the locals call “the river road,” turn around and run back, 13.1 miles in about an hour and 41 or 42 minutes.
Then he probably will do what he usually does: hang out with some friends, usually of the astronaut variety; take his turn on the platform and be handed a memento. And he will be cheered.
The Space Coast Marathon and Half Marathon is John Ouweleen’s race.
It has been his race since 2006, two years after he permanently moved to Sebastian and a year after the death of his wife. His was the story you hear so many times from runners: “I weighed 210 pounds, with high cholesterol, so I started losing weight. I wanted to do something.”
The 78-year-old Ouweleen says he “was visiting my aunt in New Port Richey when I found out about a race called the Tampa Gasparilla Half Marathon … So I stopped in Tampa to register for the race and ran it. I won my age group.”
He “felt pretty good” about that and so he stopped into Running Zone for a pair of shoes, and there he found out about more races and about Bernie Sher’s training sessions in advance of the Space Coast Marathon. He trained. He registered. He ran. He kept running.
He has finished “14 or 15 half marathons” and 33 full marathons, including six races in the World Marathon Major circuit. He has run in Rotterdam, Netherlands, from which his father’s side of the family came, and in Vienna, Austria, where his mother was born. His favorite is London. Paris irked him because of the non-helpful attitude of the organizers.
He has raced the Boston Marathon 11 times, winning his age group there too. Five years after he took up running, he won his category in the USA Track and Field Men's Masters Marathon National Championship.
Sometimes, race organizers add challenges in addition to the ones posed by courses and conditions, like insufficient age categories. In London, they end at 70, and Ouweleen won his group there two years ago, when he was 76 years old. At 78, he placed second in the World Masters Athletics Marathon World Championships; that was Oct. 21 in Toronto, a month before a half marathon.
It’s not really surprising, though.
Ouweleen is a tough product of a tough place — Paterson, New Jersey — “the Silk City,” to which his parents went to work in the textile industry and from which they moved to suburban Pompton Lakes. He didn’t run in high school “because I always had a job,” and immediately after graduation, joined the Navy.
After three years, he mustered out, took the examination to become a member of the New Jersey State Police and passed. He put on the famed French blue blouse in 1961 and stayed a state trooper for 27 years, stationed throughout the state, and retired as a highly decorated lieutenant.
He and his late wife Carol had a “snowbird house,” as he calls it, in Deerfield Beach, “but we got a little disenchanted with the traffic down there,” and so they bought a place in Sebastian, to which they moved permanently in 2004.
He doesn’t say it, but his friends think running helped him get through Carol’s death in 2005, and he now is a member of four clubs: Treasure Coast Runners, the Sunrunners of Vero Beach, Sebastian Running Club and Space Coast Runners. He has trained with the late, great Sher, as well as the likes of SCR Hall of Famer Doug Butler and Roger Roullier of Fort Pierce.
“It keeps me busy,” he says with typical understatement. When preparing for a marathon, he trains on a 10-week plan that ends with 65-mile weeks. That is busy.
He is looking for a time of 1:41 or 1:42 in the Space Coast half, which he figures will be pretty appropriate for him, at 78. Three years ago, he finished at 1:38, but last year, having pulled a hamstring in Tulsa, he “tried to run through it” and finished, hurt, at 1:47, still good enough for the age group platform.
“John is a special runner,” said SCR Director of Operations Brittany Streufert.
Sunday, he will compete in a special race, its 47th version, with about 6,999 other runners, this time with a single start and two half-marathon courses, one of which goes north, the other south along the Indian River. That, says race director Denise Piercy, will allow runners not only to choose a course, but to switch from the marathon to the half.
“So many people want to run the half, and this way, we can accommodate more people,” she says, adding that they’re both pretty courses, one in Cocoa with a fine view of Kennedy Space Center, the other through Rockledge, with its stately homes and massive trees.
The north one, however, has been designated by the Road Runners Club of America as its state championship course and, adds Streufert, the one designated by SCR as its Runner of the Year course.
The race will start where it always has, on Brevard Avenue in Cocoa Village, but it will have a different finish. Gone are the days of ending it on the bricks beneath the portico at Riverfront Park; these races will finish directly on the river, at neighboring Lee Wenner Park.
Were Ouweleen running the full marathon, he would face three-time winner David Kilgore of Palm Bay, who three weeks ago finished 38th in the 51,394-finisher New York Marathon, and who holds the record in Cocoa, at 2:28.34.
He is not finished with marathons, though. He has something to prove in New England.
“This year, Boston had the worst race conditions I’ve ever experienced,” he says. “It was 37 degrees with pouring rain and there were wind gusts up to 40 miles per hour. I came in second in my age group and thought, ‘Oh yeah. This is my last race here.’ But I knew the Boston Athletic Association would invite me back. It did. I’ll go back.”
As he will go back to Cocoa, where after the race he probably will seek the company of Capt. Mike McCulley, its starter and runner, who he befriended several years ago after the astronaut presented Johnny O. his plaque.
“I know him; I talk to him,” he says cheerfully. “I’ve talked to him since 2006 or 2007. In 2007 he and Joan Benoit Samuelson presented me with an award. Joint presenters, that was nice. I really like this race. This is my race.”
47th Space Coast Marathon and Half Marathon
When: 6 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 25
Where: Cocoa Village.
Why: Boston Marathon-qualifying event organized by Space Coast Runners and the Running Zone Foundation, part of both the Space Coast Runners Runner of the Year Series and the Running Zone Race Series. “Project Mercury” also will mark the start of a Big Bang Series “The Next Generation” medals, this time to commemorate each of the country’s manned space projects.
Packet pickup: 10 to 6:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday at Running Zone, 3696 N. Wickham Road, Melbourne and at the pre-race expo.
Pre-race events: Health and fitness exposition and additional packet pick-up from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at the Radisson Resort at the Port, 8701 Astronaut Blvd., Cape Canaveral. The “Marathon Mingle” with pasta dinner will take place at 5 p.m. Nov. 24 in the Cocoa Beach Oceanfront Hilton.
Special guest: Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of astronaut Alan B. Shepard, will be at the expo as well as at the race site for the awards ceremony.
Course: Start is on Brevard Avenue. Runners in the marathon and the north half marathon course will run along Indian River Drive, turn around and head back toward Cocoa Village. The marathon course will continue south along the river and join the south half marathoners . Half marathoners will go south on Rockledge Drive, turn around and finish back at Lee Wenner/Cocoa Riverfront Park.
Information: www.spacecoastmarathon.com.