Funny thing, this running game. 

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, America’s two largest cities will stage their annual marathons on the same day this Sunday, 7 November 2021. It will be the first (and hopefully the only) time this happens as LA Will return to its usual spring calendar placing next March.

But this fall both the TCS New York City Marathon and the Los Angeles Marathon presented by ASICS will celebrate their return to racing while saluting their legacy runners.

Now in its 50th year, New York is down to one legacy runner, Larry Trachtenberg, 67, a former special ed teacher from Queens, who was one of 127 starters and 55 finishers in the 1970 inaugural race around Central Park.

In year 36, LA still features 127 runners who have completed every race out of nearly 11,000 who started the first LAM in 1986.

No one starts out to be a legacy runner, or a legacy broadcaster, for that matter. It just works out that way. And that is what this story is about.

The two of us couldn’t have been any more different, considering we were born within weeks of one another and grew up four miles apart in post-war St. Louis, Missouri. 

I came into this world on January 2, 1948. Johnnie Jameson arrived just six weeks later on February16th. Since the age of 10 I grew up in St. Margaret of Scotland parish in the city’s Shaw neighborhood on the near-south side. Johnnie grew up in Pruitt-Igoe, the poster-child for failed urban housing projects just off downtown St. Louis.

I graduated from St. Louis University High School, class of ‘66, an all-boys Jesuit prep school. Johnnie matriculated from public, Vashon High, also class of ’66.

Later, we were both drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam years. Johnnie in 1968, me one year later. But while Johnnie was shipped off to Vietnam, where he experienced the horrors of war, I only lasted 11 weeks in the military before being shipped home to finish college due to a damaged elbow stemming from a high school motorcycle accident.

In the ensuing years, we both joined the great escape from St. Louis, me moving east to Boston in 1974; him winging west to Los Angeles in 1981. 

In our coastal redoubts, we both discovered the sport of running, which, you could say, saved his life, while giving me mine, professionally. 

Like many frontline veterans, Johnnie Jameson experienced things in Vietnam no human should. Upon his return to the States, the memories of the war haunted him. Only when he discovered the calming effect of running did his PTSD subside. 

It was the Los Angeles Marathon that provided the annual goal that kept him running. But once he started, he never stopped.

By the time we met for the first time in March 2018, he had run all 33 City of Los Angeles Marathons, while I had broadcast all 33, having begun my broadcast career in Boston during the running boom years of the late 1970s.

When we compared notes, we learned how oddly similar our life arcs through running had been. 

Perhaps the least important, but most highly visible, difference between us was our color. I am the taller white guy. He is the shorter, but fitter, black guy.

We also both realized that if we had remained in our hometown of St. Louis, the chances of us ever crossing paths in our seven decades on the planet would’ve been infinitesimal, as St. Louis has always been a racially divided city. 

Today, we still both self-identify as runners, though a neurological condition has stripped me of the physical capability. Yet here we are, both celebrating 36 years at the LA Marathon this Sunday morning, him on foot, me behind the microphone for KTLA-TV5.

“I’m wonderful,” Johnnie told me as he prepped for his legacy run this Sunday. “I am still working (he’s a postman). I still have my routine, walking 4-5 miles a day. I get some runs in on the weekend. And we legacies hook up occasionally.”

Good luck, St.Louis (that’s what we call each other), you and your 126 legacy brothers and sisters. We will compare notes afterward. Then plan for #37 next March.

Funny thing, this running game. Sometimes makes you wonder what all the other fuss is about.

END