PUBLISHED 05/30/2006
In early December, four months into the SRLA calendar, Julian, Itzel, Pedro, and the rest of the Banning team faced their biggest challenge so far: the Southern California Half-Marathon in Irvine. The team gathered in front of the school at five on a foggy Saturday morning to catch the bus to the race. Mendoza checked off the runners as they arrived. Many of his friends marveled at his willingness to rise at four a.m. on his day off and drive an hour from his home in Altadena to meet the team and ride a yellow school bus jammed with 40 teenagers (Banning would share the bus with an SRLA team from a neighboring high school) to Orange County and there run 13.1 miles. But Mendoza thought it was fun. He caught the kids' giddy, worried vibes. The farthest they'd run so far was nine miles. Today marked a jump to double figures. Their first encounter with the M word.
Brittany Layton, an electric, rail-thin African-American freshman, danced in the dark to a tune on her ear pods. Pedro and Esteban dozed in their hooded sweatshirts.
"Darlene," Mendoza said to a girl who had just been dropped off, "what do you have there?" It was a bag full of doughnuts. But it was to Darlene's credit, Mendoza realized, that she'd thought about breakfast at all.
"Okay," he said, "but next race try a bagel."
The yellow bus appeared. "All right, here are your target times for today," Mendoza told his team after they'd boarded. "I want you to try your best to hit them, but it's more important to find a comfortable pace and stick with it. By the way, the prize for our nine-mile race last weekend goes to Julian, who hit his target time of 1:30. Let's have a big hand for Julian!"
Sitting at the back of the bus, Julian dipped his head in acknowledgment of his teammates' applause. The darkness of the morning sufficiently masked his reddened cheeks. Brittany, who was competing with Julian for the team mileage lead, danced in her seat as the bus pulled away from the school.
A few hours later, the SRLA rainbow was flooding over affluent Irvine, raising eyebrows among the Saturday-morning latte set. Julian and his teammates were running along a bike lane above an irrigation canal. Mendoza toiled back in the pack, laboring. His back was starting to tighten, and a blister bloomed on the ball of his left foot, but his pencil remained perched behind his right ear. A flock of middle-school kids flew past, chattering in Spanish.
Despite his Hispanic surname, Mendoza does not speak Spanish. He is the son of a Mexican immigrant father and a mother of Scandinavian heritage. A 4:44 high school miler, Mendoza graduated from Southern Illinois University and then took off for L.A., where he found a job teaching at an inner-city continuation high school. There he met his wife, a fellow teacher, and discovered SRLA. Now, nine years later, only one of his kids who made it to the marathon starting line failed to finish. That girl, suffering from the flu, dropped out at 23 miles. But such was the pull of the distance, and the depth of her commitment, that a few days later the girl returned to where she'd stopped and completed the marathon.
There had also been the occasional bummer. One girl went through the entire program, completing the half-marathon and the 18-miler. The night before the marathon, she got drunk at a party and was too sick to make the starting line the next morning. It broke Mendoza's heart; it broke the girl's heart. She was so ashamed that she never came back to school. He tried to call her at home, tell her that she should feel proud of all that she'd accomplished, but it didn't do any good. "There was nothing I could do," Mendoza said.
He crossed a bridge over the canal, following the course back along the bike path on the opposite levee. He spotted a group of his girls--Itzel, Mayra Giles, Adriana Garcia--on the far side of the canal. To his relief, they were chatting and smiling; to his displeasure, they were moving at a loose amble. Mendoza cupped his hands to his mouth and roared, "Pick it up, girls!"
The girls looked up, alarmed and annoyed. Then they saw Mendoza across the canal and started waving, grinning, and running. A few minutes later, he reeled in Denette Holmes, a slender African-American girl. "This is harder than I expected," she said. "My head hurts."
Mendoza, his face set with his own pain, shepherded the girl through the next water station, making sure she downed a cup each of water and sports drink. For the next few miles they ran together. Mendoza moved with a dogged shuffle, while Denette seemed to be feeling her way along.
"Okay, so you get to this point where everything hurts," she said. "Should you like, stay inside your body, or should you start remembering your favorite things?"
After considering for several strides, Mendoza said, "I do both."
Denette gave a frown, followed by the ghost of a smile. After another quarter mile she said, "I think I feel better." Mendoza nodded and watched her run on ahead.
