‘They are people who will be with you to the end.’ How this running program changes lives
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20th anniversary of the Miami Marathon
After a year of going virtual because of the pandemic, the Life Time Miami Marathon and Half Marathon will be back for a 6 a.m. start on Sunday, Feb. 6, outside the FTX Arena.
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I took my first step never believing I could run a half marathon.
It was shortly after 7 a.m. on the first Saturday in October 2014. I had signed up with TeamFootWorks, the training program of FootWorks, the longtime family-owned running store in South Miami.
After listening to Josh Liebman — who has run 101 full marathons — tell the deer-in-the headlights newbies that we would run in the Miami Half Marathon that was coming up in late January, I set out from the store. I joined dozens of others — I wouldn’t call us runners yet — on our first run, a 30-minute trek through South Miami.
FootWorks, like many running groups, follows the Galloway Method, a training program that cuts down on injuries through running/walking in designated intervals. The pace groups go from walking to running a full mile, before breaking for a minute walk.
Starting this journey at age 58, I chose the 1/1 pace group — that’s 1 minute running, 1 minute walking, the pace we would run the 13.1 miles, the distance of a half marathon. (Other pace groups are 2/1, 3/1, 4/1, 5/1 up to the milers, who run at 8/1.)
All of the runners in my group run at this pace — about a 14-minute mile when you average the running and walking. We have no delusions about finishing Sunday’s Miami Half Marathon first — the women’s winning time is around 1 hour, 15 minutes; the men’s winning time, 1 hour 3 minutes. Our goal is to finish in three hours.
Sunday, I will run my 13th half marathon.
I have run in all six Miami half marathons since that first one in 2015 — there wasn’t one last year due to COVID — along with four Halloween Halfs in Miami Beach and two in Nashville, where my son and his wife live. My husband, Ken, who encouraged me to start running, ran the full marathons (26.2 miles) there. He has since graduated to the Ironman — a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile run. (He’s done two and training for a third.)
Running partner becomes a best friend
On Sunday, I will be running alongside my running partner, Alina Cruz, whom I met that first morning on the street behind FootWorks as we parked our cars.
We were both newbies and more than a little anxious about whether we could do this. She had run years ago when she lived in New York after graduating from the University of Florida; my last running days were in high school when I joined the boys track team in my senior year (pre-Title IX, when there wasn’t a girls team) and ran the 4x220- or 4x440-yard relays against other girls who had done the same.
Alina and I ran that first day together and have been running ever since — 7 a.m. Tuesday and Thursdays at Tropical Park (five miles) and the longer runs with the FootWorks team on Saturday mornings. Footworks starts with a 30-minute run/walk and over the next 15 weeks works up to 13 miles, increasing the distance one to two miles per week.
We’ve become best of friends. She’s 65; I’m 66. She has two grown sons, as do I. She’s of Cuban heritage; I’m Italian and Greek. We both love to cook, entertain, read and travel. And our husbands get along great.
“We couldn’t do it without each other,’’ said Alina, who has run in 14 halfs, including four Disney races and one in Raleigh.
No, we couldn’t.
More importantly, our FootWorks friends have become a big part of our life. We have breakfast together after our Saturday runs, comparing notes on our runs and catching up. We’ve celebrated graduations and weddings and mourned the loss of mothers and fathers.
Lifelong friendships from TeamFootWorks
Forming lifelong friendships is one of the keys of the FootWorks program, which began as the Miami Running Club with 12 runners in 1977 and has evolved into TeamFootWorks, a nonprofit program that’s trained more than 50,000 runners since its early days in the 1980s.
“When you are out there for a couple of hours with people, you become pretty close. For 16 weeks or so, you are seeing the same people every Saturday morning — tired, wide awake, cranky, happy,” said Laurie Huseby, 71, whose father came from Minnesota and started an Earth Shoe Store 49 years ago at 5724 Sunset Dr., now home to FootWorks.
She and her husband, John “Hans” Huseby, who played youth hockey in Minneapolis and got into running when he moved to Miami, converted the store to FootWorks in 1975. Hans and Laurie created the Mercedes-Benz Miami Corporate Run, which attracts tens of thousands and spawned spin-offs in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. He died in his sleep during the Thanksgiving weekend in 2014. He was 64.
The FootWorks community came together to honor Hans in tributes at the store, and every Thanksgiving morning, runners tackle the 3.8-mile Hans Huseby Memorial Thanksgiving Fun Run, known as the Hansgiving Fun Run, around South Miami.
The outpouring of support hasn’t surprised Laurie. Over the years, she’s seen weddings, divorces, babies being born to parents who met at TeamFootWorks.
In fact, Laurie met one of her best friends — Dr. Ana Campo, a Miami child and adolescent psychiatrist — when she started training at FootWorks for her first full marathon, the New York City Marathon on Nov. 3, 1996.
Ana, who had just turned 40, set a goal of running 10 full marathons before she turned 50. (She completed nine.)
Ana, Laurie, and a third runner, Dr. Sherrie Bieniek, ran in the 1996 and 1997 New York City marathons. Over the years, they’ve run in many races, including the 197-mile Hood to Coast Relay, which goes from the top of Mount Hood in Oregon to the beaches along the Pacific. They had a 12-person team, including their daughters, and took turns running through the night.
“We’ve run together for so long — more than a quarter of a century, ‘’ said Ana, 66, who retired last year as the associate dean for student affairs at the University of Miami medical school. “The friends I’ve made. They are people who will be with you to the end.”
It’s what Betty Perez loves about TeamFootWorks.
The co-team leader for the 1/1 pace group — along with Tere Patton — Betty has run 43 half marathons since joining Footworks in January 2014. She recruited Tere when they worked together at the Caribbean K-8 Center in South Miami-Dade.
Through the years, they and others from FootWorks have run half marathons in Paris, Dublin, Chicago, Napa Valley and Yosemite, among other places.
“I’ve made friends for life,’’ says Betty, 54, who is the secretary/treasurer of Coral Reef Elementary School and whose motto is “Never Give Up.”
“I have managed to stay healthy and see the world. It’s opened a new world to me.”
TeamFootWorks
TeamFootWorks will begin a half marathon training program on Feb. 26 and a 5K training program, Fitness 101, on March 2. For information, go to teamfootworks.org or call 305-666-7223.
This story was originally published February 3, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
