Ailing Marathon Runner Defies Diagnosis

He has become a familiar neighborhood figure, pounding out the miles around the Silver Lake Reservoir, as well as a fixture in the Los Angeles Marathon.

Retired Belmont High School counselor Richard Lem had completed all 14 previous Los Angeles marathons, but he did not enter this year’s race until a few weeks ago.

“I didn’t know whether I would be dead or alive,” he said, smiling without bitterness.

Lem, 66, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in November 1998, and later learned that the disease had spread to his ribs, shoulder blades and spine. A malignant tumor also was found in his pancreas.

But he already had signed up for a February road race in Hawaii and was about to go to Seattle with his wife and friends for a football game between UCLA and the University of Washington, when he began his cancer treatments.

He also was considering a radical surgery suggested by doctors that would have required four to six months of recovery. The trip to the football game in Washington gave him a chance “to do a lot of reflecting,” Lem said.

“I decided, ‘Oh, to hell with it,’ ” he said. “If I’m going to die, I’d rather die on the streets of L.A., running the marathon.”

Despite the diagnosis, he ran the Great Aloha race in Hawaii last year and returned to Los Angeles to continue training.

“But the cancer treatments were weakening my leg muscles,” he said.

So he suspended his treatments for three months to be able to run the 1999 L.A. Marathon, a race he finished in little more than seven hours, nine minutes--more than three hours slower than the time of his first marathon in 1986.

He resumed his treatments and he is back this year, one of 366 entrants who have run in all of the earlier Los Angeles marathons. They will start the March 5 race from an area immediately behind the elite runners, and Lem said his approach this year is to “go gently.”

His goal is to finish in seven hours, but he calls his training “any way you can.”

Lem faces his terminal illness with an equanimity grounded in his philosophy of life and bolstered by a series of Chinese meditations and exercises called Xiang Gong, which he says increases his energy.

“All of us--we don’t know who we are,” he said. “We don’t love ourselves. If you love yourself and know you are only using this body while you’re here on Earth, it makes you less attached to it.”

He said he doesn’t identify with his physical self anymore.

“We have many components: the physical, the astral, the mental, the spiritual,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t feel that I am of the body.”

But there are times, very early in the morning, when thoughts of death intrude.

“Even though I’m upbeat, dying bothers me,” he said.

When thoughts of death assault his consciousness, he turns to Xiang Gong to clear his mind and dispel the negative influences, he said.

Lem has written a book: “I’m Dying. But I’m Not Sick: The Final Journey.” He does not believe in organized religion, but he considers himself a very spiritual man. He is fond of quoting Victor Hugo: “Religions pass, but God remains.”

His wife of 44 years, Patricia, whom he met when they were students at the old John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles, will also be at this year’s race.

She has been a volunteer at all 14 Los Angeles marathons, taking on duties ranging from passing out goody bags to working the so-called stations of the cross, where runners grab cups of water without breaking stride.

Patricia Lem, a retired Los Angeles teacher, remembers early marathons when “people would call asking if they could buy running shoes at the start line.”

In this year’s race, Lem will be joined by Brenda Belloso, one of his former students, who considers him her surrogate father.

“I would always see this man run lap after lap after lap on the track at Belmont,” said Belloso, who soon joined Lem on his training runs. “He explained to me that marathon running is more mental than physical. Your body is going forward, but it’s because your mind is saying, ‘Don’t quit.’ ”

Belloso, 29, is a woman intimate with sorrow. She had four brothers, including a fraternal twin. He was shot to death in 1989. Another brother was gunned down in August 1992, and a third died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound later that year.

She and Lem have talked often about death over the years.

“I’ve seen it so much,” she said. “You can’t ignore death. It faces us when we least expect it. It’s a shock for everyone, but it’s a reality in life.”

But the thought of Lem’s dying is excruciating for her.

“I go through my moments when I’m out there training,” said Belloso, who has run six Los Angeles marathons, two with Lem. “The thought of this race being my last race with him angers me. There’s nothing I can do. I have no control over death. No one has.”

Her bond with Lem “happened very naturally,” she said, growing out of their countless hours of running together.

“He’s a tough, tough person,” she said. “He’s got more heart than anyone I’ve ever known.”

The tenacity that turned Lem into a marathoner began in high school where he ran hurdles. He also competed at Los Angeles City College, but he was not fast enough to compete at UCLA when he enrolled there as an art major.

After graduating from UCLA in 1958 and serving a stint in the Army, Lem had practically given up running. He enrolled in art school and was “grasping around for a career,” he said, when an Army buddy persuaded him to start jogging in 1965.

He returned to running with a vengeance, competing in two triathlons and more road races than he can remember.

“I ran 15 races a year at times,” he said during an interview at his Silver Lake home. The walls of his home are covered with his oil paintings, plaques and photo collages of his trips with his wife to many corners of the globe.

A spinet piano sits in one corner of his living room, and he needs little encouragement to start playing Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight.” And a laugh swells up when he reminisces about his short career as a bullfighter in Juarez, Mexico, back in 1958.

He does not have a number yet for this year’s marathon because he entered late, but he can be spotted in the throng alongside Belloso, whose number is F3275.

Belloso said she will “go gently,” running with him “side by side, stride for stride.”