The Calgary Herald (Alberta)
August 27, 2005 Saturday
Final Edition

Running their way around the world: Marathoners see the world, stay
in shape

Dianne Rinehart, For CanWest News Service

On June 18, Jean Marmoreo and her husband Bob Ramsay found themselves
running in a marathon, one of many half-marathons and marathons they
jump at the chance to do each year.

But this one — held under the midnight sun on the summer solstice in
Tromso, Norway, at latitude 70, 100 kilometres north of the Arctic
Circle — was dramatically different from the rest.

“That was definitely the most exotic one I’ve done,” says Marmoreo, a
62-year-old physician and veteran of 12 marathons and seven
half-marathons in destinations including New York City, Washington,
D.C., Santa Monica, Calif., San Antonio, Texas, and Chicago.

“The only place I haven’t run a marathon is in Toronto,” Marmoreo
says with a laugh about her home city (although she has run
half-marathons here).

For Marmoreo and Ramsay, and hundreds of thousands of others around
the world, the increasingly popular sport of marathoning is
definitely about the destination.

Marmoreo and Ramsay first started running marathons annually in New
York City in 1994, running three consecutively.

“There was such a social experience there, we thought nowhere else on
earth could be like this,” she says.

That’s when they got the “new” destination bug.

They followed that up with San Antonio. Then in 2001, they ended up
doing their first Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., at the
end of October, only about six weeks after 9/11.

Running with marines past the rubble at the Pentagon was such a
moving experience they invited a few of their friends to train with
them that winter and join them the following fall. Eighty-five did,
and Jean’s Marines was, well, up and running!

And they haven’t stopped.

What has grown from a group of friends getting together to train with
Marmoreo and Ramsay in 2002 has now become a pack of more than 500
women training each year under the Jean’s Marines banner, with
alumnae starting their own mini-pack destination marathon runs, that
have included Venice, Medoc, France, Ottawa, Niagara Falls and the
uphill

giant of them all, Jungfrau, Switzerland, run by Jean’s Marine
alumnus Arax Acemyan.

Before the 2002 Marine Corps Marathon, Acemyan was a 50-plus,
cigarette smoking, self-described couch potato. But when she decided
to train for the Marine Corps Marathon, she tossed the cigarettes —
for good.

Then after finding out her ex-husband, whom she hadn’t seen in 10
years, was also training in Europe for a marathon in Jungfrau in
September, she decided to squeeze that one in before her Washington
training goal.

The running course is gruelling. Bad enough a marathon is 42 K, but
this course additionally climbs a 2,000 metre-finish line over the
route. Despite the fact it took her almost seven hours to complete —
“but I got my medal” — and might have caused lesser women to give up
on the sport, Acemyan followed it up four weeks later with the Marine
Corps in Washington in just over five hours, and hasn’t looked back.

Last year, she ran Medoc and this year she will do Chicago.

“I love to travel,” says Acemyan, who is of Armenian descent and
originally from Istanbul. “And (marathons) are a goal for me to keep
in shape. If I didn’t have a goal, I wouldn’t train.”

But the vacations aren’t solely about running. Marmoreo and Ramsay,
and two other Jean’s Marines-in-training, combined the Tromso run
with a spectacular vacation of sea kayaking, hiking and ocean
cruising.

And when Acemyan went to Venice, she and four other girlfriend
running-mates stayed in the romantic city for nine days in an old
palace that had been converted to a bed and breakfast. “We did five
trips, ran the marathon, and ate and drank,” Acemyan remembers
fondly.

When she ran the Medoc Marathon, where all 6,000 entrants dress up in
costumes, then race from chateau to chateau, tasting wine, slurping
oysters and munching on cheeses en route, she spent two weeks away,
travelling with her group of running pals for a week to St. Emillion
before the marathon, and then on her own to Nice for another five
days after it.

Fellow Jean’s Marine alumna Darlene Roth, 50, a nurse who has also
run the More half-marathon, says for her, the marathon and the
running are the “icing on the cake.”

The real goal is the destination travelling with her girlfriends. She
and her fellow travelling companions turned the More half into a
shopping and spa trip.

“We’re a bunch of wild women,” she says of the bonding that takes
place during training for each trip. “We just have a lot of fun.”
Even training runs turn into a bit of travel adventure, she says,
with teammates picking a “really nice restaurant” each week to run
to. “Any pound you lose (training) you gain back!”

Mila Luka, 38, a product manager with Bank of Montreal and mother of
two youngsters, was one of Acemyan’s four running-mates along for the
Venice marathon. She found the marathon itself — especially because
she had flight problems getting there — not exactly “ideal.”

“But oh, but the food and the drinking!” she remembers of the group’s
routine to meet each night in a little bar for cocktails. “It was a
fabulous trip, fabulous food, fabulous wine and fabulous company.”

Luka combined the beauty of her trip to Venice with a trip to Trieste
to visit an aunt, who then accompanied her and her husband Chris to
Rijeka, Croatia, formerly Fiume, Italy, where her mother grew up.

It was her first trip to Italy.

Running in other countries “is a fabulous way to see a destination,”
she says. The Marine Corps Marathon’s Washington route — which she
ran twice — “was phenomenal. Anything you ever wanted to see in
Washington was on that route.”

And Luka has set her sights on another destination marathon: Big Sur
in California, known for it’s tough up-and-downhill course along the
majestic Pacific coast.

Need to know

For a complete inspiring list, check out the International Marathons
Races Directory and Schedule at

Dianne Rinehart, a Toronto-based freelance writer, ran the first
Jean’s Marine Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., in 2002 and
has run three Vancouver Sun 10K runs and several Toronto 10Ks.

GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: CanWest News Service; Destination marathoner Arax
Acemyan, in black, is a former self-confessed couch potato.;
Photo: Calgary Herald Archive; The Jungfrau Marathon is a steep price
to pay for runners.