Ready to run in Keizer

Rebekah Maddox, a McNary High School senior, will be among those participating in Marion County’s first marathon on Sunday, a new addition to the Keizer Iris Festival. (Dee Moore/For the
KEIZERTIMES)

By DEE MOOREFor the Keizertimes

Running is Rebekah Maddox’s life, so much so that she will be running her first marathon this weekend at the inaugural Iris Festival event on Sunday. The 18-year-old McNary High School senior is on the school’s track team and was on the cross country team this past fall.

But all of these elements of Maddox’s life are relatively new. She began running a little more than a year ago.

“It started when I wanted to lose weight,” Maddox said.

According to Maddox, her dad, Michael, bought her a gym membership and then challenged her to run more than he did. He runs two to three times a week at the gym, but isn’t a running enthusiast.

At first, the going was difficult for her, but she didn’t let that get her down. She kept one goal in mind; “I just thought, I got to beat my dad,” Maddox said.

One year later, she is headed to the district meet to compete in the 1500M and 3000M runs, is 75 pounds lighter and is about to run her first marathon.

“It took me awhile to actually start to like running.” Now she is a distance runner who loves the sport.

“I am really passionate about running,” Maddox said. I am not running to maintain my healthy weight; I am running because I love it. I was lucky I just happened to have a passion for it.”

Though running worked for her in her efforts to lose weight, she doesn’t recommend it to everyone. Her advice is simple, do what you love. According to the teen, the key is finding something, some form of exercise that you enjoy, and do it.

“You have to find something you are really passionate about,” she said.

Though she is about to embark on one of the most grueling challenges a runner can take on, Maddox began her running career on a treadmill at the gym. It took her awhile to get the self confidence to run in public. It was not long before that phase passed; in addition to running at school she has run two half marathons.

She has heard from other runners than no matter how much or how hard she trains it will still be painful.

According to Carlos Soto, a personal trainer at Courthouse Fitness in Keizer, no amount of training can prepare a runner for her first marathon. There is more to running than the physical aspect; it is very much a mental sport.

“It’s about 80 percent mental and 20 percent physical,” Soto said.

The runner and fitness guru has been lending his expertise to the Keizer Chamber of Commerce, which is sponsoring the festival and marathon. Soto has assisted with setting up the marathon and he will be helping manage the 5K, 10K and half marathon.

Most runners begin their physical training six months or more before a marathon.

“It takes months of planning,” Soto said. “Many runners average 10 miles or more a day every day of the week.”

Maddox has been training for the marathon by adding extra run time to her schedule and running additional miles while at track practice.

But, no matter how much a person trains, it isn’t ever enough to keep the self-doubt from creeping up while running the race.

“Mentally you are going to hit a wall; it’s going to hit on the course. You have to break through, then after that you got it,” he said.

The more inexperienced the runner is the larger the wall, the more difficult to break through it.

“We are human. We are going to have negative thoughts. All runners get it; you’re going to want to stop. With more experience it won’t be as big a wall, but no one is beyond it,” Soto said.

“My advice is to mentally prepare yourself, know you are going to get it and have something in place that’s going to help you,” he added.

There are all sorts of ways to prepare beyond practice. He recommends carrying an inspirational quote or saying; write it on your hand if you have to.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help, support groups are important, the trainer said. Ask family members to be waiting at check points to provide incentive and encouragement.

“That is mentally so awesome,” Soto said. “Don’t think of this as a competition. This is for you, you are doing it for yourself, enjoy it.”

And Maddox expects to; she is doing it because she loves to run and to challenge herself; all the right reasons for someone to run a marathon, according to Soto.

She is sentimental about this first marathon because it takes place on the anniversary of her first long run outdoors.

“It’s going to be really awesome,” she said.

That sentiment is echoed by Keizer Chamber of Commerce director Christine Dieker, the force behind the festival and marathon.

“I think this is what the valley needs,” Dieker said of the marathon. “Our valley is so cool looking; I think this will be a great opportunity.”

According to Dieker this is the first and only certified full marathon in the county. The director has been working toward this goal for the past two years.

The marathon starts at 7 a.m. Sunday at the KeizerFEST Fun Center along Cherry Avenue and is one of several running events during the course of the weekend.

The marathon was certified by the Oregon branch of the USA Track & Field. The USTF is a “national governing body for track and field, long-distance running and race walking in the United States,” the agency’s website states.

This makes the event a qualifier for the Boston and New York marathons, Dieker said.

 “We have a strong base of runners, 25 to 30,” Dieker said.

The marathon will have a “there and back” course rather than a circular course and will follow the Willamette Valley Scenic Bike Route. The idea was the USFA certifier’s idea and made the planning much easier for Dieker.

The Keizer and Marion County Fire District is assisting with course management and will provide emergency services if needed. First aid certified volunteers will be manning a tent to provide help with minor problems.

“I don’t know what we’d do without the volunteers we have,” Dieker said. “I know we are going to be able to pull this off and have a fun, safe event.”

The chamber has purchased ChronoTrack bibs. These are radio frequency monitors, which will allow race managers to track the time of reach running.

Rather than hiring an outside agency to manage the marathon and track the runners, chamber marketing director, Stephan Wurzberg, and other staff members went to Illinois to learn how to operate the software so that the organization can track the runners themselves.

“These are the same monitors that are used for the Boston and New York marathons,” Wurzberg said.

Though Maddox hopes this marathon is the first of many, she isn’t thinking about that distant future. For now she is focused on training and preparing for this run. Then there is graduation and college.

She plans on attending Oregon State University in the fall, her major as yet is undecided, though she is considering physical or occupational therapy as a career. While there she plans to continue running, though not as part of the school’s team. She hopes to join a running club while in Corvallis.

“I want to do something that’s just for fun,” Maddox said.

Copyright by the Keizer Times
To view the original story visit the Times at keizertimes.com/2014/05/17/ready-to-run-in-keizer/

Ed and Warren: a made-in-Oregon valentine story

Forest Grove native found his life love packing fruit on citys industrial strip

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by: Dee Moore - Former Forest Grove resident Warren Schlegel (sitting) met Ed Miller in a cannery on Forest Groves industrial strip back in 1967, where they processed strawberries for Flavor Land USA. They crossed paths coincidentally several years later and have been together ever since.

By Dee Moore

Warren Schlegel didn’t even know he was gay back in 1967, when he was an 18-year-old working in Forest Grove at the Sunset Packing cannery along with Ed Miller, also 18.

Schlegel had just graduated from Forest Grove High School and was spending his summer days manning a machine that sliced strawberries and mixed them with sugar.

Miller also ended up at the cannery, capping Flavor Land USA containers of strawberries after they left Schlegel’s tank. The Davis, Calif., native had just completed his first year of college at Willamette University in Salem.

At the time, neither guessed that the other was gay.

While the two became friends, they never expected to see each other after they left the cannery, let alone star in a nationally publicized video decades later highlighting their long-lasting relationship.

“I never thought I’d be sleeping with a 64-year-old man,” they both like to joke. Now that they’re both 64, it’s no longer a shocking notion.

Tangled path to ‘partner’-ship

When the summer of 1967 ended, Schlegel and Miller made no attempt to keep in touch. Schlegel went off to the University of Oregon to study art education. At one point, Miller transferred to the U of O, where the two ran into each other at campus lectures or foreign films. But then Miller transferred again, this time to the University of Wisconsin, to study community service and public education.

Neither of them returned to the cannery. Schlegel spent his summers working for his dad at Tualatin Valley Plumbing and Heating instead.

Then Miller came back to Oregon to take a job as a day-care director in Coos Bay. On one of his rare days off, he hitched a ride to Eugene to visit a friend. He was eating lunch outside the student union when he looked up and saw Schlegel walking out of the cafe with a tray, looking for a place to sit.

Miller felt like he’d been hit by a bomb.

By that time, they both knew they were gay and Schlegel had come out to his family. His mom had immediately sent him to the “family shrink” to make sure he was OK, he said, but she soon accepted his sexuality when the psychologist told her there was “nothing wrong with Warren.”

It was more of a struggle for Miller’s family when he brought Schlegel back to California one Thanksgiving after graduating from college.

He had come out to his sister by then but not his parents, who had divorced while he was in college.

“I’m not surprised,” said his dad, who was already estranged from Miller and never met Schlegel.

His mother, too, was uncomfortable with it, Miller said. But she came around — especially after meeting Schlegel. “She just loved Warren,” he said.

It was the same with Schlegel’s mother, Mary.

“She liked me almost from the beginning,” Miller said, telling him that “If you love somebody, that’s all that should matter.”

After Schlegel’s father died, his mother grew closer to Miller. The two even went on a 21-day cruise together — from Florida through the Panama Canal and up to Astoria — while Schlegel stayed behind at his job.

From activism to refuge

The rest of society wasn’t quite as accepting.

Though they met with little direct prejudice, the couple did get odd looks now and then — when they checked into hotels together, for example.

And when they decided to buy a home in Portland, it took a long time to find a lender who would put the mortgage in both their names.

Schlegel’s grandmother noticed the discrimination and told them, “You boys got to go get wills together,” Miller said.

Miller’s cowboy grandfather used the term “partner” to describe Schlegel, so the pair adopted the now-ubiquitous term long before society picked it up.

The couple believes it helped that they each grew up in relatively liberal college towns. But they knew the rest of the world wasn’t as open to gay people.

Every time anti-gay activist Anita Bryant (who later became a gay-rights supporter) appeared on television in the early 1970s, “Warren would stand up and yell at her until his face was red and the veins in his neck would be throbbing,” remembers Miller, who suggested Schlegel channel his frustration constructively.

Schlegel volunteered to do graphic design work for Right to Privacy, the precursor to Basic Rights Oregon. He designed the organization’s logo, posters, T-shirts and more.

by: Courtesy Photo  - Warren Schlegel (left) and Ed Miller were recently drafted to tell their 42-year love story as part of a campaign to promote marriage for same-sex couples.

The couple also marched in Portland’s first gay pride parade. “All 40 of us,” Miller said of the annual event that now draws thousands of marchers and spectators.

“If there were any nasty reactions from onlookers,” Miller said, “we didn’t hear them over our own chanting of ‘What do we want?’ ‘Gay rights!’ ‘When do we want them?’ ‘Now!’”

The two also worked to pass laws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. But they dropped out of activism in the early 1990s after they’d lost more than 70 percent of their friends to AIDS. The memories were too overwhelming and painful.

During a day trip to the coastal city of Nehalem, they got the idea to move there. They bought some logged property on a ridge and ended up building a near copy of the 1937 concrete home built by famed architect Bernard Maybeck. In July 1997, they moved in.

What do they want? Marriage!

Last summer, Schlegel and Miller contacted former Oregon governor Barbara Roberts, whom they’d met and befriended through their long-ago political connections.

Roberts, a strong gay-rights supporter, immediately remembered the couple and accepted their invitation to speak at their home for a fundraiser supporting the Basic Rights Oregon (BRO) campaign for marriage equality in North Tillamook County.

Word of their personal story traveled to BRO’s Portland officials, who wanted to showcase Miller and Schlegel in a video promoting marriage equality.

Their first trip into the limelight became a nationwide hit. Originally shown on the BRO sister site, Oregon United for Marriage, the video was picked up by “The Advocate,” a national LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) magazine and by The Huffington Post. It’s available on YouTube by searching for “Ed and Warren, 42 years, Oregon.”

Schlegel and Miller were recently honored in Portland at a BRO celebration dinner, which featured the video that made them poster boys for marriage equality. Guests descended on them afterward, asking how they stayed together so long.

“You choose your fights ... don’t worry about the past,” Miller said. And always remember, “It could be worse.”

After November, they hope it will be better, with family and friends at a small civil service and with the words, “I do.”

Copyright by The Forest Groves News-Times and The Pamplin Media Group