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PROFILE A CONVERSATION

WITH ALAN PAGE The ex-Viking and state Supreme Court justice is well known at the Twin Cities Marathon for playing his tuba for runners

Of all of the things Alan Page is known for, perhaps the one he is known for the least, is the one he has done the longest. He has been a runner since the mid-1970s. He took up running in the midst of an NFL career with the Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears in which he earned All Pro honors six times, Most Valuable Player once and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. After receiving his J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1978, he worked as an attorney, then served seven years in the office of the Minnesota Attorney General. In 1992 he was elected to the Minnesota Supreme Court, becoming the first African American on the court. He was reelected three more times, serving 23 years until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2015. In 1988 Justice Page, and his wife Diane, founded the Page Education Foundation, which assists Minnesota students of color in pursuit of post secondary education. To date, the foundation has awarded $15 million in grants to 7,000 students.

In 2018, Diane Sims Page passed away. She and Justice Page had been married 45 years. Justice Page is also known for serenading Twin Cities Marathon runners with his tuba as they pass near his Minneapolis home.

BY DENNIS BARKER

DB: You’re known to this generation of runners as a good running watcher/musician at the Twin Cities Marathon, but what is your own running like these days?

AP: It’s sort of graduated to walking every morning. Until about two years ago we ran three to four miles in the mornings, together with a group of friends.

Diane and alan are pictured out for a run in 2015. Photo by Jerry Holt, Star Tribune.

AP: At first it was very difficult. It was our time to be together, to goof off, to be ourselves, to enjoy the outdoors together.

DB: How did you first get into running?

AP: We fell into it together. It was the running boom in the mid 70s and we had friends who were runners. It wasn’t something we were naturally inclined to do. We started running and struggled and gradually became runners.

DB: I remember Diane as a very graceful runner.

AP: Graceful and determined. She didn’t start running until she was 31or 32 years old. She wasn’t athletic before then - sports were frowned on for girls when she was in school. But once she got into it, she was determined. Our first or second race was the Bud Light race in St. Paul. We ran together for a while then she took off and left me for dead. When I got in, she had already been done for five minutes.

DB: Did your competitiveness from football kick in when you raced?

AP: In running, and football, too, I always just tried to do the best that I could. I tried to push myself and be as good as I could. And I wanted to feel good doing it.

DB: Then you ran your first marathon (Grandma’s 1979). What was that like?

AP: It was painful. We had been running for six or eight months and I said I’d like to do a marathon and Diane said, “No, we’re not doing a marathon!” But we trained for it and started the race together. She didn’t stay with me long before she took off. I had never been that tired or beat up before, including all of my football games. At 19 miles I started to struggle and promised myself, not just said, but promised,

myself that I would never do this again. I didn’t know if I could make it. I did but it hurt.

DB: But like most marathoners, you ran another one.

AP: Yeah, Grandma’s in 1982 or 83. I felt a lot better afterward. We had just been running and racing more and I knew what I was in for.

DB: And Diane was hooked?

AP: Hook, line and sinker. Once I talked her into running that first marathon she wanted to see what she could do. She ran the Chicago Marathon and was the fifth woman in 3:01. The next year she was in even better shape but got a hamstring injury and couldn’t run. She was real disappointed. When I was with the Bears, she ran with a group on Tuesdays that did what they called a solid steady state run. They traded off leading each mile and kept the pace going. She would take the lead at ten miles and keep it going strong. They let me come along sometimes and I stayed with them for one mile.

DB: What was your own marathon training like? AP: It was basically just long runs and some 5 and 10K races.

DB: You didn’t go to the track or do intervals?

AP: No. But one year when I was with the Bears we had to run a mile at training camp, so I did some track work to get ready for that. I ran a 5:26. I could run a 2:10 half but after that there was a big drop off.

DB: Did you run track in high school?

AP: When I was a freshman in high school I was in football and they made me go out for track. I hated it. They made me a shot putter because I was big. One day they made us run quarters. After the first one I almost threw up. I promised myself that if I ever threw up I would quit. But I never threw up. One meet they put me in the 440, why I don’t know. Going into the last turn I felt like I had a piano and some other things on my back.

DB: Your son recently posted a video of you doing bear crawls, so you’re still in pretty good shape. Do you do those or other old football things to stay in shape?

AP: Not too much but I do them occasionally to get my heart rate up.

DB: I know you and Diane made your own pasta. Was that something you started because of running?

AP: No, it was something that was a lot of fun but a lot of work. We had been pasta likers and it was something we enjoyed doing together. We did it for a while, then went back to buying it because it took so much time.

DB: What are some of your favorite running memories?

AP: The best memories are of being out with friends on our daily runs, the joy of long runs and sharing conversation or running along in solitude. I was lucky to be able to do that for forty plus years, talking about serious things and silly things and experiencing the weather conditions. One training run, Diane and I and some friends were heading north to Theodore Wirth Park. We got water in the chalet and then ran up to Victory Memorial Drive. Right when we got there the sky opened up. There was thunder and lightning and six inches of water in the street. We talked about going back but it’s the same that way so we just kept going. At one point we looked at each other and just laughed.

One morning we were running on Dean Parkway and it started to storm. There was a lightning strike not far from where we were and it scared the living daylights out of us. You could smell the electrical burning smell.

There were winter days when it was twenty below, and as awful as it was, we did it together and had a good time.

DB: Did running help in your legal career?

AP: Definitely. There were times when I would think things through on a long run. Even when you’re together with friends you can get lost in your thoughts. It’s a valuable time for thinking and sorting things out. Sometimes, you’d be struggling with something and be out on a run and suddenly it’s as clear as can be.

DB: Did running help in your football career?

AP: It didn’t help or hurt it, but it helped me mentally, so in that sense it helped.

DB: Did you ever convince any of your teammates to run with you?

AP: No, I just ran. But one day Walter Payton came with me on a short run from the Bears training facility to Lake Michigan. It was during training camp at the end of the day and we were hot and tired. We got to the lake and thought ‘Why not jump in?’ It was awfully cold and it was quite a shock to the system.

DB: Did your kids get into running?

AP: All four kids got into running and have completed a marathon. It will be interesting to see the grandkids. They have been out on the run with us since they were a week old. We were so incredibly fortunate to have stumbled into running because it has brought us a lot of joy.

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PROFILE THE JOURNEY OF A LIFETIME Bataan Death March 102K

BY GARY PORTER

As Roy waited patiently at the start line, he couldn’t help but smile. The contrast with his last race. The size of the field. The location. The last race was a tune up, a training run for this one. This was the race of a lifetime; one he had thought about for years. In fact, it was the journey of a lifetime. For this race, Roy Plana and his buddy, Dave Percival, had traveled from the Twin Cities half way around the world. Roy lives in Hudson, Wisconsin, after retiring as a director with American Express. Dave teaches middle school and coaches high school track and cross country in the White Bear Lake school district.

So what about that training run, a local race with a handful of runners? No, Roy’s training run attracted a field of over 50,000 runners and a purse of $100,000 to the winner. In November, Roy ran in the New York City Marathon. He had completed 19 marathons before NYC, including Boston. So why not add the Big Apple, good timing with it coming a couple months before this race of a lifetime. He would follow the Galloway method, 18 minutes running followed by two minutes walking.

Roy’s race of a lifetime? Barely 100 runners toed the starting line. So why would anyone travel half way around the world to line up with 100 other runners? And why was this race starting in the dead of the night? These were the questions Roy would need to try to find answers for as he waited at the start line.

Okay, so maybe it was the lure of a race designed to commemorate a famous historical event that attracted Roy and Dave to sign up for a run 8,000 miles from home. And because they were the only Americans, a race that required them to sing the Star Spangled Banner at the start. The two of them had already run one race to commemorate this event. In 2008

Runners and families honor ricardo plana’s journey during world war ii. Submitted photos

they ran the Bataan Death March Marathon through the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The run honors those brave men in the forced march at the outset of World War II in the Philippines. Roy and Dave described this as the toughest marathon they had done.

So hadn’t they done their part to honor those in the death march? Roy was now 66, Dave ten years younger. Why did they feel compelled to run a race that follows the actual route of the infamous march in the Philippines? The Bataan Death March 102K has a cut off time of 17 hours to finish. The temperature usually approaches 90 degrees at the finish with humidity to match.

For Roy it was simple. His dad was in the Bataan Death March.

On December 8, 1941, hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded the Philippines, at that time a U.S. possession. After three months of fierce fighting against superior forces, the American led troops were backed to the very southern tip of the Bataan peninsula. About 12,000 Americans and 64,000 Filipinos were forced to surrender on April 9, 1942, the largest ever to surrender under a U.S. command.

It was against this backdrop that the soldiers began the death march at Mariveles, a city at the southern tip of the Bataan peninsula. Over the next seven to 10 days the soldiers would march north some 60 plus miles to San Fernando. Along the way they were subjected to every form of brutality imaginable. Veering off to the side of the road would result at best in a severe beating, at the worst a beheading by bayonet. One common form of torture was the “sun treatment” where they were forced to sit in the blazing hot sun with no water.

Ricardo Plana was born in 1920 in Iloilo, a province on the Philippine Island of Panay. At the age of 19 Plana joined the Philippine Scouts, a component of the U.S. Army. Through a combination of fortune and pure persever

PROFILE ance he survived not only the march but three plus years in the POW camps. On two different occasions he narrowly escaped execution. Now Roy stood at the starting line to honor the man who along with his mother literally gave him life.

This would be Roy’s first time running in two months due to a strained medial meniscus on his right knee. He focused on core exercises, deep water running and cycling to maintain his fitness. Roy and Dave faced other challenges. Due to construction the route for the 2019 race was reversed. This meant that after 50 plus miles the runners would finish the race with a five mile, 15 percent elevation climb followed by a sharp three mile decline. The race would start at night, giving the runners a few hours of “cooler” weather before the sun came out.

January 19, 2019, 10 p.m.: Roy and Dave didn’t start the ultra with the planned run walk strategy they had practiced. They settled into a comfortable 12 minutes per mile pace. At 12 miles out the two separated but always kept each other in sight. By daylight they scaled back to two minutes of running followed by a minute walking. Dave described the traffic along the busy highway as “frightening.” If he veered too far to the left to avoid cars and busses coming towards him he would end up in the sewer. Roy dodged a dead chicken along the route. Feral dogs and monkeys appeared out of nowhere.

The runners’ support teams did a great job of keeping them hydrated and nourished. Watermelon, boiled eggs, mangoes, coconut juice, Gatorade and peanut butter on a banana fueled them. Once the sun came out the temperature climbed to 90 degrees with the humidity reaching the high 80’s. Roy continually switched out

wet towels under his Safari winged cap to counter the conditions. He kept soldiering on, reminding himself of the brutal conditions his dad had endured on this very sacred ground. Even when he reached the challenging hill with nine miles to go he didn’t doubt himself. But with just a mile and half to go a well meaning comment from another runner startled him: “I hope your friend is okay.”

At the 91K commemorative marker Dave sat down along the side of the road. He had stopped sweating and figured a brief rest and some hydration would get him moving again. His told his wife Patti that with an hour and half to go, not to worry, he was going to make it. It turned out that was the last thing he would remember until the next day. When his wife reached him he was having seizures. Fortuitously an ambulance happened to pass by and rushed him to a clinic. After a short stay Patti decided to get him back to their hotel. She stood him up in the shower with his clothes still on and got him into bed. By morning he was feeling better. Dave had given the race everything he had to give and then some.

Not knowing for sure what had happened to his buddy, Roy pushed on. He finished the race in 16 hours, 43 minutes—a mere 17 minutes before the cutoff. Of the 239 entrants he was one of only 81 to finish. Roy’s wife Chris, along with cousins he had never met, greeted him at the finish. In the 11 year history of the ultra, Roy became the only direct descendant of a soldier in the death march to complete the race.

After the war, Roy’s parents moved to the states and his dad served over 33 years in the U.S. Army. They raised Roy and his six siblings there. Ricardo Plana passed away in 2003 at the age of 83.

As fate would have it, Roy finished the race on the tenth anniversary of his mom’s passing. He was certain both his mom and dad were smiling down with pride for the way in which he had chosen to honor them. This wasn’t Central Park and there weren’t throngs cheering on the finishers. But it didn’t matter, this was the race—and the journey—of a lifetime. Roy and his wife reflect on the journey of ricardo plana The support team, race director and family celebrate at the finish