Press Releases

Marathon Project give students tools for health lifestyles

by Sam Bloch, April 27, 2007

On Nov 18, nearly 90 students within the Poughkeepsie and Beacon city school districts will run a marathon, a feat accomplished by less than 1/10th of 1 percent of all Americans. If they can do that, Susanne O'Neil reasons, then they can also learn to lead healthy lifestyles.

For 35 weeks, those participants of a new program, the Marathon Project, will run three days a week at Poughkeepsie High School and participate in eight Dutchess County races, their training culminating in the completion of the Philadelphia Marathon. By accomplishing such an ambitious goal, the program, part of the Council for Addiction Prevention and Education of Dutchess County (CAPE/DC), aims to help these students develop strong self-esteem and discipline.

And with the support of adult mentors, the students will abstain from tobacco, alcohol, and substance use, improve their overall health and maintain strong academics.

"This program empowers kids," O'Neil, the Marathon Project coordinator, wrote in a CAPE newsletter. "They run to become who they want to be."

O'Neil developed the Marathon Project after reading about Students Run Philly Style (SRPS), a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization that, like it precedent Students Run Los Angeles (SRLA), was designed to help underperforming students by completing a marathon. The success of these programs is overwhelming. SRLA has helped more than 26,000 teenagers complete the L.A. Marathon over the past 18 years. Furthermore, 97 percent of them graduated high school, a striking accomplishment compared to the 65 percent of graduated students throughout the L.A. Unified School District.

"Kids are running and changing their own mindset," O'Neil said. "The program has a character of its own. It's not, "Here's what the blood alcohol content is, here's what this substance does." It speaks for itself.

O'Neil also stressed the open nature of the program. Anyone from ages 12 to 18 within the Poughkeepsie and Beacon school districts, she said, can join.

Most of the weekly practices involve stretching and going for a short run, teaching the runners to pace themselves for endurance running. But on Saturday, April 21, the 20 students put their training to the test and ran five kilometers, or 3.1 miles - their longest distance yet.

The students, however, were hardly fazed. Stretching under the direction of O'Neil and their team of mentors, they beamed as Poughkeepsie High School Assistant Principal Margaret Pineiro affixed running numbers to their CAPE shirts.

Justice Paulin, 12, and Douglas Stoneham, 13, both sixth graders at Poughkeepsie Middle School, talked about the benefits of the program, which include two free pairs of sneakers and a free membership to the Poughkeepsie YMCA or Beacon Fitness Center to cross train for the marathon. And after running the marathon - or a half marathon, as CAPE suggests for the middle schoolers - each runner will also be able to participate in all Mid-Hudson Road Runners Club races for free.

"I like it," Paulin said. "We're losing weight, and I get a free membership to the Y!"

The students also seemed casually receptive to the drug prevention component of the program, as if it was entirely secondary to the opportunity to run.

"I know there are lots of drugs, but I'm not interested in them," Paulin said. "I just eat." Stoneham laughed and clarified his friend's remarks. "We're just trying to do the right thing." The mentors, they said, never talked explicitly about substance abuse or addiction with them. "They just encourage us to keep going," he said. "they're just cool people."

But this attitude indicates the success of CAPE's proactive approach to education. To many of the runners, the mentors aren't people trying to prevent unhealthy behaviors - they're just cool. And by running a marathon, the runners are staving off addiction - they're just having fun and being healthy.

Support from mentors

Much of the success of the program depends on the support of the students' mentors, who include their teachers, parents, friends of program coordinators and members of the Mid-Hudson Road Runners Club. The program currently has approximately 15 mentors in Poughkeepsie and between 30 and 40 for the nearly 60 students in Beacon.

For many mentors, the opportunity to interact with their students and see them excel with their classmates outside an academic setting attracted them to the program.

"I don't coach sports, so this is a way to see them in a different space," said Bernadette Wiggin, a math teacher at Poughkeepsie High School. Because the program extends through November, when many of its participants will become freshmen at the high school, it gives teachers like Wiggin and Christine Buchman, a fellow mentor and special education teacher at PHS, an opportunity to ease students' transitions. "Hopefully, we won't seem as brutal and intimidating," Wiggin joked.

Like Wiggin and Buchman, Pineiro relished the opportunity to interact with her students outside of school, but strongly responded to the goal of the project.

"The kids didn't realize they could do this," Pineiro said, recording finishing students' times. "But if they commit to running, and if they're surrounded by the right people, they can learn to do anything they put their mind to."