Amid a sea of athletic shorts and T-shirts, a flash of orange rubber caught the eyes of onlookers at the Napa Valley Marathon in March.
Pablo Aguilera ’07 nestled a basketball in his hands, which he planned to bounce as he ran the 26.2-mile course through Napa Valley’s scenic vineyards and hills. And he intended to break a world record.
“The actual record itself, the dribbling a basketball while running a marathon, that came as a joke,” Aguilera said.
Aguilera, a history teacher at Woodside High School in Redwood City, was helping a student look up the record for running up the stairs of the Empire State Building in the Guinness Book of World Records for a trivia contest when he first caught sight of the basketball-marathon record.
“I saw that the record holder ran a marathon in four and a half hours and I said, ‘I can do that,’” he recalled. “Some friends came over to hang out after work, and they asked me to prove it. So I went right to the Web site and signed up as a joke, but I thought there was no way they were going to get back to me.”
A few months later, the Napa Valley Marathon directors sent an e-mail to Aguilera, approving his request to run the marathon while dribbling. The response took Aguilera by surprise, and it was then that the daunting nature of the task truly dawned on him. Although he had competed in triathlons while at Stanford and had played pick-up basketball all his life, he knew that this unusual attempt would require extensive training.
Enlisting the aid of Christopher Gaines ’05, a Stanford rugby coach and trainer, the two designed an intricate training program incorporating cross training and upper-body strengthening exercises to keep the shoulders and arms from tiring too quickly.
“The training program I developed for Pablo was meant to develop his overall body coordination and awareness,” Gaines said. “This stemmed from the need to have optimal coordination due to his need to dribble while running.”
As the March 7 event date drew closer, Aguilera decided to use his dribbling endeavor to raise awareness and funds for an organization close to his heart: Stanford College Prep, a mentoring and tutoring program that helps disadvantaged students with both college-geared academics and the complex application process. After speaking with one of his students, who could not afford Stanford or Berkeley’s application fees, he decided that he would focus his efforts in this direction.
“At that point I realized, maybe these kids are turned away by the fees of actually applying to the school,” Aguilera said. “I mean, if they apply and they get in, then there’s aid, but if they’re turned away from even applying, that’s a big problem.”
After months of preparation, the day of the marathon arrived. Aguilera, palming a basketball at the starting line, drew great speculation and curiosity from fellow runners.
“Everyone was pretty supportive once they found out what I was doing,” he said. “Some of the people I was running around asked, ‘Is that for charity?’ And when I said yes, they were all running beside me. There were these serious runners with watches and GPS systems for their pace, and they actually tried to keep me on pace with what I was trying to get.”
Aside from a near mishap at the beginning of the race when a man jokingly swiped at the ball, and another instance when a woman started complaining of the continuous “boing” of the ball, the race began smoothly. Aguilera alternated hands when dribbling and soon fell into the rhythm of the motion, and the other runners and spectators cheered him on. Until mile 14, Aguilera’s quest seemed destined for victory.
“I followed Pablo via GPS for the entire race and could see that his pace was well ahead of the record–I was sure he was going to beat it,” Gaines recalled. “I noticed him slow down to a stop around mile 14 and figured that something had gone wrong.”
At a water station at mile 14, Aguilera’s leg suddenly slipped on the water-plastered asphalt and bent away from him as he fought to remain standing. It was accompanied by a loud “pop” that did not bode well for his leg’s wellbeing.
“It was painful like crazy,” Aguilera said. “But I ended up going still. I couldn’t run, but I was walking and still dribbling somehow. And then I had to do that for about four miles.”
At mile 20 he decided to attempt a running pace again, because with a 48-minute 10K, he could still break the record. But his renewed running only lasted until mile 21, when another pop sounded. This time, he knew he had to stop running. Aguilera walked for another two miles, and then managed to limp-jog to the finish.
“Looking back on it, we felt that for the overall message and ending, it kind of fit the whole cause a little bit better,” Aguilera said. “I do wish it could have been different just because of the pain, but for the message of getting everyone to realize what was going on, how serious it is and my commitment to that, as a teacher and just an educator and a member of society in general, I think it really was meant to happen that way.”
While Aguilera beat the original four-and-a-half hour record, in the interim between setting forth to achieve his goal and running the marathon, a man from Los Angeles set a new record at 3:38. Because of his injury, Aguilera was not able to surpass this new barrier, but he has plans to repeat the effort in Sacramento this December and continue fundraising. He also plans to remain by the cause that he jumpstarted, and is hoping to create a scholarship fund with the money raised from his next basketball-marathon.
“Pablo’s marathon fundraiser has been incredible for us,” said Christine Solari, director of Stanford College Prep. “First, he raised over $7,000 for our program, which is a huge amount of money for us and can really support our senior programming. Second, it brought a lot of attention to our program–we’ve been around a long time, but we’ve never had that much publicity.”
“The young people who go through our program are incredible and they have big dreams,” Solari continued. “Given access, they can achieve anything.”