Family balances religion, running

PALMER — One local couple may have found the secret to maintaining a healthy marriage and family life as runners in Alaska.

“The family that runs together stays together,” a man once said as he bicycled past Ben and Christy Marvin running with their first two sons — Ben was pushing the stroller. Several years have passed since then, and with three boys under the age of 10 in tow now, the Marvins have pretty much adopted the phrase as their family motto.

Christy has become something of a living legend in the Alaska Mountain Runners (AMR) racing circuit in the last three years, winning all six races in the Grand Prix series last year. This year she set records at both Government Peak and Knoya Ridge, and missed a record in the Crow Pass Crossing last week by just 24 seconds in the almost 23-mile race. She also won the San Diego Trail Marathon this past January and the Equinox Marathon in Fairbanks last September.

But Christy is not the only star runner in the family.

Her husband Ben won the Little Su 50-kilometer foot race this past February. In competition with the 44 male and female cyclists and skiers in the same race, he placed 24th overall, coming in ahead of every single skier. Last year he placed third in his first year running the Equinox Marathon, and this year he placed seventh at his inaugural Mount Marathon race. Not only that, he placed in the top five at the Government Peak and Bird Ridge climbs three years in a row and Knoya Ridge and Matanuska Peak twice in a row.

Although Christy has been in the news more, she felt the need to clear the record by saying she that “never in [her] whole life” has she beaten Ben in a race. At Crow Pass last weekend, Ben came in only 40 seconds ahead of her, placing 13th, but was misled on a five-minute detour and walked for at least as much time after falling and splitting his knee open.

“If I had come up on him, honestly, it would have completely thrown my focus, because I know if I come up on him in a race, something seriously wrong has happened,” Christy said.

Injury isn’t the only good excuse Ben has for not winning races every other week like his wife. Ben has worked full-time as an anesthesiologist for the last seven years, a job which sometimes requires him to take days off at a time from training. The family also has 3-, 6-, and 8-year-old sons (plus two Rhodesian Ridgebacks) to take care of.

Christy has had her own training interruptions with pregnancies, of course, and being a stay-at-home mom can have the same level of responsibility — if not more — as a full-time job.

“Ben’s never had to start over completely from scratch because he didn’t have kids,” Christy pointed out. “I’d start out with 3 mile runs, and they stunk. I felt like crap, my legs would hurt, my bones would hurt, my knees would hurt, I’d have shin splints — everything would hurt for a little while.”

Still, she runs.

“I think a lot of people associate all this pain with running because they don’t go about it the right way. They start out with way too much, way too fast, and then because it hurts they stop. They never hit that breakthrough where it actually changes over to ‘OK, now running is fun and it feels good and it’s actually benefiting my joints.’”

Ben agreed that there is a science to it.

“There are lots of studies showing that runners have a lower incidence of joint pain than non-runners and that, actually, running more is probably protective against knee pain and arthritis,” he said. “Time will tell but if you’re smart about your training and you’re biomechanically sound at the start of it, I don’t think you necessarily need to fall into what everybody thinks of runners, like ‘oh his knees are going to blow out.’”

There is less technical scientific evidence that inspired Christy to race in Alaska’s mountains, however.

“Probably the first moment where I thought, ‘OK I can really compete with whomever in the mountain racing scene’ was when I raced Holly (Brooks) at Bird Ridge in 2012,” she said. “I remember I was really excited to race behind her and see how she hikes and what she does differently, and I remember hiking behind her for a little bit and thinking ‘OK, even the Olympians, they put one foot in front of the other.’”

Christy grew up running and racing fast in Glennallen, then continued to Colorado State University where she saw Ben frequently on the Cross Country and Track teams. In 2003, when Ben finished his undergraduate degree in medicine, he and Christy got married and left Denver for Ben’s residency program at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Ben’s description of their love story was simple: “Two little kids who fell in love in college, and that’s it.”

When the Marvins moved to Alaska as a family in 2011, Christy was glad to be home for several reasons, but a big one was the upgraded quality of training from Minnesota.

“There was nowhere to train,” she said. “We had a 500-foot hill to do intervals on.”

Once Christy’s dad started running the Mat Peak Challenge, Ben got really interested.

“He just thought it was the coolest race because it was a real mountain race,” she said. “You know, it’s all a bunch of tough, grizzly looking Alaskans, so we were kind of inspired by that.”

Since then, the Marvins have drawn inspiration from mountain runners on a more personal level, citing the Kopsack family as role models.

“They’ve just done a good job of keeping their family close, I think, united by a common pursuit,” Ben said.

But what — or who — inspires Ben and Christy the most, they said, is spirituality.

“We feel like it’s so hard, in Alaska, to deny the existence of a God when you look out at all of the amazing things that he has created and that he’s given for us to be able to go and enjoy,” Christy said.

Ben quoted scripture to back up their faith and beliefs.

“It says that in the Bible that ‘you’ll see my fingerprints everywhere in the world,’” he said. “I think I see it most clearly out on the trail somewhere.”

Christy said that their faith is not specific to their family, either.

“You get people all the time that are looking for something to inspire them, or they’re looking for the best self-help book ever written,” she said. “I think to those people I would just say open the Bible and read it.

“Even if you’re not a believer or you’re not a Christian, you can find all kinds of inspiring verses and inspiring quotes that you can commit to memory and pull on and rely upon when you’re in your races and you’re at your lowest point,” Christy added. “There’s always been someone in history that’s had it tougher than you and that’s tried harder than you and been beaten down more than you, and when you look at those things it’s like, ‘OK, I can do this.’”

But in the long run, Ben said, running and winning races is “trivial.”

“Our main goal is (moving) toward eternity and raising our boys to be godly men, seeking first the kingdom of God,” Christy said. “‘All else shall follow.’”

Next on the racing docket for Ben and Christy is this year’s Mat Peak Challenge — provided Ben’s knee doesn’t give him too much trouble — beginning at 9 a.m. on Saturday.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.