76-year-old Charles Barrena has accumulated nearly 275 race
t-shirts
GILROY – Before it happened, Charles Barrena was not much of a runner.
Sure, he had ran some while playing football – first while growing up in Detroit and then while stationed in post-World War II Japan with the U.S. Army 9th Corps.
In his mid-40s, he even took a few Gavilan College exercise courses that included rather lengthy jogging tests.
For the most part, though, running was simply an occasional recreation for Barrena.
Then a tearful 1979 came along.
It was a year when that occasional recreation suddenly came to mean a lot more.
Twenty-five years ago his wife of 27 years, Virginia, passed away of a sudden brain aneurism at the age of 48.
“She was here one day and gone the next,” Barrena recalled.
They raised three children in the Gilroy house they purchased in 1956, but the children were grown by the late 1970s. Two were married and one was away at college.
Barrena had retired as a colonel in the Army Reserve and as a teacher at Brownell Junior High. And now, his once-vibrant home was all but empty.
“I was pretty much all by my lonesome,” Barrena said. “It was a pretty bad time.”
So when a friend asked him to run in the popular Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco, Barrena took him up on the offer.
“I guess in my mind, I was kind of looking to finish it as a memorial to my wife,” he said.
Barrena not only finished – but just kept on going.
He started adding more and more races to his annual schedule, including the hometown Garlic Run. He even joined a local running group, the Gavilan Joggers and Striders.
“It was a part of my recovery,” Barrena said. “It was a way to get going again.”
By 1983, he was back in school – pursuing a doctorate in education at the University of La Verne.
He was also back in love.
After meeting university secretary Linda Ames, Barrena asked her to attend the Garlic Run.
Now he usually ran a 10K in 45-48 minutes and a mile in just under eight minutes. But that wasn’t going to be good enough this time.
Wanting to making a good impression, Barrena turned up the motor – completing his first mile in just over six minutes.
“And that did me in,” he recalled with a chuckle.
Only a few hundred yards from the end of the race, Barrena took a tumble and was down 15 minutes while the medics administered him oxygen.
Not to be deterred by mere breathing problems, Barrena got up and somehow made it to the finish line in an excruciating 62 minutes.
Was Linda impressed by this obvious show of manlihood?
“I was terrified!” she said.
Nevertheless, the two were married in 1984 and have been ever since.
And Barrena’s been jogging ever since, too. At the ages of 59 and 60, he even competed in a pair of 26-mile marathons around the Carmel area.
Now 76, Barrena estimates he’s competed in around 325 races – and he’s got the T-shirts to prove it.
Nearly 275 racing shirts are stacked in his garage and in drawers and closets all over the house.
“I kind of get a good laugh when I look at some of the ones I got back in ’79,” Barrena said. “Back then they were all mediums.
“Now when I go, I’m needing those XL’s.”
Other things have changed with age, too.
In 1990, Barrena retired after nine years as vice principal at El Robley Elementary.
In racing, he runs exclusively 5K races and usually shoots for something around a 12-minute mile.
After running in the Bay to Breakers nearly every year for two decades, Barrena called it quits there after the 1998 field hit 120,000 and it took him 19 minutes to get to the start line
Barrena is finding life’s not always easy in the oldest age bracket, either.
“You know you’re old,” he said, ” when you’re looking around and worrying about all the young 70 year olds in the field.”
He still blows by the youngsters, though – winning three of the four races he entered this year, including last month’s Reek Run in Gilroy.
Perhaps his success should come as no surprise, though.
Nearly every morning, Barrena gets up and either jogs three to five miles or bikes six to nine miles. It doesn’t matter if he’s in Gilroy or not – Barrena almost always scouts out a place to exercise on vacation.
On a recent trip with his wife to Cancun, the beach was the place for stretching and running.
“To me, it’s just relaxing,” Barrenas said of his daily routine. “It kind of empties my mind.
“The plan is to keep on doing it until it’s not possible anymore.”
That time doesn’t appear to be anytime soon.
After a recent physical, Barrena received a clean bill of health from his doctor and was told he had an excellent chance of seeing the age of 90.
For some 76 year olds, making it to 90 is a slow, painful struggle.
Not for the ever-active Barrena.
Morning by glorious morning, he’s simply taking it all in stride.
