Huntington Park runner joins the list of finishers of the top six marathons in the world

With the upcoming celebration of the Summer Olympics 2024 in Paris, fans worldwide are ready to cheer for their favorite athletes who aim for the gold medal. Antonia Guzman wants to watch swimming, gymnastics, and track. As a runner herself, she finds this a very exciting moment.

Guzman is not a professional athlete, but she surely has an excellent track record. The Huntington Park native has completed over 40 marathons, including the six major marathons in the world: Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York. Last year, she officially became part of the Abbott World Marathon Majors Six Star finisher family. Since the beginning of the Abbott races in 2016, there have been only 2,547 finishers representing 84 countries. 

Guzman still finds her accomplishments impressive, having started running in 2011 at the age of 35. Little did the now 46-year-old know that what started as a favor would turn into a passion. 

Guzman, an English teacher at Legacy High School in South Gate, recognized she wasn't an avid runner. In fact, she never saw herself as an athlete in any sport. In her job, she would often work extra to prepare for her classes the next day. Word went out among the students that a teacher was staying after school. A group of students interested in starting a Students Run LA (SRLA) group at Legacy High School approached her, asking for her support. 

SRLA's main goal is to train students for the Los Angeles Marathon. However, in order to be approved, they needed a coach. The job was not appealing to school staff because it was not paid, it was after school and it required commitment to training three to five days a week, after school and some weekends. 

Initially, Guzman declined the invite, not only because it overlapped with her after-work school activities, but also because she had zero experience running. 

A few weeks later, Guzman saw the same group of students and asked them how the running group was doing. They said there was no running group because they hadn't found a coach yet. Then they asked her again to be their coach. Unenthusiastically, she accepted but made it very clear she would not be running. She would be there only to take roll and watch them do their thing.

She started coaching a group of about 30 kids, and few weeks into the training, as she was marking their laps on her clipboard, she was also trying to be a team player by cheering them on. 

"I was encouraging them, saying, 'You can do it!'" she recalled. "And one of the kids passing by said, 'So can you!' That hit me hard."

It was then that she realized she needed to lead by example. That evening, she went to the shoe store to buy running shoes.

Initially, she ran with the young athletes to show them she was a team player. But little by little, she started liking the training. These feelings became more intense as the training increased to Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and sometimes Saturday or Sunday. 

Guzman said running helped her immensely to overcome and reflect on her emotions. She was going through a complicated divorce, and running gave her a way to think, de-stress, and learn to let go.

"Running helped me to think that divorce is not the end of my life but the opportunity for a new beginning," she remembered. 

Guzman ran her first marathon in Los Angeles in 2012 with the SRLA group. She said it was an impactful moment and something she never thought she could do. That year, she began a passion she didn't know she had. 

"When I started running I realized that I was doing it for my own mental and self-care," she said. "Now, I don't see life without running." 

Since then, she has run at least three marathons a year as well as many smaller races. This summer alone, she ran a marathon in Alaska and will do another one this Saturday in Seattle. 

The hardest part is to step outside

Guzman said that when she started running, she knew very little about races outside of Los Angeles. Eventually, she learned about running groups and more marathons, including the Six World Major Marathons. These marathons are very popular but also expensive. Not everyone can finish them either because of the lack of funding or running time. To join, runners must finish the marathon in a certain amount of time, enter a lottery, and/or do charity work. 

In 2016, after running the Chicago marathon–one of the Six World Majors–Guzman aimed to finish the other five marathons. She didn't have the money to travel overseas or the qualifying time to be accepted in some marathons like Boston but that was not a deterrent. 

"I set on this mission to finish all six," she said. 

Her goal was to finish in 2021, but due to the pandemic, she put that goal on hold and she finished in 2023. 

Leading by example

Guzman was named the most athletic in the Legacy High School yearbook for two consecutive years. She cherishes this title but also finds it very funny because, in her early 30s, she would have never imagined earning it. 

Her average time for running a full marathon is between 3 hours, 45 minutes, and 4 hours, but when she runs the L.A. Marathon, she runs with SRLA students for the whole marathon and follows their timing. She recalled that in this last marathon, one of the students got hurt in mile three, and she motivated her to continue even if it meant walking. It took them seven hours to finish, but they did it. 

"We teach the students that if you are going to start, you are going to finish," she said. "Things are going to get hard, you may feel uncomfortable, it will start hurting, but we have a goal. We are devoted, we have a goal, and we are going to follow it through."

She finds it very pleasing to see former students who continue running after graduating high school. She sees them joining other marathons or running groups.

In her experience, Guzman realized that the biggest challenge is getting out the door. 

"We put so many reasons on our heads of why we can't finish something," she said. "But if we put on our shoes and go out to walk for five minutes, that gets the wheel going. The most important part is to start and stop comparing with others." 

All Six World Marathons completed by Antonia Guzman: 

• 2016-Chicago
• 2017-New York
• 2018- Boston
• 2019- Berlin
• 2021- London
• 2023- Tokyo (it was canceled from 2020-2022)