For One Foothill Man, a Final Race in a Year Full of Them

Christmas for the Felsenfelds will be a little hectic this year.

Sure, they'll wake up and open presents. But then Sam, the father, will have to get away to the track for a while to train for the marathon he will be running Sunday in Manhattan Beach. And because it's a marathon that he and his wife have personally organized, with about 100 people scheduled to run in it, there are plenty of last-minute race-planning details to be ironed out.

Plus, the kids have to be taken care of.

"I'm looking at my son, and I'm thinking he should not be doing what he should be doing right now," Sam Felsendfeld said over the phone Friday. "He's drinking from a sippy cup, and he has no idea that tomorrow is Christmas."

He was talking about Jack, the younger of the two Felsenfeld sons. Jack, 7, is autistic.

Even today, years after the diagnosis, thinking about his son's condition gets Sam mad.

"I look at him and I think he straight-up got robbed," Sam said. "It's not fair. I hate it. There's a lot of bad things in this world, but autism—that's my cause."

Sam has run more than 1,600 miles in 2010, as part of what he says is a "stunt" to both raise awareness about autism and raise money to fight it. Each week of the year has seen him compete in at least one marathon—some as far-flung as Anchorage, AK.

Sunday's Operation Jack Marathon will bring to a close Felsenfeld's campaign. He says his efforts have netted about $75,000 in donations, most of which will go to the charity Train 4 Autism. And with more than a thousand followers on Twitter and Facebook—not to mention newspaper and TV coverage across the country—he's made progress in getting people to talk about autism.

But for Sam, who transformed himself into a marathon runner after getting fed up with his overweight and unhealthy lifestyle at age 30, it hasn't quite been enough.

"You have these big dreams of, 'Oh, you're going to set the world on fire in a year,'" he said. "It doesn't really work out that way, but Train 4 Autism is a lot better off than it was. I thought we'd raise more money than we did, that we'd get more people than we did, but we still made gains. It certainly was worth it. If I had to do it over again, I would do it again—just better."

That's not to say he will be doing it again. The yearlong-packed regimen of training, traveling, running, working a full-time job and, of course, trying to spend time with his family has left him exhausted.

"This is a one-shot thing," he said. "I'm not going to run 61 marathons again."

"If someone would donate a million dollars to the charity," he added with a laugh, "Yeah, I would."

Barring that, though, after Sunday's race, he'll only run in occasional marathons. But his cause will go on. This coming year will see him leading up the South Orange County chapter of Train 4 Autism and helping with the group's national efforts. He may even write a book.

For now, though, the focus is on the race ahead of him. He said he's spent a lot of time imagining what that final leg will be like.

"It'll be fun, but when I'm running those last couple miles, I don't even know what's going to be going through my mind," he said. "I don't know if I'll be crying or running the fastest miles I've ever run. That's been playing in my mind for a while now—I just don't know."

The Operation Jack Marathon begins at 7:30 a.m. at Dockweiler State Beach. For more information, check out Operation Jack's website.