Setting the Pace of Life

The two women on the jogging track in Boyle Heights covered their noses.

“Ah, they’re burning the dead,” Maria Ruiz, 58, said in Spanish, her Nikes crunching in the early morning darkness.

“Oof, the smell,” said her jogging partner, Elena Ramsey, 55, who pulled the corners of her shawl and hood from underneath her headphones to cover her face.

At 4:30 a.m., as a police helicopter’s searchlight twirled overhead, the smoke was a relatively minor inconvenience along the track that wraps around a 128-year-old graveyard.

On this day, Ruiz chose to leave her broken broomstick, which she usually carries for protection, inside her 1982 Plymouth station wagon. But she clutched her rosary, which she kisses, in her left hand.

“I’m not afraid of the dead. The dead can no longer hurt me,” Ruiz said. “It’s the living I’m afraid of.”

Fitness centers are rare in the working-class Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights, so the community long ago created a health club out of the street.

For longer than most anyone can remember, people have used the 1.5-mile sidewalk around Evergreen Cemetery for exercise. A year ago, the city recognized how the sidewalk had become a center of Boyle Heights life by installing decorative streetlamps and a rubber surface along it, and formally naming it the Evergreen Jogging Track.

There are plenty of young joggers here, with lean-as-jackrabbit bodies, fixed gazes and take-no-prisoner strides.

But a large number are older women, many of them immigrants, like Ruiz and Ramsey.

They are busy most of the day, working and looking after their children, their grandchildren or other people’s children.

Ruiz began her daily workouts five years ago after learning she was diabetic and had high cholesterol. She hit the cemetery before dawn despite protests from her husband, who worried she’d be mugged. She started tentatively, mixing a slow-motion jog with long periods of walking. Soon, her pace picked up and she was striding past people along the route.

But the exercise routine that started as a way to get fit took on an urgency last year.

For Ruiz, the graveyard’s circumference became a place to run headlong from death.

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Ruiz and Ramsey are the first to say that trekking around the cemetery in the darkness of morning can be an adventure.

Sometimes the crematorium belches. Strange men have “flashed” women from behind their cars. Gang members occasionally glare. Still, the joggers prefer the graveyard to city parks, where there are plenty of trees and knolls for vagos -- good-for-nothings -- to hide behind at dusk and dawn.

Those who join Ruiz and Ramsey along the route are as likely to wear blue-collar attire -- utility shirts, work boots, slippers and uniforms -- as trendy sportswear, making it hard to distinguish those who are exercising from those who are using the sidewalk to get to work or school. Ruiz wears hooded sweatshirts and sneakers, usually with polyester pants. Ramsey favors bulky knit sweaters or jackets and shawls.

Ruiz met Ramsey a year and a half ago. Ramsey had confided that she was afraid of walking in the dark, so they decided to exercise together.

Ruiz said her mother taught her a valuable lesson about walking when she was a girl growing up in Mexico.

“She always said, ‘Mija, never walk with your hands empty,’ ” Ruiz recalled. “ ‘Always have your rosary with you, and at the very least, grab a stick.’ ”

So she usually carries the broken broomstick.

A year ago, a woman came running around a corner, crying and saying that a naked man had tried to grab her.

“I told her, ‘Why are you afraid? Don’t be afraid. There’s two of us, and he’s one person,’ ” Ruiz said. “I told her, ‘Let’s go back, and if he tries to hit me, you hit him, and if he tries to get you, I’ll hit him.’ ”

The two women returned, and Ruiz shook her broomstick at the man, who was sitting in a car. He drove off.

“I told her, ‘See, if you show fear, they’ll try to frighten you,’ ” Ruiz said.

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Evergreen Cemetery is one of the oldest in Los Angeles, opening in 1877 in what was then a rural outpost east of the original Los Angeles pueblo. The sidewalk along the cemetery has been attracting joggers and walkers since at least the 1940s. Around that time, Nadine Diaz’s paternal grandparents used to walk around the graveyard for exercise.

When Diaz’s own parents were dating in the 1960s, they took evening strolls around Evergreen Cemetery, past old monuments bearing the names of the city fathers who built Los Angeles: Van Nuys, Lankershim, Hollenbeck and Workman.

Later, when Diaz was a baby, her grandparents would push her in a stroller past the eucalyptus and palm trees, beside the ashen shapes of tombstones, granite angels, obelisks and mausoleums.

In the 1980s, Diaz began caring for her grandfather, Antonio Diaz. The walks around the cemetery became part of their routine together. Back then, he frequently complained to the City Council about the cracked and tree-buckled sidewalks around the graveyard, but nothing was ever done.

“We would walk together, he with his cane in his old age,” she said. “He still tried to walk, up until he was totally blind and he couldn’t do it anymore.”

Antonio Diaz died in 1988, but his granddaughter continued to jog around Evergreen Cemetery. She and a group of community residents finally persuaded the city to fix the pavement, add lighting and formally dedicate the area as a jogging track.

“I almost cried,” said Diaz, 42. “I thought about my grandfather, and I only wished this had been done years ago.”

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Ruiz and Ramsey were also excited about the improvements, especially the green streetlamps that made it easier to see. They arrived in the chilly air every morning, feeling each stride was making them healthier.

Last April, Ruiz’s husband, Gilberto, a 66-year-old retired gardener, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. At first she was in denial, even begging her husband’s doctor not to report his condition to the Department of Motor Vehicles so that he could keep his license.

But eventually she channeled her worries into her daily workout, concluding that she needed to stay healthy to care for him.

“I worried I would abandon my husband. I love my children, but they’re young and they can fend for themselves,” she said. “But he needed me. I would live for him.”

Three months later, Ruiz had her yearly breast exam. A mammogram showed a possible problem. An ultrasound confirmed she had a tumor.

Doctors removed her left breast, and the early morning pilgrimage to Evergreen Cemetery stopped. She began chemotherapy. Her friends didn’t know when she would be back.

A month later, Ruiz stunned them by showing up at the track. She was weak but ready to work out.

“When they asked, ‘What happened, what happened? Can you walk?’ I said, ‘Yes, I can walk,’ ” Ruiz recalled.

She did only one lap that morning.

“I felt dizzy,” she said. “I wanted to run, but I couldn’t.”

Over the next few weeks, one lap turned into two. Then three. On good days, she was back up to her old workout of five laps.

But it wasn’t the same. Her breathing was often labored. Even her ears ached; she had to wrap a rubber band around the neck of her sweatshirt hood to keep it from flapping against her.

Her friends noticed her discomfort.

“In the past, she would stay with us for a while” and then move ahead, setting a faster pace, said Soledad Lopez, another morning walker. “She said, ‘I have to do my time.’ Now she really struggles. We tell her to slow down, for her health. But she says, ‘It’s for my health that I have to walk.’ ”

During chemotherapy, Ruiz often forgoes the track -- she’s either exhausted, nauseated or depressed.

“I wanted to keep going, but my legs couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “I moved from the bed to the sofa, and that’s how I spent my time.”

After one round of chemotherapy, she told Gilberto to tell the doctor she didn’t want any more treatment. “I thought, if I’m going to die, why should I keep sacrificing myself?”

But Gilberto encouraged her -- not just to continue chemo, but to keep up the exercise he once opposed.

“He would say, ‘You’re tough. You’ve always been tough. Keep being that way.’ ”

Ruiz’s energy improved, and she returned to the track.

At the beginning of her recent jog with Ramsey, Ruiz said she could not do a brisk pace.

But an hour into the jog, as the sun was beginning to emerge and more joggers were showing up, Ruiz’s gait turned into a semi-trot.

“See, see, she wants to run,” Ramsey teased.

To die, Ruiz said, would be to abandon her husband.

“I’m going to live. I tell the divine providence, ‘Let me live. Let me heal, so that I can be there with him when his mind starts to get lost,’ ” Ruiz said, wiping a tear.

“I tell my husband, for me, sitting is a punishment.”

The sun higher and her walk over, Ruiz said she was dreading another round of chemotherapy. But she said she feels thankful.

“I have a lot of faith in God. I’ve put myself in his hands,” Ruiz said. “Yes, they took a part of me. But here I am, thanks to God, walking.”