Students running Los Angeles (SRLA) is a running program where students aged thirteen to seventeen train for the annual Los Angeles Marathon. SRLA began in 1989, where a continuation high school teacher Harry Shabazian challenged his students to train for the LA Marathon and the experience changed their lives forever. Later, other teachers joined him and created the non-profit organization SRLA which helped lower dropout rates. Paul Traponi, a cofounder of SRLA, continues to visit every school that is participating in the program even though he has stopped training himself.
In all of the 34 years SRLA has been active, about 75,000 students have completed the Los Angeles Marathon with about 99% of students who started the marathon in 2023 all finished. Most of these students will be first generation college students. Almost every student that participates in the program becomes more academically driven, graduating from high school and having plans for college. Training for a big event not only makes them more physically strong, but also mentally strong, and they become more confident in themselves in their adulthood.
Here in John H. Francis Polytechnic Senior High school, we are the largest SRLA team alongside Lewis Continuation School. This team has three wonderful coaches leading our students. One of these coaches, Joshua Brown, was a former SRLA student runner that is now coaching the new generation. He first joined SRLA in his sophomore year in high school after being asked by one of his friends. Unexpectedly, he “fell in love” with running and the “camaraderie of being on the team and the accomplishment of fin
ishing the marathon.” He fell in love with SRLA as a whole. He remained in SRLA until he graduated his senior year. When he got hired as a teacher at Polytechnic high school, he saw another teacher, Luis Coronel, with a SRLA shirt on. Once he found out he was going to coach SRLA, he joined and coached alongside him. Coronel and Brown have been coaching since 2018, and they’ve had more coaches and students join them along the way.
In Polytechnic’s SRLA team, the majority are magnet students, including student and co-author of this article, Valeria Brambila, a junior that has participated in her three years of high school. Her initiative to first join SRLA was because the summer before her first year of high school, she decided she wanted to run the LA Marathon. Her brother, who is a Poly alumni, informed her about the program. She was one of the two only freshmen that joined SRLA for the 2023-2024 season. She has returned to SRLA for both her sophomore and junior year, while taking AP classes and online college classes every quarter. She finds time to study while in school, watching informational videos while running, and staying up late. Although this may not be efficient for everyone, Valeria has passed her AP exams and is a straight A dual enrollment student. Joining SRLA has made Valeria happier, as she is more fit than she was before and doesn’t feel as anxious anymore.
Since SRLA has been growing exponentially in the past few years in John H. Francis Polytechnic High School, there have been instances where there has not been proper funding. In the 2024-2025 season, four people on the team were not able to participate in the LA Marathon although they had been training for the entire season. The team was only able to provide reimbursement to two students for a total of $340. This season, the team is almost the same size as the previous season, but received less spots for the upcoming races. Please support our team and donate whenever donation events are held.
