Ron Bindi was hit with a sad coincidence when he arrived in Anchorage to run his first marathon in 1999. He was a member of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training and was raising money in honor of one of his Roseville elementary school students who had been diagnosed with leukemia.

When Bindi called home to say he had arrived safely in Alaska, he was told his aunt had died the day before - of leukemia. "She'd kept it from me," he says of his aunt, Flora Petri of Chicago. He ran that race in both her honor and on behalf of his student, Melanie Waters, whose disease later went into remission and who is now a healthy junior-high student.

Bindi finished that first marathon in four hours and 13 minutes, and returned the next year, again on behalf of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. "My aunt's death motivated me to do it again," he says. He took seven minutes off his time.

Last year, because of all the juvenile diabetes he witnesses as a gym teacher at Huron Park and Patton elementary schools, he decided to switch charities. Bindi ran his third annual fund-raising marathon in Kona, Hawaii, in June on behalf of the American Diabetes Association.

There's no way to explain just how hot that course is. Trust me. The marathon course goes out and back on the same blacktop road made famous in the Ironman Triathlon. It is surrounded by miles of black lava, without a bit of shade. You get out in the middle of the black lava field, the sun baking down, nothing to provide even a nanometer of shade for as far as the eye can see, and it becomes this HOT, surreal, parching, baking test turning quickly to ordeal. Surface temperatures climb to 135 degrees and more.I did the race in 2000. I love heat. Love running at high noon. I've gone out in 104 degrees to get a second run of the day in just to say I did it, and I've never experienced anything close to the last 10 miles at Kona.

The night I did it I ran into a veteran marathoner from Tampa, a retired gentleman who runs at noon every day in those very humid summers of central Florida. And he'd seen nothing like Kona. In Florida, at least there are trees and grass and flowers - living things that ameliorate the heat. There is not that pure furnace blast of equatorial sun radiating off black lava.

Anyway, this veteran marathoner gets to about the 20-mile mark, back from the lava, now, and along the ocean. And he comes to one of the small beaches that dot the Kona coast, sees that gorgeous turquoise sea, the waves breaking, a palm tree or two blowing in the wind, and he thinks: "That's it. I'm done. I finished running. I am going to sit me down in that water and cool off and enjoy the rest of my day."

He stops running, staggers off the road and down the beach to the edge of the water, takes off his shoes, wades a few feet out, sits down and ... and, is promptly hit by a riptide wave that knocks him over and begins pulling him out to sea, channeling him toward a break in the reef that guards most of the little bay. He could get smashed on the reef or sucked down and drowned. He fights and fights and fights, panicked, not swimming parallel to the beach like you should to get free of a riptide, but trying to swim directly to shore. Weaker and weaker he gets, not easy considering how weak he was to begin. Somehow, finally, he breaks free, makes it to shore, pulls himself up on the sand and just lies there, gasping, his heart freaking out of his chest.

"If it ain't one thing that'll get you in Kona, it's another," he says that night on the way back from the Team Diabetes victory banquet. His victory wasn't in having finished, it was in still breathing. His story is so vivid and his punch line so perfectly timed, everyone around him is roaring with laughter.

So, running on a very challenging course in Kona last summer, Bindi battled high heat and humidity to finish in 4:15. "At the halfway mark, I was on my way to 3:40, but then the sun came up over the mountain, and it got hot."

Alternating walking and running the last eight miles, knowing he had $6,000 in pledges on the line, Bindi kept going. "I struggled. It got pretty brutal, but I was going to finish in one way, shape or form. I wasn't going to quit."

Those kinds of conditions might have been enough for most people, but Bindi, a former football player, says he began getting the bug in October to train for another marathon and signed up to run in Kona, again, and again on behalf of Team Diabetes.

Bindi, a Royal Oak resident, isn't your typical marathoner. His age, 48, isn't unusual for a long-distance runner, but his size, 210 pounds, is.

Bindi encourages his students to run, too. The kids run at least five minutes at a time during their one day of gym class each. They can run more if they want, with Bindi awarding a trophy to the class that compiles the most minutes.

The kids all do the President's Fitness Challenge mile each April. That same month this year, kids at Huron Park, Patton and Lincoln elementary schools also held a walk and run to raise money for the Diabetes Association.

The kids solicited pledges ahead of time, then from April 15-19, depending on their gym schedule, walked or ran around the neighborhood.

Last year, Bindi's kids at Patton did the fund-raising on a trial basis and raised $6,000. The program was then expanded to three schools this year.

None of that money counts toward the $4,200 Bindi must raise for his return trip to Hawaii. His major fund-raiser each year has been a golf outing at Fern Hill Country Club in Clinton Township. The two-person scramble will be on May 18 this year.

"This isn't about me," says Bindi. "I want to make the kids aware of fitness. Some of the kids I teach, unfortunately, are diabetic. And some of the other teachers are diabetic, too. It's me being able to contribute something."

Team Diabetes has already done marathons this year in Disney World in January and Rome in March. It goes to Kona in June, Dublin in October and Bermuda in November. For information or to pledge money to either the Roseville kids' walk or Bindi's Kona Marathon, call Mary Riegle at the Diabetes Association at (888) 342-2383, ext. 6702.

Last issue, I paid tribute - at least I thought it was a tribute, others thought otherwise - to one of the true running originals, George Geck. Geck got even - the item in the column reminded him he'd forgotten to send an invoice for some work he'd done at my house recently.

So, I got a bill for $85 and a note in response to my claim that I was gaining on him and was gonna beat him somewhere, some time, on the roads this year:

"The only way you'll beat my ass in '02 is to hire Tonya Harding's bodyguard to whack my knees."

My challenge has been answered by one of his own. Tonya, get me your phone book.