JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. \u2014 The DONNA Marathon is this Sunday in Jacksonville Beach. Among the thousands of runners expected to compete, will be one senior citizen from the Orlando area.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s not only trying to hit a personal racing milestone, but also run for a special cause. <\/p>\n
>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<<\/a><\/p>\n Gloria Vasquez, 74, of Osceola County, will be making the nearly three hour trip to Jacksonville to run her 97th marathon on Sunday.<\/p>\n She\u2019s run in marathons across all 50 states before the age of 60 and she\u2019s working on making it to 100 marathons total. <\/p>\n She\u2019s done the Boston and New York City marathons multiple times. Vazquez even served as an Olympic torch bearer in 2002, an honor for her community service work. So what brings her to the Jacksonville for the DONNA?<\/p>\n [DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks<\/a>]<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m doing it for my sister who passed away of breast cancer, my very dear sister,\u201d Vasquez said. \u201cI like to see how these women survive \u2026 I admire how they were able to do the treatments, tough it out and here they are continuing with the marathon. They don\u2019t give up. They just keep going.”<\/p>\n Vasquez\u2019s sister Isabel Smith was only 62 when she died. <\/p>\n For the Vasquez, life has been a marathon. Vasquez fled domestic violence, immigrating to the U.S. from Colombia as a single mother, and opened her own spa business. <\/p>\n [SIGN UP: Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter<\/a>] <\/p>\n \u201cWhen I came here with my four kids, that was my goal, work hard, work hard to raise these four kids. Thank God, God helped me,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n Her secret to still running marathons at age 74? Vasquez said eating healthy and, \u201cI do 10 to 15 miles every weekend enough to be in shape for the marathon.\u201d<\/p>\n Vasquez said she wants to keep running as long as possible and make it to her 100th marathon. <\/p>\n Click here<\/a> to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, click here<\/a> to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and click here<\/a> to stream Action News Jax live.<\/p>\n Action News Jax Top Stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. \u2014 The DONNA Marathon is this Sunday in Jacksonville Beach. Among the thousands of runners…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136660,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[50380,6647,4528,66800,66797,66804,66801,22140,969,66798,15388,116,118,117,5729,1975,634,66802,66803,139,55141,628,1871,66799,66805],"class_list":["post-136659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-_florida","tag-boston","tag-colombia","tag-donna","tag-donna_marathon","tag-gloria","tag-gloria_vasquez","tag-god","tag-jack","tag-jack_zion_dakota","tag-jacks_beach","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news","tag-jacksonville_beach","tag-kissimmee","tag-local","tag-new_york_city","tag-olympic","tag-orlando","tag-osceola_county","tag-us","tag-vasquez","tag-zion","tag-zion_dekoto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}