Checked Off Shanna McCullough's Bucket List: LA Marathon

LOS ANGELES—Kenyan teammates Edna Kiplagat and Wesley Korir may have won, respectively, the women's and men's contests in the annual LA Marathon—he for the second time—and the cameras may have paid more attention to the mainstream celebs like Shia LaBoeuf, Sean Astin and Audrina Patridge who sprinted, ran, jogged or walked the 26.2 miles from Dodger Stadium to the Santa Monica Pier... but at least one former XXX star got her endorphins firing at full blast last Sunday as well: Shanna McCullough.

"It was a little hot and humid, which was no fun, but the route was fantastic," McCullough told AVN. "This was the first time they did this kind of a route: You go through Hollywood and Beverly Hills and Brentwood and Westwood and it ended at the beach where it was all nice and cool. All the roads were closed, so how many times do you get to run right down the middle of Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard? That was cool. It was fun to be able to see the city that way, and then they cheer you across the finish line, which is very exciting."

"I actually walked it a few years ago, and I thought, well, I just wanted to see if I could do it once," she added. "I didn't run the whole thing, but a good amount, and I was happy with it and I did it and now I can say I did it. And I wanted to prove I could do it before I turned 50, to prove that anyone can do anything they set their mind to."

The long-time XXX veteran had been slowly retiring from hardcore performing since the early 2000s, though recently came back for a non-sex role in Wicked Pictures' Tiger's Got Wood. The run was in part McCullough's own idea of how to celebrate her 50th birthday, but she started her quest much earlier.

"It's not something that you can do easily," she assessed. "I trained for close to a year, with serious training the last nine months; getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning and running in the dark and running long runs on Sundays and being really strict about eating right and doing all these things because you have to protect yourself from getting injured, especially when you're older. Your body's not the same when you're 50 as when you're 20. I recovered pretty well, though; I had some blisters on my feet and was a little sore and stiff, but I went to work the next day. It felt good to do something like that, that was kind of, well, I always wanted to try it and just see if I could actually go all the way through it. The hardest part is sticking to the training and then making sure you do your goals right. It was a challenge, but this is probably the only time I'll do it; I'll just think of something else for next year."