(Updated with official times)

A local guy made good Saturday morning on Pleasure Island.

Good time, that is.

Orange native and former Lamar cross country runner Drew Bean repeated as the Pleasure Island Half-Marathon champion, bettering his time from a year ago with a 1-hour, 11-minute, 27-second run. He ran nearly 4 minutes faster than last year.

Bean was coming off an attempt to earn a bid to the U.S. Olympic marathon trials, but came up short.

“The best way to describe it is, the trials are like the playoffs,” said Bean, 27, a Houston resident who graduated from Little Cypress-Mauriceville. “Making the Olympics is like the World Series. I’d like to make the playoffs one year for the Olympics.”

Brian Clark of Orange was second at 1:20:43, and Joe Huyett of Beaumont was third at 1:22:58.

Bree Fontenot of Bridge City won the women’s division at 1:23:49. Haley May of Orange came in second at 1:37:15, and Catherine Madden of Beaumont was third at 1:43:50.

Bean ran on three straight Southland Conference championship teams at Lamar (2007-09), and his experience has kicked in.

“I had quit running for two or three years after college,” Bean said. “I had some injuries and got frustrated with it, walked away from it completely. … I couldn’t help myself, so I got back into it. Another year along with the training has helped.”

Almost 400 runners, race organizer Richard James said, took on the trail from the Pleasure Island RV Park over the Martin Luther King Bridge and back racing in one of three disciplines: the half-marathon, or 13.1 miles; the 10-kilometer, or 6.2 miles; or the 2-mile event. The event is part of the Texas Bridge Series, which also holds events in Galveston, La Porte and Kemah.

Italian Virginia Leonardi won the overall title in the 10K in 40:54 and repeated as the women’s champion. Now living in Beaumont, she moved to Port Arthur last November with her husband, who works for General Electric, and had her 21-month-old son Tomas enjoying the Saturday sunrise with her.

“Usually, I prefer the flat course because I like in every race to increase my PR (personal record),” Leonardi said. “I like track. I like racing the track.”

But the run over the bridge gave runners like Groves native Jason Hanley a beautiful view.

“The challenge to it is, it’s such a long climb,” said Hanley, who now lives in Beaumont. “I’ve done a lot of trail races, too, and typically the climbs go up and down. You’re continually changing that, whereas here, you’re going up for three-quarters of a mile or so, so it gets to burning on you after while.”

Said Beaumont’s Kimberly Palacios, the women’s 10K runner-up: “It’s more difficult than running on flatland, that’s for sure. It’s hard to gauge how fast you’re supposed to go without killing yourself.”

Mary Kathryn Gibson, 10, of Nederland attempted to take down a world record for the 2-mile run in her age division, but came up short by 15 seconds with a time of 12:04. Her brother Travis, 13, won the overall 2-mile division Saturday in 11:25.

“The going out was a little slow because they were going into the wind, but they made it back up coming back in,” the Gibsons’ father, Rick, said. “They probably lost 10 seconds on the way out.”

Mary Kathryn was 2 seconds shy of the world record two weeks ago in a race at Texas A&M, her dad said. She has until her birthday Jan. 7 to break the mark.

But for Bean, he continues to add another chapter to his comeback.

He left Lamar’s cross country team after his junior year to run marathons on his own in Boston and Houston. After injuries slowed him down, he did lots of  weight training with his older brother and had gained 45 pounds at one point.

“I ended up getting my goal on the bench, and when I looked up at it my 25th birthday, I decided, this isn’t what I wanted to do,” Bean said. “I started hitting the trail and never looked back. That was April 1, 2014.”

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I.C. Murrell: 721-2435. Twitter: @ICMurrellPANews