Matt Fitzgerald - Life Is a Marathon: A Memoir of Love and Endurance

All of the events described in this book, many of which were recorded contemporaneously with their happening, are faithful to the authors recollections. In a few instances, time has been compressed for the sake of narrative flow. Some names have been changed.

RUNNERS OFTEN SAY that a marathon doesnt really begin until youre twenty miles in. What they mean is that, unless youve completely blown it, only the last 6.2 miles of the race are truly testing and determinative. If the essence of a marathons challenge is running on tired legs (and it is), the first twenty miles are prologue, not the thing itself.

Something similar can be said of life. If a human life begins factually at birth, it does not begin symbolically until sometime later, when events transform a mere existence into a story. Take me, for example. I was born on May 5, 1971. But the story of my life, as I tell it, does not begin until seventeen years later, on May 21, 1988, which is the day I discovered I was a coward.

The scene of this unfortunate revelation was Hanover, New Hampshire, a bosky little college town in the western part of my home state. I was there with my fellow Bobcats of Oyster River High School to compete in the Ninth Annual Hanover Invitational, a big regional track meet. Around three oclock on a mild but overcast afternoon, after most of the other events had been contested, an official raised a megaphone to his lips and, in a strong Yankee accentall nasal As and silent Rsspoke the words that precipitated my undoing as a young athlete.

First call, boys thirty-two hundred meters. First call, boys thirty-two hundred. Competitors should warm up and make their way to the start line for check-in.

A colony of bats took wing in my gut as I rose from my seat on a grassy area outside turn three of the host schools state-of-the-art, eight-lane, rubberized track, half hearing muttered wishes of good luck from a couple of teammates. My legs went noodly and my tongue turned to cotton.

Running competitively over long distances is a lot like dangling by your fingertips from a cliffs edge with certain death below, except its your entire body that feels as though its losing its grip. No runner finds pleasure in this doomed sense of strained weakening, but some young runners handle it better than others. Those who possess what exercise scientists refer to as a low tolerance for perceived effort tend to quit the cross country team after the shock of their first hard interval workout or race. At the other extreme, a special few runners seem not to problematize these unpleasant feelings at all but instead just accept them, operating under the attitude that, as legendary Australian running coach Percy Cerutty put it, Its only pain. And then there are those who neither flee to another sport nor shrug off the pain but instead, for whatever reason (and theres really no way to tell if one is predisposed), develop an immoderate dread of this unique brand of suck, a fear so intense that it leads eventually to avoidance behaviors ranging from reduced effort (your coach might not notice the difference between 95 and 100 percent, but