The 27th Mile

In the Boston Marathon there are many victors, and not all of them cross the finish line in first place.

Olympic marathoner Don Kardong once wrote, “Want to see how you’ll look 20 years from now? Glance in a mirror right after you finish a marathon.”

Dr. George Sheehan, a distinguished runner, writer, and physician, was once asked the difference between a jogger and a runner. “A race number,” he replied.

Chiseled in concrete on one wall was the line, “Run with patience the race that is set before us.” I wasn’t religious enough to know if this was a line from the Bible. (It comes, I learned later, from Hebrews 12:1.) But it spoke clearly and wisely to all runners, and especially to marathoners. Marathons are exercises in patience. Gratification is long delayed.

In your own races you have at least the illusion of control. But you can’t run your friends’ miles, which is why you worry for them. Running for yourself, you focus on the little steps right in front of you, and on those just taken. With friends, you see how far they’ve come to get to the marathon start, and you know how getting through 26.2 will change them in ways they don’t yet know.

When I ran I wanted to vanish — from work, from parenthood, from adulthood, from responsibility, from the confines of the indoors into the endlessness of outside.