A little Kookie goes a long way.

hen you’re young and in great shape, running a marathon is a breeze. W When you’re old and in great shape, running a marathon is less of a breeze but a breeze nonetheless. But did you ever wonder what it’s like to run a marathon when you’re old and in crappy shape? Well, if you did and you want to find out the answer, just keep reading.

It all began in late May, with me on my couch, coffee mug in hand, Pippy the cat on my lap, contemplative (that is, | was contemplative, not Pippy).

Between sips of joe and pats of the pet, something strange and obscure nagged at me. Something I had to do? Something I forgot to do? Someone I wanted to see? Someone I never wanted to see?

Suddenly it dawned on me. This was the 38th anniversary of my enlistment in the Navy. It was also roughly the 38th anniversary of when I started running, since the only reason I started was to get in shape for the service.

Back then people didn’t run—at least not in any significant numbers. The only runners were high school and college ones, a few nuts who jogged for health, and even fewer nuts who ran marathons.

So when I began running, I did it as might’ve been expected—in a nutty, haphazard way—Converse All Stars on my feet, no clue about nothin’ in my head. I just started running one day, ran the next day, and the day after that . . . and kept running. Then, before I knew it, I’d gone from someone who got winded walking downstairs to a guy who could run up to eight miles effortlessly.

© Michael Hughes

It was a tribute to numbskull perseverance at its best. But it stood me in good stead, as six years after I started, I coasted across the finish line at the Boston Marathon, fulfilling a lifelong dream.

But that was 30-plus years in the past. And while I had maintained good fitness for years, I eventually got lax—so much so that this last year I hardly got any exercise at all. And it showed: at 5 feet, 4 inches, and 175 pounds, if I looked like any kind of athlete at all, it was a geriatric sumo wrestler—minus the top knot and epicanthic folds.

So if that’s the shape I was in, why did I decide to run a marathon? Believe me, I’ve no clue. For all I know, Pippy the cat put the idea in my head by interspecies telepathy, which, when I think about it, was no weirder than me wanting to run a marathon to begin with.

I picked the New Hampshire Marathon in October, which gave me four months to train. The way I figured it, I’d use the last two months for serious training, the

second month to get in good pretraining shape, and the first month to waddle my way into decent enough shape to begin pretraining.

And now an analogy: great fitness is to running as requited love is to life. In both, the pain of an ugly reality is buffered.

With running, if you train long and hard enough, you’ll fly over the asphalt, endorphins flowing like the wide Missouri, and it’ll be over relatively fast. With requited love, if you lose your job, drop your transmission, and break your front tooth, everything will still be A-OK, as long as Honey Babe still loves you.

In literary terms, it’s the difference between the works of D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. One is lofty romanticism, the other, industrial-strength realism. And when I went for my first run after my monster layoff, I felt like the protagonist in a Hemingway novel, one he never wrote called A Farewell to Legs.

I expected my muscles and knees would hurt and I’d look like an escapee from the Old Geek’s Home, but I was sure of one thing: I wouldn’t get winded. No matter how out of shape I’d ever gotten, I’d never lost my aerobic capacity. In fact, the only time I got winded running was on a bitterly cold February day 12 years ago when on a slow jog, I suddenly found myself gasping. It turned out that I had three clogged coronary arteries. After a triple bypass and a year of working out, I was in good shape again. But I hadn’t stayed in shape—as I was about to find out.

A humble beginning

After I brushed the cobwebs off my shoes and sweats, I trundled out to the road and started trotting slowly. I figured I’d do an easy 2.5-mile out-and-back. I was right about my muscles and knees hurting—that started right from the start. But I was wrong about my breathing. After about 200 yards, I started to get winded. And as I’m sure you guessed, it didn’t get any better. Matter of fact, I never got to the 1.25 mark but turned around after a mile, feeling more ridiculous than I ever had.

It wasn’t being out of shape that got to me; it was having underestimated just how out of shape I was. This got reinforced by other folks as well.

A salient example: One day I was in town and ran into a lady I’ve known all my life.

“I saw you yesterday and waved,” she said. “But I don’t think you saw me.”

“Where were you?” I asked.

“I was driving out of town, and you were walking toward it.”

For obvious reasons, I didn’t bother to tell her I wasn’t walking toward town; I was running toward it.

A few days after that, I had another whiz-bang of an interaction.

At this point, I had not timed myself because I knew I was slow, figuring I averaged 13-minute miles, and didn’t want to be reminded of it. Anyway, I was sitting in the local café, sipping my coffee, when one of our cops came over.

“Hey,” he said, “I clocked you on radar when you were jogging the other day.”

“Nothin’ better to do?” I said.

“Obviously,” he said. Then he added, “You were burnin’ it up out there. We clocked you at 4 miles an hour.”

Knowing I was running fifteen-minute miles was a sobering experience.

And now that I was a sober and recovering runner, what was I going to do? The same thing every sober person in recovery should do—take it one day at a time. Or in my case, for the first week or so, I took it one mile at a time.

When I started running again, I felt lousy, which was not only logical but expected. But I had been down before, and I knew if I just kept plodding on, day after day, everything else would get better. So plod on I did.

In the middle of week two, I went for a 3.5-miler. Because I live in the mountains, a flat course is impossible, which is fine with me since hill running makes me stronger. My 3.5 is a loop that goes downhill for about two miles and then turns into a monster uphill for about 300 yards—a great test of fitness. Unfortunately, I flunked it.

Oh, I didn’t stop to walk, but about midway though the uphill, I felt like someone had a death grip on the back of my sweatshirt. When I crested the hill and hit the level, I was relieved, but it was no cause for celebration: I was gasping, and my legs had turned to jelly.

I wondered if I was ever the guy who had run hills so well that at Boston I never even knew I was on Heartbreak Hill till I’d floated through it. The answer had two parts: one, I once was that guy, and two, I was no longer that guy.

A humbling continuation

After that, my training became a simple matter of pickin’ ’em up and puttin’ ’em down and slowly increasing the distance each day. It’s even more boring to read about than it was to do, so I’ll spare you the details. Fortunately, by week eight, I’d gained strength and endurance, had dropped some adipose, and was running between four and eight miles a day at a sub-12 pace. Oh, where was that cop and his radar gun now?

In short, though it seemed impossible, my training was right on schedule. Now all I had to do was maintain it, increase my longer runs to 12 to 14 miles or so, and I’d be in fine fettle by M-day.

It was a fine theory. Unfortunately, I hadn’t considered two hard realities—my knees. For years my left knee’s iliotibial band has bothered me but never so badly it stopped me from running. But a couple of weeks after I’d started increasing my mileage, it began to really hurt. I wear a strap on that leg, which had always kept the pain at bay, but no longer. Now it took at least a mile at full hobble before I warmed up enough to jog somewhat smoothly. Though I looked like a pathetic

old gaffer and the pain increased, I managed to finish my runs. I also started icing my knee and taking ibuprofen and was grateful my knee hurt only as much as it did, knowing things could get worse. And they did.

In week 10, my right knee started to hurt. I knew it wasn’t my IT band, but I’d no idea what it was. The pain was sharp, hot, under my kneecap, and radiating to the inside of my leg.

What to do? Three things. One, ice it. Two, get another strap. And three, not go to a doctor.

Why not go to a doctor? Simple. I figured any doctor in his right mind would tell me to cancel my marathon plans.

But what would I want with a doctor in his right mind, since I’m not in mine? Otherwise, I never would’ve considered running the marathon in the first place. So I instead did what I’m best at—I went into world-class denial and decided to keep on keeping on.

I didn’t do it heedlessly, though. I cut down to four days a week and limited my runs to between four and eight miles.

Everything stayed pretty much as it had until week 12, when I developed a click in my left knee. Actually, it was too loud to be a click—it was much more of a clack. It happened every time I straightened my leg, and it was accompanied by a sharp but brief pain.

Immediately, I Googled “clicking and clacking knees.” The most common diagnosis was that the knee’s cushioning had eroded and the noise was bone snapping on bone. Most sites referred to it as “runner’s knee.” It was great news. I didn’t have jogger’s knee, walker’s knee, or old fart’s knee—I had runner’s knee! So while maybe nothing else about me was a runner, at least my left knee was.

As you might expect, my problematic patellas threw off my walking stride. I didn’t notice it, but almost everyone else in town did, and their typical greeting changed from “How ya doin’?” to “How come you’re limping?” Once I told them, I discovered something amazing: everyone is an expert on runners’ knee injuries. This includes people who’ve never run anywhere in their lives, including to the bathroom.

Not only did they have an opinion about my knees, but they all had the same opinion, namely that’s what I got for running on pavement for 40 years. I never tried to rebut them, though. What good would it serve to tell them, yeah, if I hadn’t ever run I might have had perfect knees, and I might also have had a perfectly fatal heart attack.

But for any aches, pains, and problems that dogged me, I was going forward with my marathon training. Maybe I took off more days than I wanted to, but I figured it gave me more time to heal. Plus, through surfing the web, I founda heavyduty knee strap made by Cho-Pat, and I ordered a pair. They didn’t eliminate my knee pain, but they minimized it, which was a great relief and confidence builder.

© Michael Hughes

Of course, I could have cross-trained. The Adirondack Mountains, where I live, are ideal for hiking and biking, and I enjoy both immensely. But while cross-training would improve my strength and aerobic capacity, it wouldn’t give me the trauma of road running. And although strength and aerobic capacity are necessary for a marathon, for hackers like me the vital issue is how well I can handle that four-letter word, P-A-I-N.

So while whizzing around on my bike getting all sorts of pain-free benefits was a delicious temptation, it wasn’t one I indulged in. Instead, I kept pounding the pavement, and the pavement kept pounding me.

Then, before I knew it, it was the night of October 4, and I was driving into White River Junction, Vermont, to spend the night with my friends Kookie and Long Lenny. The next morning the Kook and I would drive to New Hampshire, and I’d be given abundant opportunity to see how well all my theories and practices on marathon training worked—or didn’t.

Thad an oldies station on the radio, and the last two songs before I pulled into K and L’s house were “I Need A Miracle” by the Grateful Dead and AC/DC’s classic, “Highway to Hell.”

Were they omens? I don’t believe in omens. I do believe in luck, but that also wasn’t an issue. Either my luck would hold or it wouldn’t, and either way I had no control over it.

The issue was I had two hurting knees and insufficient training. And how well I’d do was best stated by the great mountaineer Jim Whittaker: “You can never conquer the mountain. You can only conquer yourself.”

So the logical follow-up was: would I conquer myself?

I figured if “Loss” Vegas took book on it, at best the odds would be 50-50.

But I know myself. And I knew that no matter how the marathon went, as long as I had any energy and chutzpah left, the odds of me quitting were nil.

Of course that was no guarantee of finishing. Then again, nothing is. But if I couldn’t tell myself, “Can do,” I could tell myself, “Never say die.” So even if I couldn’t conquer myself, I wouldn’t cop out on myself, either. To some people, that might not be very reassuring, but to me it was all the reassurance I needed.

Minimal involvement

Emest Hemingway was a minimalist writer. Al Hirschfeld was a minimalist caricaturist. Chet Baker was a minimalist trumpeter. I am a minimalist marathoner.

What makes me a minimalist? Just this: I try to get the maximum distance out of the minimum training. Some people might consider me less minimalist than plain old lazy, but I won’t accede to that.

I mean, get real. Anyone who trains for a marathon—even a wee bit—then shows up and actually tries to finish it is not lazy. Crazy? Maybe. Deluded? Perhaps. But lazy? No way. And this is especially true today, in America’s Golden Age of Lethargy.

I wasn’t always like this. Back in the day, when I was 30 years younger and 30 pounds lighter, I put in my share of 65-mile weeks and turned out some decent times.

Given my youth, training, and a worldview filtered through rose-colored aviator shades, finishing a marathon was pretty much a sure thing. I started at the end of the pack and ran the first nine miles slowly. Then, depending on how I felt, I either picked up or slowed down my pace. After that, I stayed at my comfort level till I hit the 20-mile mark, at which point I was strong and experienced enough to know exactly what pace I needed to ditty-bop across the finish line.

But now, in my seventh decade, the marathon is at the outer reaches of my resources—physical, mental, and emotional.

I’ve run continually since 1969, but I’ve cut back in distance, speed, and frequency. I might say something cutesy like “pain is my copilot,” which while

true, is just same-ole same ole to any other geezers in my Asics. But it leads to the Old Marathoner’s Conundrum (OMC): you need to train for a marathon, but the old runner treads a fine line between enough training to succeed but not so much that he gets trashed in the process.

Translated into nitty-gritty, the OMC limited me to 30 to 35 miles a week, and after a summer of my faux training, I’d slimmed down some and speeded up a bit, but I was still in no condition that any sane man would attempt to run a marathon in. Then again, we’re not talking about a sane man—we’re talking about me.

Musing and mulling

I mulled over this as Kookie and I drove to Bristol, New Hampshire, for the New Hampshire Marathon. I mulled over something else as well—namely, the cumulonimbus clouds that were cruising overhead like enemy dirigibles. The weather peeps had predicted the usual 30 percent chance of rain, but it looked like it could swing either way, what with the rare splotches of blue sky and sunlight. The temp was in the low 40s, with a high in the low 50s expected.

The temperature didn’t concern me. I live in the Adirondack Mountains, where cold is a fact of life. Rain, however, would be a different story—especially cold rain. There was no way I could finish a marathon in it. As the 3:30 runner of my youth, I probably could have, but now, as a sexagenarian schlepper, fergit it. To keep running for five-and-a-half hours under optimum conditions would require all my resources; adding rain to the equation would exceed them. If the skies decided to open up and give me the cold shower I was constantly told to take during my adolescence, I knew I’d have to quit.

At Newfound Memorial Middle School, I picked up my registration packet. It was trouble free and so, logistically, was the entire NH Marathon. In fact, in addition to being efficient, the NH Marathon is as friendly as it gets. It lays claim to having more volunteers than runners, and I believe it. Everywhere I turned, some local was offering his or her help, and each seemed genuinely glad to do it.

I realize there are high-status marathons—Boston and New York immediately spring to mind. But they’re not my kind of race. I’m a hick, always have been, and always will be. The idea of running in a 20,000-person pack in a city of millions is as appealing to me as drinking a gallon of warm spit. Yeah, sure, there’s 26.2 miles of constant cheering and support, which is fine if you want it. But I don’t.

To me, running is not a team sport, nor am | a team player. I’ll either finish the marathon or I won’t, but I’ll do it on my own. Others can encourage my efforts, just as they can discourage them, but there’s only one person who owns the results—good, bad, or indifferent—and we all know who that is.

And that’s what I love about running in general and running marathons in particular. To paraphrase William Ernest Henley, in the marathon, I am the master of my fate and the captain of my soles. (Sorry. It was too good to resist.)

Duly registered, I changed into my running outfit: shorts, T-shirt under a longsleeved pullover, and over that, the piéce de résistance—my Team Dope T-shirt.

Ah, yes. Team Dope.

For the past dozen years, I’ve written a weekly column for the local newspaper. The column’s name is The InSeide Dope, a two-, three-, or maybe even four-way pun. After hundreds of columns, it was only natural that my official town nickname became “Dope.” Of course, that’s fine with me, since I was the one who started it. But beyond that, when people call me Dope, I know it’s only with good intention, since anyone who truly dislikes me would call me a whole lot worse, and not to my face, either.

Anyhow, back in the summer, when I announced I was going to attempt a marathon, a bunch of my friends said they’d be there to cheer me on. Deeply touched by such loyalty, I went to the local T-shirt shop and ordered a dozen of his custom-made finest in assorted colors, with “Team Dope” in big Art Deco letters. They turned out wonderfully—which is more than I can say for Team Dope itself. Due to excuses of all sorts—some probably even valid—on race day, Team Dope consisted of only Kookie and me. It was, I admit, a disappointment, but not a wholly unexpected one. Besides, gains can come out of losses, which in this case they did, as I was spared finding presents during the Christmas rush—at least for 10 other friends.

Pain, the ultimate four-letter word

At race time, we were called to the start. As everyone milled around, stretched, jogged, leaped, and cavorted, the usual hubbub of excitement filled the air. But truth be told, I wasn’t part of it. OK, I was a little excited, but I was doing my best to contain it. I didn’t know exactly what lay ahead, but I had a fairly clear idea. It was going to be one long, hard, painful grind. And while excitement might’ve gotten me through the first hundred yards, it wouldn’t do squat for the remaining 26 miles.

Some kind of prerace instructions I couldn’t hear were shouted, and suddenly we’re off. I’m at the back of the pack, trotting comfortably and of course slowly. My strategy, such as it is, is to go exclusively by my stopwatch—run 15 minutes, walk five, and try to maintain it throughout. If I can, I figure I’ finish in 5:30 or so.

Finish in 5:30? Oh, how times have changed! When I was in my running prime, I declaimed about “so-called runners” who clogged up the marathon courses. With the arrogance only youth can muster, I’d proclaim that anyone who couldn’t finish in four hours shouldn’t be allowed to enter in the first place. That was then. And now I’m hoping for a 5:30? Looks like the times aren’t the only thing that’s changed.

For the first 12 miles, my strategy holds, which I expected. I’ve always calculated my races based on the collapse-point theory, which I read somewhere in the 1970s. It states that your maximum distance at your training pace is three times your daily mileage over the previous eight weeks. That’s why I was dogmatic about having 65-mile weeks when I was a serious marathoner. So with my summer’s 30-mile weekly average, I’m on cruise control for the first dozen miles. It’s also why things are about to change, and not for the better.

l expected to start hurting after 12 miles, and I did. But what I didn’t expect was where I’d hurt. My knees were my main concern, and oddly enough, they were holding up well. Sure they hurt, but nowadays they always do, whether I’m running or not. However, after 12 miles of running they hurt far less than I’d imagined.

No, I was hurting in a place that’d never hurt before: the soles of my feet. And when I say “the soles of my feet,” I mean the complete soles of both feet. Because it was both feet, and the pain was generalized, I figured it wasn’t a stress fracture or anything injurious. But what it was, I had no idea. In fact, I didn’t figure it out till a few weeks after the race, when it suddenly hit me: it was due to the new insoles I’d gotten a couple of weeks before the marathon.

A friend had recommended them to me, and I got fitted at an area sports shop. On my runs with them before the marathon, my feet didn’t hurt; then again, those runs weren’t very long. But when the pounding increased, so did the pain. Months after the marathon, I was told by someone who’d worked in that shop that the guy who fitted me was a skier, and when it came to fitting runners, he didn’t know

© Michael Hughes

his insole from a hole in the ground. But of course none of that mattered while I was in the marathon, so let’s get back to that. The pain was pronounced but tolerable at 12 miles, but by 16, I was in trouble. When each foot hit the asphalt, it was blasted with pain. The pain didn’t radiate—it hit my entire sole, instantly. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Or more exactly, the only thing I could do about it was keep going and see if it lessened. It didn’t.

At 18 miles, my balance was off. Because my feet hurt so much, I was stumbling rather than striding. For the first time in my running career, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to finish. I was afraid of something else as well—falling. My balance was so screwed up, I knew if I stepped on one of the pebbles or acorns that dotted the shoulder of the road, I’d fall. And if I fell, that’d be the end, because I just didn’t have enough oomph to recover from a tumble. Luckily, that part of the course was on a back road with almost no traffic, so I moved closer to the middle of the road, which was blessedly bare.

Somehow I lumbered my way to 20 miles. By then, in addition to my feet hurting, everything else hurt as well, and as an extra bonus, I was getting nauseous. Since there were refreshment stands every two miles and I’d drunk at each one, I knew I wasn’t lacking either water or electrolytes. Pure and simple, the nausea was caused by the pain. And now I’d reached my marathon moment (MMM).

MMM is that point in a marathon when I’ve gone farther than any intelligent person would, but the finish line seems impossibly far away.

Although I’m mathematically inept, I think of the MMM in mathematical terms, somewhat akin to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein was talking about time, but I always thought if he’d run marathons, especially if he’d run them in as lousy shape as me, he would’ve formulated the theory of relativity of distance. Essentially, it’d state: after 20 miles, though the distance increases arithmetically, pain increases exponentially.

At 20 miles, in addition to my feet being royally screwed, my knees hurt, my breathing was off, and my stomach was sore. And according to the relativity of distance, with six miles to go, I was going to pay some serious dues . . . if I lasted.

But this formula, like a whole bunch of them, while correct in one sense, doesn’t take into account the most important consideration of human endeavor— the human will. If fully actualized, it can push us beyond any limits of what’s considered possible, a la Roger Bannister running the first sub-four-minute mile and all other noble achievements of our species.

Whether my will could drive me to the finish line, I didn’t know. I only knew I’ve always taken great pride in never having DNF’d. I’d rather see DOA after my name than DNF, so as painful as jogging on was at that point, it was less painful than the idea of quitting, even though quitting seemed like a real possibility.

The road to enlightenment versus the road to the finish

Then a weird thought came to me, if any thought at that point in anyone’s marathon can be considered “weird.” I thought of my friends in 12-step programs and their struggles to understand the idea of a “higher power.” Not being either religious or spiritual, it always seemed like a waste of time to me. A few years later, it dawned on me that if there were no higher powers, then by definition, I

was God, or at least a god of some sort. And if that were true, then I’d never have screwed up as many times or as badly as I have. After that, I found myself trying to define a “higher power,” if for no other reason than to gain some perspective on my place in the world.

I never made it a full-time search, and in truth, I went about it in my usual half-baked fashion. But one day while I was reading a book on Buddhism (idly, as might be expected), one word jumped out at me: “good.” And that was it: my higher power was goodness. If I pursued goodness in my life, I could only live a better life, for others as well as for myself. Suffice it to say, I haven’t arrived, but I’d like to think I’m not quite as much of a jackass as I was before. (The vote’s still not in, though.)

And at mile 21, my higher-power musings turned to the marathon—namely, the one I was currently trying my level best to finish. And what came to me was that after 21 miles, with five more to go, my higher power was pain. I couldn’t avoid it, I couldn’t control it, and I sure couldn’t transcend it. The only thing I could do was accept it and endure it. One of Buddha’s four noble truths is life is suffering, which at 21 miles makes perfect sense. Another of his noble truths is the cessation of suffering is attainable, which at 21 miles makes no sense at all. No matter, I just keep picking them up and putting them down, with no idea of how to follow the road of enlightenment but with at least some idea of how to follow the road to the finish line.

Suddenly, a Mark Twain quote popped into my mind: “There are three kinds of people—commonplace men, remarkable men, and lunatics.”

After that, I had a less philosophic issue to deal with—my pace. I’d slowed down considerably by mile 18 but had been maintaining my 15 minutes of jogging and five of walking. But after mile 22, I could no longer maintain that prerace strategy. What to do? Simple: Change my strategy, which I did. I jogged 12 minutes and walked eight. This lasted for a couple of cycles, till I was too hammered to do it, so I decided to bag any numerical formula and just let my body decide the appropriate jog/rest ratio. So I jogged till I no longer could, then I started walking till I could jog again. This “system” was as basic and crude as it gets; it was also effective. After what seemed like a mere decade or two, I came out on Lake Street, which meant the finish line was a mile-plus away. I would’ve breathed a huge sigh of relief, if I could’ve breathed. Instead, I kept on plodding.

It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t impressive, and it wasn’t fun, but it’s what got me across the finish line. And, ultimately, what else is there?

On the cover of the March/April 2010 Marathon & Beyond was this title: “Boston: The Marathoner’s Rite of Passage.” When I first saw that, I thought of me at the end of the New Hampshire Marathon. And what I thought was this: Boston isn’t the marathoner’s rite of passage—every marathon is. At least it is for me, and I think it is for a lot of others as well. Each marathon presents different

challenges; none of them is a sure thing, and finishing them—regardless of time and place—is an incomparable triumph.

After I got my medal and my breath back, I looked at the clock: 6:19:57. I was almost an entire hour slower than I’d wanted. So was I disappointed? Of course not. Before the race, a 5:30 seemed slow but respectable; after I finished (after almost being finished, myself), a 6:20 was as good to me as a new world’s record.

Amazingly, for all the misery of the race itself, I recovered quickly and fully. My feet stopped hurting, and my joints and muscles were fine. When I woke up the next morning, I wasn’t the least bit stiff or sore. 1 don’t know why that was, but I think being so slow and walking so much was a blessing in disguise. I just wasn’t fast enough to injure myself.

One of my favorite Frank Shorter quotes is “You don’t run 26 miles at five minutes a mile on good looks and a secret recipe.”

My response is: I didn’t run 26 13-minute miles on good looks, because unlike Frank Shorter, I never had any good looks to begin with. But also unlike Frank Shorter, I did have a secret ingredient. It was my pal Kookie.

I didn’t mention Kookie’s role in my finishing the marathon because I understand the essence of good timing is to save the punch line for the end. So here it is:

Kookie didn’t just wave goodbye at the start and then go drink coffee in the local bistro till I returned, either carrying my shield or being carried on it. Nope, not her. Instead, she was a one-woman pit crew, cheerleader, and guardian angel.

She was at every rest stop, shouting encouragement. Then, in the later stages— of both the marathon and my collapse—she got all the volunteers to cheer me on as well. And so it went throughout, with her popping up at the oddest times and, oddly enough, at the times I most needed her upbeat and offbeat presence.

So after my earlier rap about me finishing a marathon on my own, am I saying Icouldn’t have finished it without the Kook? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

But is it true? Could I have made it all the way without her? Who knows?

Iknow only this: my next marathon will not even be attempted without Kookie

as my crew. eB