Life's Challenges

 I think I mentioned once that right near the end of 1979, my next-door neighbor, and jogging partner, said one morning, quite casually, “Let’s run a marathon.” He sounded quite a bit like Mickey Rooney’s character in the old films, when he would say, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!”

It made about as much sense.

Yes, I had been jogging for nearly five years. Yes, I had shed over 50 pounds. Yes, my blood pressure was a steady and reliable 120/80. Yes, I had actually run 10 kilometers once without stopping. Yes, that was 6.2 miles, and over rough terrain. Yes, we were jogging, on average, five miles per day. Yes, I was a strapping 36-year-old, if you can believe that.

But a marathon is 26.2 miles. In a nod to Greek history, the first marathon commemorated the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield near the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C. According to legend, Pheidippides ran the approximately 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to some anxious Athenians. Not quite in mid-season shape, he delivered the message "Niki!" (Victory!) then keeled over and died. (https://www.livescience.com/11011-marathons-26-2-miles-long.html0.

Get that? He died. People die trying to run marathons, maybe not as often as the ones trying to climb Mt. Everest, but they do die. They expire. They fall down and achieve ambient temperature ere the ambulance arrives. They are referred to as “the late imbecile” by their spouses and friends. It makes no sense. Your body completely runs “out of gas” before it is over. They call that “hitting the wall.” I had no desire to experience the phenomenon. The very idea was ludicrous. Five years earlier I had been a wobbling slob. Further, I had failed at every sport to which an American child was subjected back then. Who was he kidding? I would choose to live a while longer.

“What marathon?” I asked.

“The Arkansas Marathon,” he said. “It will be in Booneville on March First.”

“March First? We can’t ready by then.”

“We could if we tried.”

“Well, I’m not going to try.”

“Come on. It’ll be fun.”

“No way.”

“We’ll move up to seven miles a day and be at ten a day by the end of the year. Then all we’ll have to do is work in some long runs after the first of next year.”

“You must be kidding.”

“No, I’ve started making some notes for a training schedule.”

“Well, erase my name. The very idea is ludicrous.” I used words like “ludicrous” when talking to him. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School and I thought it made me sound less like a country bumpkin that could be led around like a trained pig.

“I’ve already mapped out a seven-mile route,” he said. “We can start it on Sunday.”

“Take your seven-mile route and put it … uh … don’t assume collaboration on my part.”

“We’ll have to leave 30 minutes earlier than we’ve been leaving. That will still get us to work on time.”

“I don’t see how we could make it by March.”

“I knew you’d come around.”

“Where’s this new seven-mile route you’ve worked out?”

Thus began one of the strangest episodes in an already strange life.

Do you remember that life insurance
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