Life Is a Marathon by Fitzgerald Matt

Author:Fitzgerald, Matt [Fitzgerald, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2019-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Five hours later, the doorbell rang at Dori’s house, a tastefully maintained Victorian in which old and new are blended just right (quirky original colonial door locks balanced out by a modern kitchen) where Dori and Nataki were now preparing dinner while I blogged in the living room.

“It’s Mike!” I caroled, leaping from my seat and skipping toward the foyer like a kid whose favorite cousin has just arrived for a sleepover.

I flung open the door and there he was: my high school best friend and former daily running partner, a man I’d last seen seven years before, when I ran my first Boston Marathon, and had last run with sixteen years before, in Central Park, on the eve of his wedding. Mike had given up competitive running at the same time as me, quitting the Oyster River High School track team in a show of solidarity after Coach Bronson booted me for gross insubordination. From there we went in very different directions with our running, Mike moving on to other athletic interests as I returned to the sport in a big way in my late twenties. A short stint of competitive lumberjacking at the University of New Hampshire was followed by a couple of seasons of rowing at the University of Rochester. Then came a mountain biking phase in San Francisco and an ongoing love affair with downhill skiing, which he shared with his wife, Alison, and their four children in (as fate would have it) Hanover, New Hampshire. Mike’s own running comeback began after my second tilt at Boston in 2016, which had somehow inspired my friend to try to qualify. And now here he was, weighing fifteen pounds less than he had the last time I’d set eyes on him.

“You look like a real runner!” I said, ushering him in.

A slight yet noticeable flinch preceded Mike’s verbal response (“I’m trying!”) to this greeting, as though I had called him fat instead of the opposite. Puzzling over his reaction, I led Mike into the kitchen to greet Nataki and to meet Dori. I offered him a beer and he declined. With a suit yourself shrug I popped the top off a single bottle and waved Mike into the living room, where we sat in adjacent vintage armchairs to go over the race plan.

“Let’s start with your goal,” I said. “What are you thinking?”

“I want to break three hours,” Mike said.

It came to me now why Mike had startled at the doorway. I’m not a real runner anyway. One month earlier, Mike had written these words to me in an e-mail listing his reasons for having decided to treat the Boston Marathon as a fun run instead of a race—“a victory lap,” as he called it. But since then Mike’s forty-six-year-old legs had shown flashes, more and more frequent, of the zip that had once powered him to a 4:24 mile. In his qualifying event, Mike ran 3:00:00—perhaps the most excruciating time a marathoner can possibly run. First Rome,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.