TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS AFTER I quit running forever—at 6:55 A.M. on March 19, 2017, to be precise—I pointed an iPhone at my face and pressed a virtual button on the screen labeled “Go Live.” My few friends around the world who were awake and on Facebook at the time, and who chose to tune in, saw me standing under a gray sky in dawn light with a mild case of bed head, not alone but in a crowd of men and women, many sporting running caps, all facing the same way. Eddie Money’s “Shakin’” blared from unseen outdoor speakers.
“I’m on the start line of the Modesto Marathon with my brother Josh,” I said, shouting hoarsely above the din.
I panned the phone until Josh entered the frame, sporting a red Nike running top and a three-day beard.
“Heeeeere we go!” he said, teetering toward me until his nose was almost touching the lens.
“The weather is good,” I continued, swinging the camera back to me. “The mood is jolly. For me this is the first of eight marathons in eight weeks. I’m going cross-country in search of the magic of the marathon. More to come.”
Four minutes later, we were running.
What can I say? I was wrong. I did run again. Lots. Since 1998, when I returned to the sport of my youth, I have completed more than forty marathons plus countless shorter running events, a few ultramarathons, and more than a dozen triathlons, including one Ironman. In a typical day, I spend two hours working out and several more hours writing about running and other endurance sports, which is my job. If a palm reader had shared a vision of this future with the eighteen-year-old me who quit running forever, I would have demanded a refund. Nothing could have seemed more unlikely at the time. Except this: that I would one day grow to accept, embrace, savor, and even crave the very suffering that ruined running for me in high school.
Over the past twenty years I have become a connoisseur, of sorts, of this unique brand of suffering. The pain of endurance racing is to me now as wine is to the oenophile. What seemed a featureless monolith of unpleasantness in my adolescence has evolved into a universe of many dimensions (perceptual, emotional, cognitive) that combine in novel ways in every race. Just as no two wines taste the same to the master sommelier, whose palate also never stops gaining in sensitivity and refinement, I could run a marathon a week for the next one hundred years and never suffer in precisely the same way twice, nor fail to come out unaltered.
When I got back into running as an adult, I wanted two things. One was to realize the athletic potential I had failed to realize in my youth—to run the best race I was capable of. The other was to defeat the coward inside me, whose fault it was that I had not run more successfully the first time around. Progress toward these goals did not come easily, especially in the marathon, a race that thwarted me again and again and thereby became something of a personal white whale—a concrete symbol of what I wished to conquer. I gave extraordinary quantities of time and energy in this cause, more than any mere hobbyist could easily justify, but I did not see my training and racing as a hobby. A coward on the racecourse is a coward off it. My pursuit of the perfect race was nothing less than a quest to become The Person I Want to Be. Twenty years into this journey, I can say without hesitation that I wouldn’t take back a single minute I’ve invested in it. To the extent that my relationship with the suffering of endurance racing has changed, I have changed.
There’s nothing unique about my experience; every longtime marathoner can tell a similar story. In the middle of the twentieth century, the great Czech runner Emil Zátopek said, “If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon.” To anyone who hasn’t run a marathon, this statement must seem a little over the top. A different life? Really? But those who have crossed one or more marathon finish lines receive Zátopek’s promise with a nod of recognition.
Even non-runners understand something about the marathon. “Life is a marathon” has become such a commonplace that rappers have been known to use it. Most people take it to mean that life is long and difficult. But anyone who has actually gone the distance knows this equation can also be flipped around: A marathon is life—a simplified, compressed, and intensified copy of life. And therein lies its power. To run a marathon is to practice life and to practice for life. Marathons serve humans in much the same way flight simulators, which assault trainees with every possible crisis, one after the other, serve aircraft pilots. Because life truly is long and difficult, it demands endurance, fortitude, patience, resilience, and long-suffering. The marathon develops all these fundamental human coping skills.
Other types of endurance races also have the power to change people into better versions of themselves, but the marathon has a special magnetism, a singular mystique stemming from its deep history. With origins in a legendary battle fought in Greece in 490 B.C., the marathon has become a byword for testing one’s mental or physical endurance. “Life is an Olympic-distance triathlon” might be equally true, but it just doesn’t have the same sparkle.
In 2016, Sheree Henderson, a runner from California, described in a personal essay for Women’s Running how running helped her overcome the lingering trauma of childhood sexual abuse, concluding, “When you see how you can physically turn around due to consistency and hard work, it’s confirmation that you… can turn around emotionally, mentally, and spiritually as well.”
Holocaust survivor Sylvia Weiner overcame the psychic wounds of her horrendous wartime ordeal by running marathons. “Running saved my life,” she has said. “Without running, my life would have slipped into some bad times.”
Through running, Mike Brannigan defied doctors’ prognostications for his life with severe autism, becoming a high school graduate and a popular teammate (not to mention a sub-four-minute miler) rather than a ward of the state.
Marshall Mathers, better known as the rapper Eminem, used running (fourteen miles a day on a treadmill!) to beat a drug addiction.
Countless amputee war veterans have used running to feel whole again, often with assistance from organizations such as the Challenged Athletes Foundation that serve as a pipeline from the front line to the start line.
The Students Run LA program steers at-risk teens away from the usual fates by training them to run the Los Angeles Marathon. It works.
Girls on the Run harnesses the transformative potential of running to build self-confidence in young girls. Ditto.
Psychiatrists are increasingly prescribing running and other forms of aerobic exercise instead of drugs to treat clinical depression.
The Back on My Feet program lifts men and women out of homelessness—homelessness—by turning them into runners.
Whatever it is a person looks for in the marathon, he or she usually finds it. Biased though I may be, I believe running marathons is possibly the single most reliable way to stimulate personal growth in the modern world. And if I’m right, does this not say something profound about the human condition? Our very best scientists and thinkers—whether or not they are runners themselves or have any interest in running—ought to be studying the magic of the marathon.
In the meantime, there’s me. I’ve been fascinated by the marathon ever since I failed spectacularly in my debut, after which, instead of vowing “never again,” I vowed to master the distance, seeing in it a way to move past the wimpiness that marred my high school running experience and that continued to tarnish my self-image long afterward. It took me the better part of two decades to complete this mission, but even that hard-won fulfillment did not end my fascination. And so, at the age of forty-five, on the very day in November 2016 when I finally ran the race I had always hoped and believed I had in me, the race that harpooned my personal white whale and redeemed the act of cowardice I committed on a soccer pitch in Hanover, New Hampshire, almost thirty years earlier, I decided to travel America in search of the magic of the marathon—not the science of it so much as its human essence.
The whole thing came together very quickly. In the four months that followed my decision, I came up with a name (the Life Is a Marathon Project), found a sponsor (Hyland’s, a Boston-based maker of homeopathic products), created a Facebook page, chose a charity partner (the Treatment Advocacy Center, which works to remove obstacles to the treatment of serious mental illness), signed up for eight marathons scattered throughout the United States on successive weekends, scheduled book signings between marathons to help pay the bills, and, of course, ran a lot.
The Life Is a Marathon Project kicked off with the Modesto Marathon in north central California, a race I had completed twice before, not because I love Modesto so much but rather because I happen to live two towns over in Oakdale and can sleep in my own bed the night before. I persuaded my brother Josh to do it with me, confident the fraternal bonding experience would supply an interesting angle on the marathon’s magic. Three years my senior, Josh was my approximate equal as a runner when we were young, but he had taken a different path in life and was struggling against a host of challenges to pull off a middle-age comeback. These included his job as a nurse practitioner serving the underserved in Salem, Oregon, his responsibilities as a husband and a father to two preternaturally energetic young boys, susceptibility to injury and illness, and a nebulous mélange of health issues—chronic fatigue, moderate depression, insomnia, and food sensitivities—that seem to be common in people who had difficult childhoods. (An intense and sensitive boy, not to mention the firstborn, Josh had needed a kind of nurturing that our father, who carried demons from his own painful boyhood, just wasn’t ready to give him at twenty-five. Tom did much better with me and our younger brother, Sean.)
Josh’s long-term goal was to qualify for the Boston Marathon. He made great progress toward this objective in the latter part of 2016, doing his most consistent training in ages and ripping off a 1:39 half marathon. If he’d been able to sustain the trajectory he was on, he would have stood a good chance of running a sub-3:25 marathon five months later in Modesto and punching his ticket to Boston. But a double whammy of bronchitis and Achilles tendonitis over the winter dashed these hopes, forcing him to dial back his goal to merely finishing the Modesto Marathon and to defer his qualifying bid for another time.
Prior to these setbacks, Josh had wisely planned to take the week of the race off from work (and from his zoo-like home life) and hang out at my quiet house in the country to rest up for his first marathon in thirty years. He flew from Portland to San Francisco and from there took a train to the East Bay, where I picked him up. When I spotted Josh amid the crush of passengers approaching the station exit from the platform, my mouth fell open. He looked not exactly fat but fattened, as though he’d spent the twelve weeks since I’d last seen him on a foie gras farm rather than training for a marathon. And since when was his hair so gray?
“I seem to have picked up some kind of bug,” he announced cheerfully as I took the backpack off his hands. “I feel a little off.”
“Remember that time you didn’t feel a little off?” I said. “Yeah, me neither.”
The next morning, after a breakfast of eggs and turkey sausage (Josh doesn’t do well with carbs), we stepped out my front door to tackle our last long training run before the marathon, an easy ten miler. Within three strides I was two strides ahead. When I looked back at Josh I pictured an old diesel locomotive, straining against rust and inertia to build momentum. Unable to resist the opportunity to indulge in a bit of brotherly hazing, I transitioned from running to Groucho Marx–style speed walking, making a show of being able to keep up with him in this absurd fashion. The stung look in his eyes made me regret the joke, and I switched back to running, pledging inwardly to do nothing more in the days ahead to rattle my brother’s confidence.
Our route consisted of four laps around my neighborhood, each lap ending with a short climb up a gentle hill that rose forty feet over a quarter mile. On our last ascent of this glorified speed bump, Josh began to unravel. I watched in rising alarm as the color drained from his face and neck. Near the top, he lurched abruptly off the sidewalk, dropped to all fours on a patch of grass, and vomited copiously. I stood over him in silence, shaking my head. How the hell was this man going to run 26.2 miles six days from now if he couldn’t even run half the distance today?
Stomach emptied, Josh wiped his mouth with his shirt and hauled himself back up onto his feet. Our eyes met. I knew exactly what he was remembering, and I knew he knew I was remembering the same thing.
The Chocolate Cake Incident.
It happened in the summer of 1987. Josh had recently completed his freshman year at Hobart College and had even more recently completed his first marathon, the Lake Ontario Distance Classic, easily qualifying for the Boston Marathon with a time just under three hours despite modest preparation. I was a rising junior at Oyster River High School, having earned All-State honors in cross country and track as a sophomore. On the weekend of July Fourth, the whole Fitzgerald family—Mom, Dad, Josh, Sean, and I—trooped down to North Kingstown, Rhode Island, to visit our mother’s parents, Stewart and Dorothy Sandeman. Per tradition, Grandma baked a chocolate cake for the occasion. For some reason, Josh and I thought it would be a good idea to go for an evening shakeout immediately after devouring a hearty dinner plus dessert. Midway through the run, as we were cresting a hill not unlike the one in my Oakdale neighborhood, a horrid chicken-and-chocolate chowder blasted into the day through his gaping piehole.
That fall, instead of signing up and training for Boston, Josh put running on the back burner to focus on his studies, a 4.0 grade point average at Hobart having enabled him to transfer to the Ivy League, where he could no longer count on being the smartest person in the classroom to turn in the finest essays and the most flawless exams. At Penn, Josh’s reduced activity level conspired with a newly discovered weakness for Philly cheesesteaks to bring out a previously hidden potential for corpulence that, once unleashed, proved forevermore resistant to re-leashing. Although his best days as a runner lay ahead of him, specifically in his midthirties, when a rare confluence of motivation and good health carried him to success at race distances ranging from 5K to the half marathon, the comeback was cut short by a sudden swerve into marriage, nursing school, and child-rearing. I couldn’t argue with my brother’s priorities, but I yearned to see him run again, knowing how hard he fought for physical and mental well-being, and knowing what running can do for a person.
“Are you okay?” I asked Josh as he steadied himself after his spectacular reprise of the Chocolate Cake Incident (or the Eggs and Turkey Sausage Incident, as I suppose we’ll call it), thinking, Well, at least he’s running again.
“We’re on to Cincinnati,” Josh said.
Another person in my place might have heard this statement as a baffling non sequitur, but I did not. Three years before, our beloved New England Patriots suffered a devastating loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on a Monday night, a rare drubbing that dropped the Pats’ record to two wins and two losses in the early part of the 2014–2015 season. At the postgame press conference, the team’s famously surly head coach, Bill Belichick, answered nearly every question he got with a mumbled, “We’re on to Cincinnati,” New England’s next opponent. Belichick’s point was that he wasn’t interested in dwelling on a bad game, believing as he did that a short memory for failure is essential to ultimate success. Subsequent events proved him right, the Patriots winning ten of their next twelve games, including the 2015 Super Bowl, and ever since then Belichick’s prickly deflection has been a refrain in my family, repeated anytime the need arises to shrug off a loss in life. What do you say when you back your car into your own mailbox or when your second grader gets the whole household sick for the third time this winter or when you show up at the wrong airport for an international flight—or indeed, when you throw up your breakfast 9.75 miles into a 10-mile run six days before a marathon? We’re on to Cincinnati.
“Well played,” I laughed, relieved to see Josh’s color returning. “Let’s both just pretend this didn’t happen.”
After dinner that evening, Josh and I sat down in the family room to “solve the universe,” as we like to say.
“What does running the Boston Marathon mean to you?” I asked, gulping from a bottle of IPA as Josh nursed a glass of water.
“Well, it goes back to what I wrote about in the first post in my journal,” he said. “Do you remember it?”
I did. Eleven months before, Josh had created a Facebook page to document his crusade for Boston qualification. In the introductory post, he wrote, “It feels like there’s a bit of unfinished business in our family, one last journey that needs to be completed. I’m still running, but my health is not what it used to be, my body not so young anymore. Yet I feel like I need to rally, to get myself back on track, to finish the journey.”
The journey Josh needed to finish started thirty-four years earlier, on April 18, 1983, when Josh was fourteen, I eleven, and Sean ten. The sun rose unseen in Madbury, New Hampshire, on that drizzly Monday. Despite the weather, the whole household was up early, and by seven o’clock the five of us were buckling seatbelts in a van driven by Mr. Marshall from up the street. Two hours later, in the sleepy colonial village of Hopkinton, Massachusetts, Dad leapt out the front passenger door to take his place at the very back of a crowd of runners awaiting the noon start of the Boston Marathon, among the other numberless “bandits.” The author of three published novels, he was working on a new fiction about a man haunted by demons from a rough childhood (much like him), whose response to learning he has Lou Gehrig’s disease is to train for the Boston Marathon—his way of finishing life on his terms. People run Boston for many reasons; my father’s was research.
After leaving Hopkinton we rendezvoused with a family friend, Dori, who lived locally and was able to direct Mr. Marshall to a few good viewing spots. When we saw Dad at the halfway point in Wellesley—impossible to miss in red shorts, a red cotton T-shirt, and a red headband—he was all smiles. Six miles down the road in Newton, no longer smiling, he stopped to chat, a choice he seemed to regret when he tried to start moving again. At Cleveland Circle, just over a mile from the finish line, Josh and Sean and I (by prior arrangement) broke from the curb and ran with our father, now shockingly altered, his size 14 New Balance 990s sticking to the road like combat boots in battlefield muck, his gaze cast yearningly ahead in the manner of a lost navigator squinting for land.
Many years would pass before I understood what Dad was going through. In the moment it was all I could do to keep my head from exploding. Seventy-two hours earlier I was calculating fractions in Mr. Emerson’s room at Oyster River Elementary School. Now here I was striding freely down the middle of a major urban boulevard, watched and applauded by thousands of spectators, many of whom mistakenly assumed my brothers and I had gone the whole distance (“Oh, look at the kids!”). From my youthful perspective it seemed as if I had blinked and become Elvis, above the law and able to cause mass hysteria just by showing up. But what I felt most powerfully during those enchanted ten minutes was pride in my pops, who had been a hero to me even before this day. Unlike his war service and the other great feats on which his legend was built, however, this one was happening before my very eyes. It didn’t matter that he weighed close to two hundred pounds and would complete the marathon more than ninety minutes behind the winner and that he didn’t even have a number on his belly. As far as my brothers and I were concerned, our father was the toughest man alive, and his marathon proved it.
Despite the friction between them, Josh looked up to Dad no less than Sean and I did. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, at the breakfast table the next morning, he declared that he was going to start running. Surprised I was, though, and not exactly thrilled, having intended to make the same declaration. I now had to think of a way to second it without sounding like a copycat little brother.
“Me too!” I said.
After school that day, Josh and I ran six miles together on the narrow roads, paved and unpaved, that snaked through the piney forests surrounding our home. Two days later, we did it again, and so on. Neither of us thought about running the Boston Marathon ourselves, however, until many years later—in Josh’s case not until 2013, when the bombing occurred. In the wake of this tragedy Josh vowed to run the race the following year in defense of the spirit of the event that meant so much to our family (Dad having run it twice more, in 1987 and 1988, and I once, in 2009). But he forgot to start training, and the next Fitzgerald to run Boston was not Josh but Sean, who came to running much later than we had but proved to have his own knack for it. Inspired by Sean’s achievement, Josh renewed his pledge, but again he made no effort to fulfill it. Then, in 2016, I ran Boston a second time, and after that Josh finally got serious, going public with his intentions on Facebook and hitting me up for a training plan.
“I get all that,” I told him in our solving-the-universe session on the eve of the 2017 Modesto Marathon, “but isn’t there also a more personal significance to this goal for you—something that has nothing to do with the rest of the family?”
“Yes, definitely,” Josh said. “To be brutally honest, I’ve felt like a complete fuckup my whole life. I’ve had a really hard time finding my place in the world. Like a lot of people who had an unhappy childhood, I’ve never really grown up in certain ways. I have trouble sticking with things. But there are a few things I am sure about, and one of them is that I’m a runner. For me, qualifying for Boston is partly about just that—qualifying for Boston—and partly about breaking patterns I’ve been mired in for way too long. The true goal is to stick with this thing and not quit, no matter what. I may not be able to control certain factors that could prevent me from ever getting to Boston, but I can control this much. I know I’m not where I wanted to be physically right now, but it doesn’t even matter. In Modesto on Sunday, I don’t care how ugly it is or how long it takes—I’m going to finish that fucking marathon.”
It got ugly around mile eighteen, on a farm road hedged on either side by budding almond trees. I’d known what was coming for some time, having become a little uneasy when I noticed that Josh hadn’t said anything in a while, then a little more uneasy when he refused a gel packet I offered him, and finally resigned to disaster when he ran his slowest mile on the fastest part of the course. I waged an internal debate about whether to acknowledge openly what was now so plainly happening or to just let it happen. When we came to a big yellow sandwich board at the side of the road with a bold red 18 painted on it, I decided to speak.
“The way I figure it,” I said, “if you can run eighteen miles, you can run a marathon.”
These words hung in the air for several awkward seconds before Josh mustered a reply.
“I hate to say it,” he said, “but I think I’m hitting a wall.”
I knew the feeling all too well. This was my thirtieth marathon, give or take, and although I was cruising it, running not to achieve a personal goal but to help Josh achieve his goal, I had hit the wall in many past marathons.
“Just manage it the best you can,” I said.
Josh’s pace continued to slow. I forced myself to stop looking at my watch, fearful of adding a layer of self-consciousness to my brother’s misery by appearing to mark his decline. I considered suggesting that he try to make it to twenty miles without walking—knowing I would have done just that in his place—but refrained. It’s easy to say the wrong thing to a struggling marathoner.
At precisely the twenty-mile mark, Josh began to walk. Runners all think alike.
“I just need to gather myself a bit,” he said.
My heart went out to my brother. I felt as powerless to help him now as I had when Josh was nine years old and I was six and a neighborhood bully pinned him to the ground and pummeled him (undersized and undisguisably brilliant, Josh was a magnet for bullies) and Sean and Mom and I stood on the opposite side of the street protesting impotently until something in me snapped and I charged the bully and leapt on his back and pummeled him, wailing in frustration at the inability of my kindergarten haymakers to halt the humiliation. The last thing Josh needed was another blow to his pride.
“You know what I’m craving?” he said out of the blue during a second walk break in mile twenty-three. “A great big milkshake.”
“What flavor?” I asked, privately elated by what Josh’s remark revealed about his state of mind.
We crossed the finish line at 4:12:54, a number that exceeded by seventy-three minutes Josh’s previous marathon time and fell more than fifty minutes short of the Boston Marathon qualifying standard for his age group. Feeling faint, he stopped abruptly and folded in half, hands on knees. A member of the medical staff approached him.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m just old,” he said, erecting himself.
We shuffled our way to the finish festival, where Josh suffered a second bout of lightheadedness and took a seat on the pavement with his back against a security fence. When he was ready, I hoisted him upright and told him about a nearby burger joint I knew that made killer milkshakes. Our eyes met again.
“We’re on to Cincinnati,” he said.
I realized then that I had greatly overestimated the effect that Josh’s unspectacular race would have on his psyche, and in so doing I had greatly underestimated Josh. Perhaps, too, I had misjudged the power of running to teach human beings the invaluable skill of failing with poise. Everyone fears failure, and many of us fear it so much we seldom risk it. This is a sure path to regret and bitterness. Happier are those who aren’t afraid to fail.
The marathon tames our fear of failure in much the same way antibodies prevent viruses from striking us twice: exposure. If you run marathons, you will fail. The marathon is no respecter of persons. It humbles everyone sooner or later—and I mean everyone. I’ll never forget the strained smile of raw mortification I saw on the face of Haile Gebrselassie, widely considered the greatest runner ever, as he limped along a London sidewalk in April 2007, having just dropped out of a marathon he was supposed to win, miles from the finish line. All marathoners get their turn on the struggle bus. What matters is what happens next. Will the runner have a long memory, dwelling on his failure and taking no further risks, or will he have a short memory and try again? Most runners try again. When Haile Gebrselassie ran his next marathon, he broke the world record.
Josh had already shown considerable willingness to risk failure in changing careers at age thirty-seven, on the heels of his previous running renaissance, abandoning his job in computer programming to start nursing school. Eleven years later, in the midst of a second comeback, he seemed unflappable. So it was only to be expected that, the following morning, as I chauffeured him to the same train station I’d picked him up at a week earlier, he told me he wanted to get right back on the horse and run the Eugene Marathon, which was seven weeks away and would be the eighth and final event in my search for the magic of the marathon, an aspect of which my brother had already revealed to me. We spent the rest of the drive discussing what he could do to improve in the meantime. Losing weight and going on sleep meds topped our list.
“See you in Cincinnati—er, Eugene,” I said as we embraced at the passenger drop-off area.
Less than twenty-four hours later, I loaded up my Mazda CX-5 (nicknamed the Fun Mobile) with two large suitcases, a duffel bag, a fluffy white bichon frise named Queenie, a bucket of dog food, a cooler, one hundred boxed copies of my latest book, a cache of healthy snacks (cashews, tinned anchovies, apples), and a pair of thirty-five-pound dumbbells and hit the road for Clayton, New Mexico, site of marathon number two in my search. Beside me, then as always, was Nataki, my wife, the person for whom I have most needed the courage I wasn’t born with and the person for whose sake I have most needed to run marathons.