Kate’s been dreaming of arch supports.

It’s Friday afternoon. It’s just after twelve, and what we should be doing is what we do every Friday. Meet for lunch, forget the days both gone and coming, and start the weekend with a margarita. Our jobs have us up and working by four, in bed by seven. It’s odd, but it works, and come Friday we just want to live like the normal people. Stay up past ten. Sleep in past five. So we begin, every Friday, with lunch and a toast to our very normal plans for the weekend.

But no. Kate’s been dreaming of arch supports.

“I feel like they’re too big,” she says, “in my dreams I actually fall off of them. And then, sometimes they’re too small. Like they’re not giving me any real support at all.”

“Maybe it’s your shoes,” I say, and Kate looks horrified.

“My shoes?” she says. “You think I need new shoes?”

“I just think we should consider our options.”

By this time we should be picnicking in Central Park, white wine stashed in my backpack. Or a glass of beer at a sidewalk table, she tells me about her day. No. We are deeply involved. We are seriously considering the individual merits of particular types of shoe cushions. We are obsessing over gel packs while getting smashed on tequila. And before the day is done, I find myself staring at what seems to be a wall stories tall, a vast display of aluminum arms, and from them hang, wrapped in plastic, the hundred ways to cushion your foot. Arch supports, in aisle six between shoelaces and medicated powder.

Also both on our list.

“The Woman’s Advanced PowerWalk Insole,” Kate says, “with arch support. Dr. Scholls. Seven dollars.”

“The gel cushion,” I say. “For my heels. I’m getting the blue gel cushion for my heels.”

“Maybe I should get blue,” she turns and says. The speaker above us buzzes with information, but we don’t hear a thing.

We should begin again…

I am a thirty-three year old man desperately trying to ignore the metaphorical implications of my age. This is not some Messianic complex. Simply put, the pressure is on. I’m newly married, recently returned to school, and I’m doing my very best to quickly make up for a decade spent trying to erase myself. This is not special. I know this. Even less special, the sudden and overwhelming need to “get in shape.” What exactly “getting in shape” means I’m not sure, but it does seem to suggest, if nothing else, an entirely elusive ideal. Something subjective, forever present and transitional. Ten years and sixty-five pounds ago, getting in shape meant size forty jeans and less neck fat. Thankfully, I now actually have some give in a thirty-six waist, and I can no longer use my neck for a pillow.

“You look great,” Kate tells me.

She’s sweet, but I feel horrible. Or I felt horrible. Right up until very recently.

“We should run,” Kate says. This is approximately two years ago when she says this. “We’ll get shoes. Running shoes. And we’ll go running.”

Understand, I’ve lost more weight since, but I’m not tiny. Two hundred pounds at six feet two inches is a lot of weight to race uphill. Even downhill. This mixed with a healthy dose of yesterday’s chardonnay often still bobbing in my belly does not bode well for the new runner. But I did it. We did it. And it felt good, to the extent of trading pain for pain. Obsession for obsession. Kate eventually quit smoking. We both drank considerably less, and sleep became more than sleep; no longer just the passing of unused time. A thing to be avoided at all costs under the passing veil of immortality that somehow sheds at thirty. Sleep became my friend, my reward. And after a run—admittedly, still yet a short one—sleep became all-encompassing. Clear and cool, I often slept smiling.

That was then.

Two years pass, and I have yet to pass the five-mile mark. We run three times each week among the sick air of belching public busses and the game-like dodge of traffic, and I fight for every breath. My wind is often weak, and the run’s uncanny ability to soften the bone-ache of an early morning hangover has lost its charm—not to mention the unfailing power to do so. It seems I have somehow schooled myself on increasing an already healthy tolerance for alcohol. Perhaps it’s just my age. I am no longer in pursuit of romance. The far and away un-chaperoned evening that I first took a taste of whiskey and thought to myself (likely in some detective tone laughably fitting for an eighteen-year-old stuck on Raymond Chandler), “I will be a drinker of Scotch and I will never mix with soda,” had pitched itself fifteen years ahead toward nights in front of television sets and empty bottles of Black and White sitting by the door. A rocks glass balanced on my gut. I am now beyond all prejudice for single-malt, and the man behind the counter waves as I walk in.

“We should run a marathon,” Kate says.

This is mid-afternoon. The April sun is still low, occasional spring rain, and the summer has not yet descended. Corn on the cob is boiling on the stove, and I’m dancing in the kitchen, mixing mojitos. Kate is tending garden on the fire-escape.

“I said, we should run a marathon,” Kate shouts, and we are both high on the weather, high on the rum, and I say, “let’s do it.”

Now I have seen the pictures, I have heard the stories of men and women taking back control, grabbing hold of fast advancing mid-life by the collar of an upturned Easter colored polo shirt. I’ve read the accounts of slackers, the stories of hipsters allergic to sweat that buckle down and run the New York City marathon after three simple weeks of training. Maybe so. But of the many things I might be, I’m no fool. And I mean that quite literally. I may have lied to others, my wife won’t let me forget this, but I do not lie to myself. I know that I am a man, a rather happy man who can run five miles without stopping. Nonetheless, I am a man who drinks too much.

“Five miles?” says Professor Perez, “you can’t run five miles.”

Aside from the fact that each day eats away at an aging body, and insecurities do their own very special work, I know something. I am back in school, surrounded by kids who cut class and, understandably, have no appreciation for the speed at which life flies, but I know that I can run five miles. There is a strange unspoken pride in this, and my money says most of these kids couldn’t run five blocks without getting winded.

And Professor Perez?

Here is a woman approaching fifty who is brimming with energy, who offers daily a casual comment on Whole Foods coffee beans, and her six o’clock run. All of this falls on deaf ears, of course. Except for me. And as far as I’m concerned this is an affront. She has challenged my place in this class, my present state as an adult. She is making a mockery of my years spent not in college. My face is red. But very quickly my confidence begins to rebuild, as I realize that this is not about my academic career at all. And why would it be? This is about running. And the professor has betrayed her very competitive nature, barely concealing resentment from a runner who has obviously not yet reached five miles. And it hits me—this is no small thing.

I can run five miles.

So I repeat slowly and assuredly, perhaps a little too loudly, “Yo corro cinco millas.”

It’s very strange. It might be some sort of residual optimism left over from a religious upbringing, hopeful sediment not quite small enough to pass through cynicism’s sieve, but I am forever looking for signs. Some interconnectedness, an intertextuality waiting to be read between every kind of experience. And I have found, no matter how random, meaning can be discovered, can be created wherever one might look. Specifically, here in Spanish class, summer school of this very year, pondering the possibilities of running a marathon. Here, I magically find myself reciting the infinite form of the verb correr five days a week. Four hours a day, conjugating the Spanish form of the verb “to run.”

Yo corro.

Tu’ corres.

Nosotros corremos.

And for some reason, I find some meaning in this.

“I think we can do this,” I said to Kate. “Every day I speak of running. I run. You run. We run. We’re supposed to do this.”

“Twenty-six miles,” she said, “I’ve given this some thought. And it’s impossible. But this we can do.”

She hands me the training schedule for New York’s very first Half-Marathon.

The first time I read William Goldman’s Marathon Man I was twelve. It remains one of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. The moment that Babe, Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film version, takes his dying brother Doc in his arms, the reader snaps to attention. Nothing is as it has seemed. The characters are not who they had appeared to be, and the entire two hundred preceding pages take on a bracing new light. It’s exhilarating—a breathless read that demands one sitting. True, it’s not Melville. But Moby Dick is no Marathon Man either. I read it for the second time at twenty, looking for that same breakneck read, but this time I read it as a writer. And my experience was wholly different, but no less powerful. I came to appreciate the book’s precision. Its clock-like construction. Each part has its place, and the intricacies are locked in toward one climactic and inevitable narrative goal. I gained an appreciation for how difficult it must be to create something absorbing, challenging, and highly entertaining.

I decided to read it again. This time as a runner.

And every time we circled Central Park, I thought of Babe running for his life and this image lent real gravity to what I was doing. I was running for my life. I told Kate. She called me a drama queen.

Then she said, “It’s thirteen miles. Around Central Park, then downtown through Times Square. Are we really doing this? We’re really doing this,” she said. “I can cry thinking about it.” She started crying.

We’ve been training for two months. We have learned the pain of speed-work, and we have become intimate with the impossibly named, incredibly effective runner’s technique—the fartlek. The fartlek is a brief period of intense running during an extended run. Imagine breaking out from a standard pace into as fast a pace as one can go, sustaining this for approximately thirty seconds, and then gaining your breath back as you walk and return to your former speed. It’s a difficult and tiring process, one that seems antithetical to your goal: running longer. Especially when there are six fartleks scheduled during a six-mile run.

Our training schedule is a demanding one. Each run is peppered with specific instructions for fartleks, advanced interval runs, general progression runs, and one would think this takes all the fun out of just simply running.

And it does. For the first week.

Then comes the your first long run. Each week extended by one mile. And the first time I hit six—and note that this is after running fifteen to twenty miles during that week already—I felt reborn. It was a profound moment. We had circled Central Park in its entirety, and we ran among the running best. Beside me ran thin and immaculate runners wearing little more than loincloths, and just plain smoking me. Men and women of fifty, sixty, and seventy running much faster and visibly much easier than me at thirty-three. But I felt no shame. I ran, ratty headband around my head, and beer-sweet sweat bleeding into my eyes. That week we were inspired, and joined the New York RoadRunners Club. We signed up for every race between that day and the big one.

The first was only five miles, no problem there, but our nerves were fried. We were running—no racing fifteen hundred other people. They had fancy mesh tops, and they squeezed neon gel food into their mouths as they ran. Kate and I had grubby t-shirts that already hung heavy with sweat, discolored beneath the arms. We had Salvation Army shorts. But we also had our numbers. Four-seven-five-zero. And four-seven-five-one. It was official—we were runners. And we crossed the finish line side-by-side and we kissed by the port-o-potties. Kate cried as she smiled.

And before you know it, we are running the Queensborough Bridge, along the harbor, and then circling Central Park. Eight miles, sometimes followed by a five mile walk. We are quite discerning about which yellow carb goo we eat and why. We run an eight-minute racing mile, and a ten-minute mile on long runs. No records broken, but for us this is a great thing. This a wonderful thing. We cheer on fellow runners who finish behind us. We holler and applaud the boy with one leg as he makes his way through the tape. We watch running on TV, and enjoy it. We spend hundreds of dollars of shoes, nylon shorts and hand-grip water holders. We obsess over Dr. Scholls. We help each other; we encourage each other. Sometimes from behind, sometimes from ahead—but we always cross the finish line together, as we will on our big day.

August twenty-seventh. Two weeks from now, Kate and I will run thirteen-point-six miles through the streets of New York City among ten thousand others, and the crowds will cheer for us. Some may accuse me of melodrama. Some may fail to see the magic in that moment. That there is no real glory until next year when we run the full twenty-six.

But for us, we are running with all that we have.

“We are marathon men,” Babe says, “and all we really have to battle is time.”

So Kate and I run with bruised feet. We run with shin splints, with twisted ankles. We have collapsed on park benches from heat exhaustion. We have tripped and scraped our knees like children. We have run despite the plague of jock itch, testicles on fire, brittle skin like rice paper. We have run despite the cramping, the bloating, and the bickering.

We have developed a taste for tasteless beer, one hundred calories or less.

And we have pushed ourselves with leaden legs, more booze in our veins than blood.

Kate and I are running together toward the sun rising from behind the river that morning of August twenty-seventh.

We are running for our lives, and we have never felt better.

Scott Cheshire is a writer who lives and works in New York.