What I still want to accomplish: 26.2 miles

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      It seemed, of course, like the natural thing to do since we were living in Paris. So, sometime in the 1970s, I started working on a novel. With reveries of Hemingway and Fitzgerald floating through my head, I’d regularly go down to the local café, take out my notebook, pull out my pen and jot down scenes and dialogue and the brushstrokes of a few characters and the vague hints of a plot.

      Not sure how long I kept this up and not sure how much I actually wrote, how far I got with my novel. Maybe 20 or 25 notebook pages? But, as it does, life ultimately intervened.

      We moved away from Paris. We eventually moved away from places that had cafes on every corner. We had kids and mortgages and 9-to-5 jobs. And I’m not exactly certain where, during all those subsequent moves, the notebook with my vague hints of a plot ended up.  

      I never got back to that novel. I’ve written a number of books since, but no novel.

     So, it’s still maybe, kinda, on my mental to-do list, after almost 50 years. I think I’d like to get back to it. Maybe it wouldn’t be the same novel—no, it definitely wouldn’t be the same novel. I’m a different writer now, a different person with so many different experiences. But finishing that novel—finishing a novel—is something I still would like to accomplish.

      It is not, however, at the top of that “still want to” list.

      What is No. 1 is not something intellectual or creative at all. It’s physical: Approaching 80 years of age, recovering from a heart attack, I would like to run a marathon.

      Yeah, I know that’s crazy.

      Although I’ve been running off and on for 60 or so years, I’ve never run more than a 10K. I’ve done a lot of 5Ks and a couple of times came in first or second in my age group—it’s a lot easier when your age group no longer has that many competitors.

      My greatest athletic accomplishment so far has been completing the Great Saunter, a 33-mile, one-day walk around the periphery of Manhattan island. I did it three years in a row, the last one at the age of 71.

      It was an almost unimaginable distance to traverse on foot, but it wasn’t a marathon where, most of the time, you’re supposed to be running. Also, it had a couple of bathroom breaks and a lunch break and the pace was reasonably civil.

      I remain pretty proud of accomplishing those gargantuan walks and never had really thought about something even more extreme, something like … well, a marathon. That was a thing committed fanatics did—a challenge for the much younger, the much fitter, the anorexic. Why would anybody want to torture themselves like that, why would anybody commit to a regimen that would preoccupy them for months, exhaust them for days, torture them for hours?

      Then I saw my daughter run the New York Marathon.                             

      It was a beautiful day across the boroughs and it seemed like we were engulfed in a citywide party. There were crowds cheering everywhere, runners enveloped in good wishes, smiling through their pain. Despite what must have been the agony—at miles 20 and beyond—we were all transported for a short time to a genial place of possibility.

      At the end of the race my daughter was tired but exhilarated, undamaged but bubbling. I envied her.

      And then, a year later and 6,000 miles east, I saw my daughter run the Ancient Greek Marathon. Yes, from the actual town of Marathon to Athens. Just like Pheidippides.

      She arrived at the concrete bowl of the Olympic Stadium, built for the first modern games in 1896, after 42.16 kilometers, many of them uphill. She was smiling.

      After the race, she held a Polaroid photo of her running, somewhere in the Greek countryside, taken by a pre-teen boy who had taken the photo and run up to and alongside her for a bit. As she showed us the photo, it was clear she was exhausted. Sweat-soaked. And happy and fulfilled

      I thought then, and have been thinking since: I want to do that, too. I want to experience that sense of pushing myself beyond my limits—which are more limiting than they used to be—and see if I could do something so far beyond what I have ever done before.

      I do understand that it would not be a one-time thing, that running a marathon would mean months of training and significant commitment and maybe injuries and dietary changes and a huge time obligation and all that goes with such a major accomplishment, all magnified pitilessly by age. But it’s exactly because of my age that I’d like to try to do it—to prove something to myself.

      Even if writing that novel might be easier.