Winners' circle.(ESSAY)(marathon running)

I HEREBY announce my arrival as a Great Event in the world of sports. The future is now, and I am it: My running of the marathon in St. George, Utah, on October 1, 2005, is an achievement for the ages.

What was my time? Impertinent question! You are so conventional, with your petty thoughts of times and rankings, your unimaginative concern for who "finished first." I did not "finish first," but I did undergo much suffering, more than any rational person would inflict on himself, and that is the operative point. My pain is my achievement.

I ran the race with two unhealed leg injuries, you see: a strained IT band in my left knee and peroneal tendonitis in my right foot. The precise medical details aren't worth repeating. What matters is that they hurt like hell. Strained IT bands feel like someone is driving an ice pick into the side of your knee; peroneal tendonitis produces a subtler, more exquisite pain: at first, mild aches; after 20 miles, fireballs exploding near your ankle and searing their way up your calf. Both injuries are the bane of novice runners who push themselves too hard, their ambitions incommensurate to their abilities.

Many such novices solve the problem by revising their ambitions. Quitters. Real athletes visit an orthopedist and ask for a cortisone shot. By now it should be obvious, O reader, to which category 1 belong. As the doctor pumped my knee full of steroids, he expounded on my injuries, ending with a question: "Your body is trying to tell you something, don't you think?"

Whatever, man. You'll hear me laughing from the finish line.

On race day, the cortisone worked its magic, and my IT band was free of pain. The tendonitis might still afflict me--the cortisone injection had been for my knee only--but it was the more endurable of the injuries, and through the first seven miles I suffered not the least. My feet flew through the pre-dawn blackness, joined by the pitter-patter of 8,000 others, their sound soft and dimensionless as the voice of the sea.

But my tendonitis rose with the sun. It came on faint, like the nearly imperceptible lightening in the east. The dramatic landscape of southern Utah acquired relief; pink tendrils of cloud marked the sky; mountains and bluffs appeared first as silhouettes and then as purpled shadows. By mile 15, the sandstone cliffs all around me were drenched in golden light--and the pain in my leg had grown teeth of fearsome sharpness.