Running from Men to Man.(Brief Article)(Column)

NEW YORK, NEW YORK--I was a slow child. My gym teacher once congratulated me for running a 15-minute mile. I can't think of a childhood torment I dreaded more than running. It was, therefore, with some surprise and not a little trepidation that I found myself last November at the starting line for the New York City Marathon.

As I moved through the crowd of tens of thousands, I remember wondering yet again how I had come to think this would be a good idea. It had been New Year's Eve 1999, and the combination of champagne, confetti, and the threat that New York might be hit by a terrorist attack at any minute probably clouded my thinking. A few of my friends, with much greater athletic prowess than me, had already decided to run. I figured it would be a good way to get my mind off of men. It sounded like the perfect feminist antidote--sweating away the memories of college sweethearts and disastrous blind dates. I was a woman of the '90s, trying to make it in the big city, looking to the future, soaring to new ... well, you get the picture.

So, the first Monday morning of the new year, with the throngs of other Upper West Siders working to remove the evidence of holiday gorging from their thighs, I hit the gym. I should disclose that I was not starting from scratch. Since moving to New York I had been running about three miles several times a week. So the question became, how do you get from three to 26.2 in 11 months?

Friends who had run distances before insisted that there is a hump right around the four-mile mark. But then your breathing regularizes and you stop feeling like you're going to collapse at any moment. It is hard to fathom that your fifth mile will be easier than your second, but it's true. By the end of May, I was able to do a five-mile loop in Central Park, take a walking break, then run some more.

In late spring, prospective New York City Marathon runners have to make a commitment, at least a financial one. There are several ways you can enter the marathon. If you have proven that you are fast enough in another official marathon, you automatically get in. Otherwise you have to try the lottery. New York City admits about 29,000 people, and several thousand more apply. Until last year, to enter the lottery you either sent in an application by mail or e-mail, or came to Central Park on a Sunday morning with thousands of other people and stood in line for hours. A much higher percentage of the entrants were taken from the people who came in person, so we stood in line, and got a place. (This year, the lottery was conducted entirely over the Internet, with the first few entrants picked ceremonially by the mayor.)

Over the next month or so I upped my distance until I could run for almost two hours, with one or two walking breaks. People who don't run, or those used to running short distances for exercise, find it hard to imagine how anyone can stay interested in something so mindless for hours on end. In fact, one of the biggest obstacles to marathon training is boredom. I run with a walkman (the test for any running song is whether, no matter how winded you are, you occasionally find yourself singing it out loud). Some of my friends, though, wouldn't dream of wearing headphones. They use ...