always be in the fast lane. Still, I certainly don’t want to keep making the same mistakes over and
over. Best to learn from my mistakes and put that lesson into practice the next time around. While I
still have the ability to do that.
This may be the reason why, while I’m training for my next marathon—the New York City Marathon
—I’m also writing this. Bit by bit I’m remembering things that took place when I was a beginning
runner more than twenty years ago. Retracing my memories, rereading the simple journal I kept (I’m
never able to keep a regular diary for very long, but I’ve faithfully kept up my runner’s journal) and
reworking them into essay form, helps me consider the path I’ve taken and rediscover the feelings I
had back then. I do this to both admonish and encourage myself. It’s also intended as a wake-up call
for the motivation that, somewhere along the line, went dormant. I’m writing, in other words, to put my
thoughts in some kind of order. And in hindsight—in the final analysis it’s always in hindsight— this
may very well end up a kind of memoir that centers on the act of running.
This doesn’t mean that what’s occupying me at this moment is writing a personal history. I’m much
more concerned with the practical question of how I can finish the New York City Marathon two
months from now, with a halfway-decent time. The main task before me right now is how I can train
in order to accomplish that.
On August 25 the U.S. magazine Runner’s World came to do a photo shoot on me. A young
cameraman named Greg flew in from California and spent the day photographing me. An enthusiastic
guy, he’d brought a truckload of equipment by plane all the way to Kauai. The magazine had
interviewed me earlier, and the photos were to accompany the interview. There apparently aren’t too
many novelists who run marathons (there are some, of course, but not many), and the magazine was
interested in my life as a “Running Novelist.” Runner’s World is a very popular magazine among
American runners, so I imagine a lot of runners will say hi to me when I’m in New York. This made
me even more tense, thinking how I’d better not do a lousy job in the marathon.
Let’s go back to 1983. A nostalgic era now, back when Duran Duran and Hall and Oates were cranking
out the hits.
In July of that year I traveled to Greece and ran by myself from Athens to the town of Marathon.
This was the opposite direction of the original battle messenger’s course, which started in Marathon
and went to Athens. I decided to run it backward because I figured I could start early in the morning
from Athens, before rush hour (and before the air grew too polluted), leave the city, and head straight
for Marathon, which would help me avoid traffic. This wasn’t an official race and I was running all
alone, so naturally I couldn’t count on anyone to reroute vehicles just for me.
Why did I go all the way to Greece and run twenty-six miles by myself? I’d been asked by a men’s
magazine to travel to Greece and write a travelogue about the trip. This was an officially organized
media tour, sponsored by the Greek government’s Board of Tourism. A lot of other magazines also