Page 579 - WhyAsInY

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had watched lots of newsreels of sprinters. What’s good enough for Jesse Owens or Usain Bolt was good enough for me. But I just could not run that way on a sustained basis. I owe a lot, therefore, to the paralegal at Coronet who told me that people who run any real distance (more than four hundred meters?) landed first either on their midfoot or on their heel. She changed my life, whether for the better remains to be seen.
I soon found that, if you ran with a heel strike, your breath would slow down, and longer, more beneficial, distances would therefore be within reach. So it was that I started modestly, at about one mile, and worked my way up to three miles or so, which, with the exception of a few times in which I really pushed myself in the park, became essen- tially the norm. The Central Park loop, which has two mean hills—one near the Metropolitan Museum and one starting at the north end of the park, bordering Harlem, and then coming back south on the west side— measures 6.1 miles, and I’m pretty sure that I ran it at least twice.
But that was not to continue. I met Kathy and soon moved to Great Neck, where my exercise consisted of our morning walks of maybe a mile or two, before we embarked on our commutes, and some short weekend jaunts. Walking in the morning continued when we moved to Church Lane South (I’ll bet that you never thought that I’d get there) but really only in the spring and fall. We’d walk to Fenimore Road and back, traversing about three miles each midweek morning. Unfortu- nately, this habit gave way when I started my stint in Washington, D.C., and never really returned. And I got heavier and heavier.
In 1998 or so, we went on a health kick. We bought weights for the small sixth bedroom, hired a person to instruct us in their use, and, at Kathy’s urging, started regular visits to a nutritionist at Roosevelt Hos- pital who had us write down all that we were consuming. Our weekly weigh-ins showed progress, but I was not satisfied. I wanted to lose some other way, and, besides, I really like to eat, mostly stuff that any nutri- tionist worth her salt would forbid.
So one of my craziest ideas hit me: Both Danny and Peter, some- times separately and sometimes together, had run the New York City Marathon. Danny had also run the Marine Corps Marathon in Wash-
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