As were so many before me, I was driven to a house of God by a shocking encounter with my own mortality. This particular place of worship, the Arlington Street Church just off Boylston Street in downtown Boston, offered me something I needed more than grace and salvation: a place to collapse after finishing the 2011 Boston Marathon. I was 46 years old and slowing down. Most people mean that metaphorically–they can't do the same number of Jell-O shots they used to, back in the day–but we runners mutter about clocks. Despite what I thought was a good training season, the Newton hills had murdered me, and I finished with a 3:27, seven minutes behind my PR of 3:20, set five years earlier. So I sat on the steps of the church and contemplated the Big Question: Were my best days behind me? Would the rest of my career on the roads be about different goals–like running my most cheerful marathon, one with the most high-fives from the curbside crowd?

And then I struck the step and cried, No! I wasn't ready to give it up, to give in, not just yet. I determined to try to see if I had what it takes before it was finally taken from me. I asked a stranger walking by the church to help me stand up, and then I staggered off to defy death, a quest I began by gingerly descending into the Boston subway, making little involuntary yips as I went.

First, time to take inventory. For years I had been running just three days a week, a scheme that had gotten me through eight marathons–including two Bostons–with a minimum of injuries. But the plan had become a routine, and the routine had become dull, and my rate of improvement had flattened long ago. The extra 10 pounds I carried around showed my diet was a disgrace. The only thing I knew about in-race nutrition was that I liked to guzzle the free Gatorade at the aid stations. I was getting no faster, no fitter, and no smarter about what I was doing.

So I did some investigative reporting. As it turns out, Professor Ray Fair of Yale University has done complicated statistical analyses on mountains of elite athlete performance data to arrive at this simple, inarguable conclusion: After the age of 35, everyone will see his or her best time decrease by almost one percent per year–for me, that meant one to two minutes. When I called Professor Fair to ask him if "everyone" included "me," he asked for my best marathon times over the past few years, and then pointed out (with some pride) that my results–declining from a 3:20 in 2006 to a 3:27 in 2011–tracked his line of decline almost precisely. Oh. I felt like I was strapped into a roller-coaster car at the beginning of the ride, listening to the rattling chains pulling me forward, except that they were pulling my car downhill.

My next call was to Michael Joyner, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, who has researched the actual cause of an aging athlete's decline–mostly, it has to do with declining VO2 max, which is a physiology-nerd term for the maximum amount of oxygen that can be consumed while exercising. I laid out my vitals for Dr. Joyner–5' 7", 175 pounds, 20 to 25 miles of running a week–and he expressed his wisdom simply and brutally: If I wanted to bend the arc of my performance back upward, I'd have to (A) run more, (B) lose weight, and (C) run a lot more. Joyner's research showed that slowing the ravages of time was possible, but only with intense effort. I was going to have to cover a lot of miles, and leave a lot of myself behind as I went.

And so my last call was to the editorial offices of this magazine, to plead for a spot in the Runner's World Challenge. The way the Challenge works is that participants get a training plan and nutrition and injury advice from experts at the magazine. Then, after 16 weeks of training, the runners and the editors meet at a big-city marathon, trade complaints, and run 26.2 miles together. The RW brain trust presented me with a plan that, if everything worked out, would have me running up to 50 miles a week, almost twice my usual weekly total. To help me with weight loss, they put me in touch with Pamela Nisevich Bede, the Challenge nutrition guru and accomplished marathoner herself who would, hopefully, help me adjust my diet. As for a race: I picked the 2011 Philadelphia Marathon, on November 20.

I had data, a training plan, generous support, and even a new pair of running shoes. The only thing lacking was an excuse in case I failed.

Training would begin on August 1. It was my own idea to inaugurate it with a half-marathon, a serendipitous race I was able to fit in while on a family trip to Red Wing, Minnesota. The River City Ramble it was called, and as I walked up to its start on the banks of the Mississippi River, I actually thought of myself as a Big City runner, come to teach these country folk a thing or two about half-marathonin'. Sure, it was 80 degrees out, but I figured I'd smoke my age group, then, quite humbly, hang out by the finishing chute, and cheer in the local hoi polloi.

Instead, one hour and 38 minutes later, I was flat on my back, trying to suck in the soul-moistening humid air of a hot Minnesota summer, thinking that giving in to death might be simpler. The idea of running twice that distance at the same pace–which I'd have to do to beat my PR–seemed less likely than sprouting wings and flying it. Gasping for air, it occurred to me that I was beginning my quest to stop growing older just as I had started growing older in a New Jersey hospital room 46 years before: lying prone, trying to figure out how to breathe. Part I: The Truth Hurts–and So Do the Miles

The training plan began with an easy run of four miles. No problem. But the second day called for six miles–of hills. A problem. Not because I can't run hills, but because in the paved-over prairie west of Chicago where I live, there are no hills. I e-mailed Jen Van Allen, the maestro of the Challenge. She cheerfully denied me a flatlander's dispensation. "The hills in the first part of the program," she wrote back, "build a base of leg and lung strength that will help you transition into speedwork in the second part. This helps prevent injury. And that's the name of the game here: We gotta get you to the starting line before worrying about your time to the finish."

So, I tramped out some of the first of the hundreds of miles to come on my road to Philly by running up and over, and back and over, and back and over a highway overpass next to an old candy factory, my eyes stinging from the diesel fumes rising up from the roadway. Somewhere, Pheidippides wept.

The schedule called for a slow, gentle progression for the first few weeks, adding just a single extra day of running at first. The tough part, initially, wasn't so much fatigue as getting used to a new daily (or near daily) rhythm. I had always filled in my off-running days with another workout–a swim or a bike ride or a yoga class. I just got up each morning, put on shorts and shoes, checked the assigned mileage, stumbled out the door...and ran.

I had thought of myself as being fit–after all, I'd just run Boston in under 3:30–but my muscles missed their days off and let me know. One Tuesday morning, I did eight fast miles on trails, then got up on Wednesday to run more, and my lower legs, creaking, simply would not cooperate. I tried negotiating with my calves. "Guys," I said, "I know this is tough, but it's got to be a team effort. The lungs are committed–right?" My lungs coughed assent, and we agreed that all of my body parts would reconvene the next morning and see if we could get on the same page.

But by the end of August, a remarkable thing happened. The aches began to fade, then disappear. My running style, under the evolutionary pressure of daily runs, began to adapt. Through miles of feedback and constant revision–unclenching my hands, lowering my shoulders, activating my calves and ankles–I started to change my running style to something that could last. It wasn't beautiful, but nothing hurt.

Races & Places

Six weeks into training, it was time to measure my progress. On September 11 I joined the RW staff at the Chicago Half-Marathon. I was feeling good, even cocky. In fact, I announced a bet: "If I beat everyone from Runner's World, then I get to pick the cover model for an upcoming issue." I said this while pointing at myself and clearing my throat.

I have always hated this particular half-marathon. Most of the course is out on the concrete surface of Lake Shore Drive, which turns into a rock-hard frying pan on hot, late-summer days, and my memories of it mostly involve trying not to give in to cardiac arrest as I staggered into the shade of the trees around the finish line. My PR for the course was a painful 1:29:23, a number written in blood and bile, but my goal for this race was simply, for once, not to give in to the perennial urge to kill myself on race day. I had always believed that if you had anything left in your tank when you crossed a finish line, you were doing something wrong; but today I was going to do it wrong intentionally.

I went out at a smooth 6:50-per-mile pace and kept it up. Even as the temperature rose, I kept my cool. Around mile six I saw an RW staffer ahead of me, and pulling away, but I didn't care...why, I was hardly racing. Just out for a quick stroll with a few thousand strangers on a sunny day in the traffic lanes of Lake Shore Drive! My pace was consistently sub-seven minutes per mile, and yet at the same time I felt completely within myself. Usually, I like to put the hammer down at the end of a race, but today I had no hammer, and nothing looked like a nail. I loped in at 1:29:15, two minutes behind the RW crew leader. I had given up my chance to be Coverboy–I was even going to shave my chest!–but gained something else: proof that success in racing did not have to equal misery.

This was a revolution. My personal highlight film of major race days is a catalog of self-inflicted miseries, like one of those Faces of Death movies from the '80s, and if you had asked me why I endured such tribulations in what is ostensibly my hobby, I would have said, "Well, that's the point, isn't it? To see how much you can endure?"

This project had begun with the assumption that in order to run faster as I got older I would have to suffer even more, following a graph line that tracked rising proportionate coordinates of pain and speed. But maybe the point isn't to see how much punishment you can stand, but to see what you can train your body and mind to do with less and less agita. Maybe the goal, as one ages as a runner and as a person, is not to learn how to suffer better, but to find your way to a sense of ease and even–have I ever used this word in the context of racing before?–pleasure. Is it possible, in this fallen world, to run fast and enjoy it? Part I: The Truth Hurtsand So Do the Miles

Any pride I could take in how well I was run-ning, though, was diminished by how poorly I was eating. I would finish a second long run in a single weekend and celebrate my growing fitness by diving into the cookie jar, like a Dri-Fit-clad Winnie the Pooh. Nutritionist Bede tried to offer me advice on how to measure and modify my food intake, down to prescriptions for amounts in grams of proteins, complex carbs, and fats. "The recommended intake of fiber is 14 grams for every 1,000 calories you consume," she e-mailed, helpfully. "If you don't want to trouble yourself with math, aim for 25 to 30 grams per day." I stared at the e-mail like a puppy trying to read Sanskrit. If I didn't want to trouble myself with math, why would I be measuring things? Instead I grabbed a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, but I didn't unwrap it. For the fiber.

Bede, bless her skinny, fat-free heart, was quite understanding. We agreed that instead of trying to actually muzzle my ravenous maw, we'd at least aim it at more healthful choices: I'd pack an apple for peckish afternoons at the office, rather than buy potato chips at the vending machine; for a sweet, I'd eat a low-fat yogurt rather than a Plausibly Segmented Doughnut. (A Plausibly Segmented Doughnut is a doughnut that you eat in one-quarter increments, spaced five minutes apart, so you can truthfully deny that you ate a whole doughnut.)

Instead of sugar-laden sports drinks, I started refueling after runs with chocolate soy milk, which in addition to providing beneficial protein, is just gross-tasting enough that I couldn't mindlessly swig a whole quart while reading the paper. I also realized something about myself: I eat fast, so fast that by the time the message from my stomach reaches my brain that one serving was plenty, I'm already licking the spoon I used to serve myself thirds. I started eating things in smaller portions, spaced further apart. I'm not sure if in the end I ate less than I would have if I had gobbled up my sandwich, salad, apple, and yogurt in one sitting, but at least I avoided the oscillation from feeling ravenous to feeling overstuffed and back again.

So, frustratingly, even as the marathon approached, the scales showed only a couple pounds of weight loss, despite my increase in weekly miles. But then again, food had so dominated me over the years that fighting it to a draw seemed like a victory. I was the North Vietnam of dieters.

Master the Half

On October 8, I ran 10 miles at 7:11 pace, and then got up the next morning and ran 20 more. I was three solid months into my marathon training; and all aches had faded, and there were some days where everything went so easily that it seemed that my house was on the top of a peak, and whatever direction I picked was downhill. On October 23, a month out from M-Day, I put on my racing singlet and walked down the street for another race, one more heat in my Aging Olympics. This particular 10-K was a favorite of mine; because it goes right by my house in the suburbs of Chicago, it's the only race my wife and kids will now deign to watch.

My first races ever, back in the Cretaceous, were 10-Ks, and in the dozens I've run over the years I've gotten my time down close to 40 minutes, but never below. The closest I've ever come was 40:05–and that required a desperate sprint at the end. I had given up the notion that speed came through pain, but I needed speed and had to find someplace else to find it. So, I used geekery. In the rebooted version of Battlestar Galactica, when they want to move the bulky spaceship a vast distance very quickly, the crew "spins up" the "Faster Than Light Drive." So after clocking 6:18's or better for the first five miles, I started saying to myself, "Spin up! Spin up!" I came roaring around the corner where I live, passed my house, waved to my wife, and flew the final half mile to the finish...as the clock ticked 39:09. My fastest time ever, by almost a minute.

At 46, I was trained, fit, and equipped with Faster Than Light engines, deployable at will. I was ready for the marathon. The only sour note: My children hadn't been there to cheer as I went by. They were still inside the house. I had gotten there too fast. Races & Places

One month, 150 or so more miles, and a few more frustrating looks at the scale later, the Philadelphia Marathon was upon me. Days before the race, I realized I had no notion what the course would be like, other than it would be about 26.2 miles long. So I consulted Ian Chillag, colleague, one-time Philadelphia resident, and 2:39 marathoner.

Part IV: Channeling My Inner Geek

He responded, "Yeah, don't be stupid."

"Don't be stupid?"

"Yeah. You're always stupid. You always go out too fast. So don't be stupid. You want to negative-split this course. If you cross that halfway mark faster than 1:37:30, I'll hit you."

I promised Chillag that if I got through the half before 1:37:30, I'd stop and wait for the clock to tick over before going on.

As I went to bed in my hotel Saturday night, full of noodles and "spicy pigs' ears" from a hole-in-the-wall in Philly's Chinatown, I contemplated a secret I had shared with no one, not the RW editors, not my running buddies, not Chillag. My stated purpose was to beat my PR, which meant sub 3:20. My informal, public goal was 3:15, which would give me a five-minute cushion in case something went wrong. But my secret goal, one which I dared not speak out loud for fear it could not bear the weight of the air, was 3:10. I had run a 1:29 half with relative ease, and a sub-40 minute 10-K–so why not a 3:10 marathon? That was the question I dare not ask anyone, for fear they'd know the answer.

But lying in bed, I could think of a hundred different reasons it couldn't happen–my weight, my stubby legs, my age. And I finally started to worry. When one tells fellow runners and the readers of this magazine and one's friends and family–basically the world–that you've been working all summer to get a marathon PR, it's easy to imagine disappointing said world. And while a lot of people fail to hit their race goals, it takes a special kind of genius to put yourself in the position of having to describe your failure in a glossy magazine, with photos of yourself, midfailure. Also, I worried that spicy pigs' ears may not have been the optimum prerace fuel. I fell asleep to dream of earless pigs rising up along the Schuylkill River to drag me down to the depths.

The next morning I woke up at 5. I put on shoes, shorts, and a singlet, with a packet of energy gels (as prescribed by Bede) in my pocket, and an old NPR (my employer) T-shirt for a cover up in the starting corral. I walked from the hotel to the starting line in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and took my place 40 feet behind the starting line. I could see the first mile of the course sloping away from me toward downtown. I bounced up and down, trying to stay warm and shake off the tension. I took off my NPR shirt and draped it over a barrier, hoping it would be given to the needy and some guy would end up wearing it while panhandling, saying "Won't you pledge your support?" My wave edged forward to the starting line. The starter counted us down to the gun. I looked around at my fellow runners like a man with a secret. I said to myself, "Don't be stupid," and off I went.

A mile in I realized that this was going to be a different race than any of my prior marathons. I was running fast, around seven-minute miles, but this felt different than my too-fast starts at just about every marathon I've run. Usually, it's the crowd that pushes you–sometimes literally–as you break free of the pens and head down the hill from Hopkinton or over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. But the crowd here was half the size of Boston and New York, and most were far behind me. Nobody was pushing me, not even myself. Yes, I was happy to be finally running the race, after months of training and anticipation, but this wasn't an adrenaline rush before the last half of the race walloped me. This was, of all things, restraint. I was running fast, but incredibly: I knew I could go faster.

At mile three I came up on an EMT on a bicycle, and kept up with him easily as he casually pedaled along. We chatted a bit about his assignment; he wouldn't be biking the whole race, but turning back and patrolling the first five miles, looking for runners in trouble. I thanked him for doing that good and valuable work, and smiled with the supreme confidence that I would never see him again. Mile five flashed by, and we were back into downtown, with cheering crowds along Chestnut Street, and I felt great. I began to cultivate that feeling of holding back, poking at it, like it was a bandage on top of an itch I really, really wanted to scratch. Another 7:05 mile. It was fast–very fast–but it felt easy. It felt smart. For the first time in any marathon, I began looking forward to mile 20, because it was then, and only then, I promised myself, that I'd let myself tear it off and go.

The clock at the halfway mark read 1:33. I was ahead of my stated goal pace, and two minutes under my secret one. I was being recklessly, intentionally stupid. Chillag was going to hit me. "Well," I said to myself, "first, he's going to have to catch me."

By the time I hit 20 miles on an uphill stretch in the riverfront neighborhood of Manayunk, the "itch" had faded; the marathon had reasserted itself. But even if I couldn't accelerate as I had at the 10-K, I was still 2:24 into a marathon with six downhill miles left, and anything was possible, including the impossible. Then–tremors, in my calves, those weird misfirings of nerves that feel like wires in your legs have been crossed, and indicate cramps to come. It was calf cramps that cost me 15 minutes at least in the 2009 NYC Marathon, and I wasn't going to let that happen to me again. I stopped dead, near the 23-mile marker, and spent 30 precious seconds stretching out my calves. "Behave," I hissed at them. Would they listen? I started running again. I picked up speed. A mile flew by, no cramps. This was going to be amazing...a 3:05, maybe, really? Another mile zipped by, going downhill now. Gravity itself had signed onto Team Sagal! I got to the mile 25 marker and...

BOOM! A gremlin whacked my hamstring with a ball-peen hammer, inflicting a sudden and vicious cramp. This had also happened to me before, in the 2006 Chicago Marathon, and for a crazed moment I refused to believe it was happening again and kept trying to run on one leg, like Monty Python's Black Knight. No way. I hobbled to the side of the road, stopping dead for the second time, and stretched out my leg on the fender of a car, pounding the muscle with angry fists, cursing it, pleading with it, while three whole minutes clicked away, and the 3:05 finishers streamed by me, puzzled to see a bald man arguing with his own leg by the side of the road. I was so close, in so many ways, to succeeding beyond my secret dreams. If I lost it now, a mile away from the finish, and watched the clock tick past 3:20 as I walked through the tape, I don't think I could bear it. It would have been better to have just dropped to the pavement at mile three and let that EMT pedal me in on his handlebars.

I pushed away from the car, and ran a step. The leg ached, but the ache faded, and the cramp did not return. I refused to baby that leg, and insisted on accelerating back up to a seven-minute-per-mile pace: It was crazy, but at this point I was gambling with house money, and if my leg fell off, well then, dammit, I'd use it as a crutch to hobble the rest of the way. It seemed a miracle that this was possible; these steps, this mile, this whole race. I divided the last mile into quarters, and started bargaining with fate for each one. Just let me run this 400, then you can tear my legs off. Okay, thanks. How about one more quarter? I came curving around the museum, and the crowd all seemed to be shouting for me.

And then I was there, through the finish line, my watch reading 3:09:25. I had done it, definitively, smashing my PR of five years before by more than 11 minutes. I felt flush with achievement, with the energy, if not necessarily the legs, to run a victory lap around the whole damn course waving an American flag. Instead, I went back to the RW Challenge postrace party, enjoyed a massage and coffee and bagels, and with Bede's explicit permission, a few cookies. News of my new PR spread around the room, and I had the pleasant experience of blushing as I was praised by total strangers.

I had accomplished something which Professor Fair's statistics and Dr. Joyner's physiology had predicted would be highly unlikely, if not impossible. But I did not feel as if I had conjured a miracle. I felt–I knew–that I had put in four long, difficult, painful, rewarding, exciting, revelatory months, my finest as a runner, transforming the impossible, mile by mile, into the possible. I had not reversed time, or gotten any younger. But I had shown, at least to myself, that time and age are not walls but fences, and fences can be jumped.

Epilogue: I Take a Moment to Slow Down–and to Think of What It Means to Go Faster

I learned a number of powerful, simple ideas about training for this race, most importantly, the value of mileage, relaxation, and form. I proved to myself that age is not an absolute barrier to improving one's results, and that if we can't stop time, we can slow it down. And I set a goal for myself, and with determination, planning, and help from friends and family, I met it; that, according to most authorities, is the point of not just running but of life.

Afterward, I felt a little adrift. I had hunted the Great White Whale, but unlike Ahab, I had caught him. Now what? As the marathon receded into the distance, I couldn't quite figure out what to do with myself. I kept up my mileage, but the intensity faded, and pretty soon, as we entered the not-quite-a-winter of 2011–'12, my Great Race was beaten ceaselessly back into the past. Even as I write, months later, I'm not sure what my next running goal will be.

The stars continue to wheel overhead, not caring much whether or not a 46-year-old man managed to run a marathon faster than he ever had before. But the only story we get to tell is our own, and my narrative will say: He was a runner, and as he got older, he got faster. He learned something about running, and about himself, and what was within his capabilities, and what wasn't; and about what was inevitable, and about what was not. In the end, I set my PR not because I trained this way or that, or drank soy milk rather than sports drink, but because I chose to do it.

We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back.