At the tender age of 12, I first read about the Boston Marathon.

“Wow!” I thought. “That’s the perfect challenge for me!”

Actually, it was less a challenge than a wholesale delusion. I didn’t run, I didn’t jog — hell, I didn’t even jog my memory. But that all changed in spring 1969. I’d enlisted in the Navy, had a month till boot camp, and knew all too well my previous four years of “training” on cigarettes, coffee, and sleeplessness wouldn’t serve me in good stead. So I started running.

I had no long-term plan; I just wanted to get in shape. But I stuck with it, and by the time I was back in The World, I found I actually enjoyed running. I also had increased my distances, even running a couple of ten-mile road races. And then I started thinking seriously about running the Boston Marathon.

Now, here’s the beauty of long-distance running: It takes no skill.

Anyone can run a marathon. All you need is commitment, proper training, and a certain pigheadeness. Without the first two, you won’t have the necessary strength and stamina. Without the last, you won’t have the grit to keep on keepin’ on after your brain has told you To hell with it. And don’t kid yourself — there will be pain.

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In the dark

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In spring ’74, I decided I’d run Boston the next year. First I had to qualify by running another marathon. I chose the now long-defunct Paul Smiths to Lake Placid marathon, which would be in the fall.

At that point I had a bunch of things going for me. I was young and thin and had been running almost daily for five years. What I didn’t have was a training plan.

Today, if anyone wants to learn how to run a marathon (or rassle a steer, join the Church of Satan, housebreak a unicorn, or do anything at all) all they have to do is go on the internet. Within minutes, they’ll have access to information and opinion on every facet of it, from training, nutrition, shoes, books, clinics, and on and on.

But back in ’74, not only was there no internet, there was almost nothing available anywhere to guide a marathon wannabe. Libraries and bookstores didn’t have the books; sporting good stores didn’t have the equipment. And there was no one around who’d ever finished one, let alone even run one. We were in running’s Dark Age.

Luckily, there was one beacon of hope. Runner’s World. Back then — as opposed to today — it was as basic as it got. No glitz, no gloss, fewer pages, and a damn sight fewer ads. But what it did have was good race coverage, interesting interviews and personality profiles, and some fine advice on training. And one training plan was to me what The Philospher’s Stone was to medieval alchemists. The big diff was the training plan was real.

It was called The Collapse Point Theory, which had been thought up by an ultra-marathoner named Ken Young. Simply stated, your ability to run a specific distance at a specific pace was three times your daily mileage, over a two-month period. While there’s nothing complicated or subtle about it, it was radical to me at the time, precisely because I never saw any tested training plan. Beyond that, it explained perfectly why so many peeps hit the wall at 20 miles.

“Hitting the wall,” as the name implied, meant runners would be doing fine for a certain distance and then, suddenly, almost without warning, everything went to hell … sans handcart. And while peeps could struggle on for a while longer, they were in blinding, puke-sick agony. And ironically most folks seemed to hit the wall at 20 miles. It seemed 20 miles was the marathoner’s Anti-Christ. You’d hear account after account of someone getting to 22 or 23 or even 24 miles and being unable to even hobble to the finish line.

Of course, there was nothing mysterious about it, as the Collapse Point Theory explained. Most runners, perhaps because it was a nice round number, had settled on 50-mile weeks as sufficient for marathon training. Bu they weren’t: According to Ken Young, the minimum weekly mileage should be 63 miles, since it’s a nine-mile daily average, and a marathon is 26 miles plus change. Fifty-mile weeks translate into seven-mile daily average, which will get you to 21 miles, more or less. And for too many folks, it was less.

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When 1 + 1 > 2

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Actually, I think Tom Agan was the one who read about The Collapse Point first. Tom was my fellow teacher, friend, and running partner. And– as opposed to me — he was a lifelong athlete. In fact, in his twenties he’d gotten an Olympic bid for Nordic Combined. Tom had been a runner for years and had entered several marathons, but hadn’t finished one, due of course to insufficient training. At that point, he and I had run together for at least a year and we both were looking to the Mecca known as Boston (no need to add the word Marathon — to us, Boston alone said it all).

A running partner is synergy at its best. If you run with someone you’re in sync with, the two of you will be able to perform far better than you can alone. I can’t explain why that is; I just know it is. And while that seems to be some sort of faux-profound Zen babble, the fact is it’s true.

Tom and I stuck to the training plan religiously, and when we lined up for the Paul Smiths-Placid Marathon, we were Ready for Freddy!

There are marathons … and there are marathons, and by any measure, that one was a beast. It was due to the hills. If you check a topo map, you’ll see the elevation gains and losses are considerable. Hills are both the builder and the destroyer, or if you prefer it in Hindu iconography, they are Lord Krishna and Lord Shiva. In training, running up hills will build your strength better and faster than any amount of flatland running. On the other hand, running down them will pound the bejammers out of them.

In a hilly marathon like the Paul Smiths one, this meant toward the end, going up the hills, your legs strained mightily, and going down them your legs got pounded into jelly. Or most specifically, Tom’s and my legs would take a world-class hammering.

We both did fine till coming down LaPan Highway. Then I noticed Tom’s pace was off.

“You OK?” I asked.

“It’s my right foot,” he said. “It started hurting going down Ampersand Avenue.”

“And how’s it doing now?” I asked.

“Worse,” he said.

I checked my watch. We’d been keeping on our pace, almost to the minute, so we could finish a bit under three and a half hours, which was the qualifying time for Boston. If we fell off pace, neither of us would finish in time. But beyond simply qualifying, there was another issue — a much more serious one.

Remember I said there will be pain in a marathon? Well, there’s pain…and there’s pain. Pain, in a marathon, of and by itself, is no big deal. It’s just something you have accept, try to ignore, and put up with for however long you keep running. And once you stop running, the pain goes away.

Then there’s the pain that foretells injury, which is a whole different animal. Ignore that one, and not only will you be hurting for a long time, you may never run again.

It takes a bunch of smarts and objectivity to differentiate between the two, and if you realize you’re flirting with injury, it takes a bunch of humility to call it quits.

Luckily, Tom was endowed with all those things, and at 14 miles he dropped out.

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Me, myself and I

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I think only 35 people had started the marathon, and because the field was spread out, after Tom left, it was just me on Route 86, all by my lonesome.

There was an oft-repeated adage with marathons that when you hit the 20 mile mark, you’re half-finished. While not true in terms of distance, it was true in terms of wear, tear and fatigue. Pace slows, pain increases.

Somewhere over 20 miles, I was feeling pain everywhere, including in my beard and fingernails. I concentrated on only three things — putting one foot in front of the other, maintaining my pace, and keeping my eyes on whatever was fifty yards away. Even at 23 miles I didn’t know if I could get to the finish line, but I did know I could run another 50 yards.

The long downhill into Placid about reduced me to both tears and babbling idiocy. But somehow I endured and crawled up the hill to St. Agnes, finally crossing the finish line with a full four minutes to spare.

I qualified for Boston! And come spring, I was going to Boston!

But that’s only half the story. The other half belongs to my running partner.

Having dropped out of this marathon, Tom considered it a training run. Then after resting his foot for a bit, he started training again, and ran another marathon, this time finishing it and qualifying for Boston.

And in the process he exemplified my primary rule of running, which is this: You may never be the fastest runner, the strongest runner, or the most graceful runner. But you can always be the smartest runner.