Lives: Finding My Marathon Legs

I ran my first marathon in 1993 at age 33 and hobbled around for weeks afterward. Friends and doctors suggested it be my last. Two years later, when I finished my second, I told my boyfriend at the time to "cut off my legs" if I ever threatened to run another.

Illustration by Holly Wales

Rob Hoerburger running the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 7, 2012.

In 2008, when I finished my 18th, I thought, Now you really can stop. It wasn't that the thrill was gone; I cried after every one. But I had been at it for 15 years. I'd run some of them relatively fast (sub-3:30), at least for my age. I'd conquered the bridges and canyons of New York and Heartbreak Hill in Boston. I'd run one in nor'easter-like conditions and one in 85-degree heat. I'd run them as far afield as Berlin and Sydney. I went to more than one high-school reunion and heard lines like, "Didn't you used to be a large person?" Now I could scale down my running and maybe finish my novel, learn Italian, write songs.

But I found it hard to quit. Marathon running had become an inexorable part of my identity. I was often introduced to people as "Rob, who runs marathons." At one point in the mid-2000s I realized that more than half of my closest friends were marathoners. And I liked being skinny. So in early 2009, I found myself re-upping for my 19th.

My body had other ideas, though. Every time I started to get back into marathon shape, a new injury would sideline me. I had hernia surgery. There was recalcitrant heel pain. I developed asthma. The members of my running team, Front Runners New York, kept getting younger and faster. I turned 50, meanwhile, and kept getting slower.

But the signal event of this period was the death of my mother, Virginia. She never had much to say about my running. Her reaction on one hand was not surprising, as she was not the kind of parent to get overly involved in her children's lives. But she was a jock in her youth in 1930s Brooklyn, and in adulthood continued to play golf and tennis. When I was growing up, she was forever exhorting me to "go out for the team" or to "get into the game," long after it became apparent that the team and the game had little use for an overweight, bookish kid who would rather stay in and listen to his Dionne Warwick records.

Now that I was finally showing some signs of athletic prowess, her response was always polite but stock: "Did you win?" "No, Mom, thousands of runners finished ahead of me." "How long was that marathon?" "All marathons are 26.2 miles, Mom." One Christmas Eve I returned home frosted over from a predawn training run, and she gave me the kind of withering look I used to get when I practiced scales on the piano, a look that said, "That's so tedious; play some real music."

Oddly, my most successful running years were the years of her steep physical decline. In 2003, the year she entered a nursing home, I qualified for the Boston Marathon for the first time. She responded with barely a nod. But then one day, an aide at the home stopped me in the hall and said, "I heard you just ran a marathon." I thought one of my sisters had told her, but it was my mother.

On the day my mother died, in March 2010, my sister Peggy and I were permitted to help prepare her body while we waited for the funeral director. As her bare legs were revealed, I realized I hadn't seen them, hadn't really considered them, in years. (My mother was an inveterate pants-wearer.) Her thighs were still thick and muscled, her calves marbled but meaty. These were the legs that helped carry her across hockey fields and basketball courts when she was a teenager, and (with the aid of a walker) up and down the hall of the nursing home the week before she died.

I finally made it to the starting line of my 19th marathon a few weeks ago, in Chicago. Still nursing an achy heel and a tetchy hamstring, I ran a careful, workmanlike race. I didn't cry when I crossed the finish line in 3:52:38. The only emotional moment came when my "inner iPod" — a playlist I programmed in my head to help get me through the race — landed on Aretha Franklin's "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)," a song my mother loved. This was near the end of the race, and I was tiring. But I suddenly flashed on that last day in the nursing home, and I felt a surge, if not of speed, then of confidence. My 19th marathon may not have been among my faster ones, but it was the first for which I was fully conscious of where I got the legs to run it.

Rob Hoerburger is an editor at The Times Magazine. He is at work on a memoir.

E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission. 

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