I’m never doing that again.

This was the first thought that went through my head as I crossed the finish line of the New York City Marathon, my very first. It was a brisk, sunny day in November 2023, and my skin was encrusted with salt. Muscles felt like old rubber tires. I really wanted a banana.

After a few more steps, I was handed a finisher’s medal. Some pretzels. Gatorade. No banana, but slowly, I started to feel more human. I was transformed, though. These 26.2 miles were the most I had ever done. The accomplishment started to sink in. Dude, you just ran a MARATHON!

My attitude toward running another one began to change. This was one of the good days. Complete strangers would shout my name–in an encouraging manner! How often does that happen in NYC? If I ran a bit easier, next time could be more fun, less suffering.

But as I lay in bed that evening, I thought of all of the moments I could have pushed a bit more. I slowed down too much at the water stations. I was too conservative in the first few Brooklyn miles. I didn’t let gravity pull me downhill on the Queensborough Bridge. The competitor in me continued to fidget in my head. As sure as running in too-small shoes will make you lose a toenail, I knew I’d be running another marathon. (The toenails grow back, don’t worry.) And I was going to run it hard.

If you were to ask me at any point in my life if I would ever be a runner, let alone race in marathons, I would have done a spit take with my margarita. But like millions of Americans, I took on the sport in the thick of the pandemic, mostly to offset the nightly tater tots and freezer martinis. (And I got bored of walking, quite frankly. Running and racing just looked cooler.) Leave it to collective trauma to get people outside and competing—running is the top sport on Strava. (It’s like Facebook for jocks.) In 2022, the share of runners on Strava who ran a marathon doubled from the year prior; 2023 saw a 24 percent increase in people who ran at least one race.

My marathon future came quickly. Just a few weeks after the NYC Marathon, I signed up for the Big Sur Marathon. It’s one of the most scenic races in America. You run north on the Pacific Coast Highway in northern California—a ragged edge of earth. The kind of place where people escape, hike, get spiritual. The final scene of Mad Men, where Don Draper sits cross-legged, eyes closed in a meditative state, craggy cliffs with ocean and sky behind him? That’s Big Sur. It’s a good place to contend with an existential crisis.

It’s also considered one of the toughest marathons in the country. The elevation gain is 2,182 feet. Total loss is 2,528-feet. And there are barely any spectators to cheer you on. Isolated long runs can be grueling. The NYC Marathon, with its big-hearted crowds and relatively flat course (elevation gain of 810 feet and a loss of 824 feet), is a cakewalk by comparison.

What did I just sign up for? This would be my second marathon ever, and only six months after the first. Shouldn’t I have at least picked a flatter course? Is this even good for my body? What am I really trying to prove here?

Brrrrrring! Sound the trauma-dump alarm! Apologies, but we could probably use a touch of vulnerability at this juncture of the essay. As it was for lots of folks during the pandemic, these past four years were difficult and disorienting. My brain was disheveled. Productivity was fleeting. My marriage became challenging and morphed into separation, co-parenting, and a pending divorce. At the same time, my father had several health issues that put him in and out of the hospital frequently. In the winter of 2021, he fractured a number of vertebrae in his neck and back from a fall. He pulled through it, but I began to think deeply about my own mortality for the first time.

There was significance to the timing of the Big Sur Marathon—it was two weeks before my forty-fifth birthday. It could be a meaningful way to commemorate the moment, to prove to myself that I could still grow stronger even though I was now, statistically speaking, fully ensconced in midlife.

Running was therapeutic. It offered me a way to viscerally process this chapter, to literally sweat it out. I could think about everything or nothing. I could run to celebrate or to grieve. I ran in new cities and on fresh routes to engage my mind. Explore. Let ideas come to me. I could also take familiar routes to zone out. Just breathe. Renew.

I found out early in my running journey that lacing up and laying down some miles unlocked a deeper understanding of myself and the world. It was less about living longer and in better health and more about living more fully. And I felt like I was just scratching the surface of this side quest—I wanted to explore more of this corner of the universe. And I believed that marathons and other races were part of how to get there.

The big difference this time around would be the support of a coach Hoka was hooking me up with, Ben Rosario, one of the cofounders of Hoka’s Northern Arizona Elite team. Runners on this team have won eighteen national titles, thirteen World Marathon Major top tens, and six international medals, to name just a few achievements, and it’s even produced an Olympic Trials Marathon champion. Humbling stuff. Hoka also provided fresh kicks, plus a few Zoom sessions with registered dietitian Maddie Alm and mental-performance coach Shannon Thompson. This would be a real-deal training program I was subjecting myself to.

Ben gracefully pushed me hard. There were regular ten-mile runs—on a Tuesday. Speed workouts that had me running faster than I ever thought I was capable of. Weeks when I ran more than fifty miles. This is all fairly routine stuff for semi-serious runners, but there were days when I felt like I was being thrown into the deep end of a very cold pool to learn how to swim. The bulk of these workouts happened during a particularly harsh winter in the Northeast. Early on, my hands always seemed to be on the verge of frostbite.

Ben told me that I would think fondly of these grueling workouts when it was all done. That sentiment comes off as Hallmark-card B.S. when you feel like you might hurl at the end of a lactate-threshold workout. (It’s as torturous as it sounds.) Still, I diligently logged the workouts over the course of 120 days, shuffling them around to fit my schedule. (I skipped a few. Life happens.)

It’s often said that running is the sport for everyone because the barrier to entry is so low. All you need are some decent sneakers, workout clothes, and safe places to run outside your door. This is unlike cycling or golf, which can require a good deal of travel and equipment that will flex your credit-card spending. But I leaned into my gear-nerd sensibilities early on, since I knew from my golfing days that geeking out over new products and innovations would keep me motivated. That means I now own more running shoes than my closet can contain.

I gravitate toward Hokas because they make me feel superhuman. I began wearing them back in 2021, when I was still learning to run for a mile without stopping. For this training block, I used the waterproof Clifton 9 GTX for wet days. The new Mach 6 for tempo runs. The Skyward X for long runs when I was running with faster friends. Speedgoat 5 for the occasional trail runs. The Mach X for everything else.

As someone who was relatively new to running, I had no idea how effective (or ineffective) real training would be. So when I signed up for Big Sur, I also signed up for the NYC United Half Marathon, which happened a few weeks before the big race on the California coast. Yes, a race before the race. I wasn’t confident that I could finish Big Sur in a decent time, so this hometown half was an easy way to cash in some of my training chips, just in case Big Sur turned into a bust. Besides, Ben thought it was a good way to gather important data to see how fast I could actually run the big race.

It turned out the training was working. I managed to beat my previous half-marathon personal best by three minutes (1:47:51). I am told this is good! I was confident that I could aim for a sub-four-hour time in the Big Sur Marathon.

At this point, I was a little race crazy, so ten days before Big Sur, I decided to run in a relay marathon with a few Hearst colleagues at the Armory, an indoor track on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. One catch: The race started at 6:00 p.m. and I had to be at an Esquire party in Times Square around 7:00 p.m. So I ran the first three-mile leg as fast as I could, high-fived my teammates, grabbed my commemorative mug, quickly showered, and hopped on the subway. By 7:15, I had a glass of Champagne in my hand, sweat still dripping from my brow.

“The fact that you would even consider doing that makes you a real runner,” Ben told me.

On the morning of the Big Sur Marathon, the alarm went off at 3:15 a.m. Go time. I put on my kit, slowly chewed on a banana and a carb-heavy Maurten bar, sipped electrolytes, and made my way toward the start of the race in Carmel. Darkness turned into magic-hour purple. At the start time of 7:00 a.m., the sun was still low in the sky, but the energy of thousands of runners anticipating those those hills was high.

My NYC Half performance gave me a lot of confidence going into Big Sur. I was flying throughout, listening to old-school jock rock, taking in the clean salt air. I usually zone out to NPR–those radio voices keep the heart rate low–but I make an exception for races and the final miles of long runs. All of the “Eye of the Tiger”s and “Pump Up the Jam”s might have juiced me up a bit too much, however. At mile 22, my thighs started to cramp.

A cramp at this point of a race feels world-ending. Just four more miles! I felt good all around, but my adductors weren’t having anymore of these hills. (In retrospect, I needed more hydration.) All of a sudden, every incline for the rest of the race felt like a mountain.

I alternated between walking, stopping to stretch, and doing a shuffling jog. My thighs kept screaming: Stop! I kept telling them: Not today. I didn’t think I was going to make it. And if I did, my goal time was fading away. What was the point now?

Then I remembered.

“If you were to get that time or that place, what would that give you?” Shannon, the mental-performance coach asked during one of our sessions. “The better questions to ask are: Who do you want to be? What qualities do you want to bring out of yourself?”

I want to be a person who can get tough when shit gets rough.

I want to learn how to do hard things.

I want to give back.

It was time to rewrite the ending here. I chugged more electrolytes. Ate bananas at the aid stations. Kept moving forward. One. Foot. After. The. Other. A woman came up to me around mile 24 and said, “You can do it! Almost there!” The words went right through me like wind through a leafless tree. Or did they? Moments later, the cramps stopped.

I managed to run the final two miles without stopping, grimacing through the finish line. I beat my previous marathon time by nine minutes. Official time 4:00:47. So close to a sub-four-hour marathon! But hey, I’ll take the PR that Big Sur gave me.

What Ben said early on about thinking fondly of all the hard workouts? It’s true: The marathon was the reward, and everything that led up to it I now see as an old war story. Buy me a beer and I’ll give you a TED Talk about lactate threshold.

I also discovered that food and drink never taste more amazing than they do after a long run. I made new friends, and continue to make them, even though I thought that was impossible at my age. Running with others was crucial to becoming faster, stronger, smarter. I got fitter than ever. I stopped caring about how much I weighed. French fries. I love French fries. I encourage random strangers on runs when I can. I sleep better. I’m taller–or maybe that’s just the Hokas.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned is the difference between “get to” and “have to.”

“I have to do a long run tomorrow,” I would often tell my kids at the dinner table as I ate extra rice.

“You get to, Dad.” My eleven-year-old daughter, a burgeoning runner herself, would say. “Not have to. Remember, not everyone gets to run.”

At first, I thought this correction was cute. But now, I realize, this is everything.