Marathon

Most "important" books aren't much fun to read. Most fun books aren't very important. But there is always exception. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink is exactly the case.

That's a book I'd waited for four months before my turn to borrow from the public library. And to be finished within two weeks, for that matter, before the due date. As it turned out, I learned so much from this book within two weeks. Nothing complicated. Nothing difficult. But completely fun. And practical.

I expect you want an example? Of course you do.

So often in my day-to-day conversation about running I was asked when it's my plan to lace up my shoes and run a marathon. I reacted the way I reacted to filing a tax return - sooner or later I'll do it.

I haven't yet.

It suddenly dawned on me, after reading Pink's chapter on Endings, that the last year of a life decade could have been the answer. I was introduced to Red Hong Yi (an artist who ran her first marathon when she was twenty-nine years old), Jeremy Medding (a diamond businessman who ran his when he was thirty-nine), Cindy Bishop (a lawyer who ran her first marathon at age forty-nine), Andy Morozovsky (a zoologist who had never run anywhere close to 26.2 miles until he'd turned fifty-nine).

Notice their age: twenty-nine, thirty-nine, thirty-nine, fifty-nine.

The best illustration of "9-enders" aiming to search for meaning before another new decade in chronological age, in fact, comes from a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In an analysis of the age at which 500 athletes ran their first marathon, the 9-enders are overrepresented by a whopping 48 percent. What is the most likely age for us to run the first marathon? That's twenty-nine. (I'm out, okay, I know.) Twenty-nine-year-olds were about twice as likely to run a marathon as twenty-eight-year-olds or thirty-year-olds.

What next? That's forty-nine. Someone who's forty-nine (I shall wait for that, I guess) is about three times more likely to run a marathon than someone who's just a year older.