The Fantasy of Discipline

The body that can’t run marathons

There was a period in my life when it seemed that everyone I knew was getting married. This period was followed shortly by the time when everyone was having a baby. After those two epochs came a long span of divorces. All of these periods were predictable enough. Today, I’m at a point that was harder to see coming: Everyone I know seems to have taken up running.

This was a somewhat unexpected development given the company I’ve kept for much of my life. I’m the person who, after a week of tryout matches for the junior varsity tennis team, was ranked only marginally higher than the young woman who had broken her arm the week prior and hadn’t bothered to either show up or remove her name from the roster. I didn’t achieve better results with any other sports, so I cultivated different hobbies — books, music, film — and hung around with folks who, like me, didn’t mind a largely seated approach to life.

I continued roughly in this vein, surrounding with (what I assumed were) like-minded individuals, until I woke up in my late thirties and found that every other unathletic person I knew was now training for a fun run, a triathlon, or…