"​The Night a Shirley Temple Led Me to 36 Marathons"

Started the night at Whiskey River with a Shirley Temple — my noble attempt to “cut back.” It lasted exactly as long as a Shirley Temple can last before bar‑master Nathan G. slid a gin martini into my line of sight… and, well, I switched. Twice.

Sometimes the best stories don’t come from our own heads at all — they come from the people we bump into in bars, restaurants, or on the streets of the towns we call home. Case in point: the couple I met at Whiskey River the other night. I’ll call them the Marathon Runner Couple. They were fantastic. They’re the reason today’s blog exists, even though a few days ago I was convinced I didn’t have another entry left in me. Turns out inspiration isn’t always about us. Sometimes you just have to look up and notice someone else’s spark.

This couple knows how to live. They know how to lift each other, how to laugh together, how to make being a couple look…well, attractive. They’ve run 36 marathons in 36 states. Thirty-six. The most recent was in Kentucky — a full-on Kentucky Derby Marathon — and they loved every minute of it.

The husband cracked me up. He said that by the time they’re still stretching at the start line, the Kenyans have already finished the race and are probably showered, fed, and halfway to the airport. That’s when I realized I had never actually thought about what qualifies as a marathon. It’s not Bay to Breakers in San Francisco. A real marathon — like the New York City Marathon — is 26.2 miles. Twenty-six miles and change. The thought alone is mind‑boggling. How does a human body last that long?

So I asked him: What do you think about for 26 miles?

He shrugged and said he thinks about everything. One of his tricks is eavesdropping on the conversations around him — lets the chatter pull him along at his steady nine‑miles‑per‑hour zone. His wife does the same. Her hardest marathon was in Colorado because of the elevation; her easiest was New York, where she sprinted like a gazelle through the boroughs.

I was totally impressed.

How do they stay motivated? Simple: they walk. Every weekend. Long walks, real walks. There’s a trail here in Westchester that runs all the way down to Marble Hill top end of Manhattan but in the Bronx, then keeps going along the Hudson down into lower Manhattan. Parks, bridges, neighborhoods, places to grab a bite or a beer — a whole day’s worth of wandering.

Now that’s a weekend. That’s an adventure. That’s the kind of thing that makes me want to lace up and go. It sounds a lot more exciting than a gym routine, especially now that New York is thawing out. The snow is gone, the air is softening, and even if the calendar is the only thing insisting it’s spring, I’ll take it.