For the marathon runner, few weeks are so humbling as those just before the big day. Gmail transforms into an archive of emails from race organizers that are hollow in their insistence that “all the hay is in the barn.” Some serve as eager countdowns of the hours, ever dwindling, to “victory day.” One event sponsor, touting a certain runner-friendly brand of parmesan cheese, assured me that “race day will be even more exciting than you imagined.” For most, the messages are cheerful assurances that the marathon will be a celebration of months of diligent training. For me, they were calling shenanigans. I was unprepared, and growing profoundly worried. The race was starting to feel less like a party, and more like a standardized test. One that I’d spent all fall pretending I wasn’t going to take.

The six months since I signed up for the race had been a case study in chaos. I landed a new job. I hurdled time zones in a series of unplanned trips. And I consistently fell prey to an entrenched lack of self-discipline, most problematically around heeding the note I taped above my alarm clock, which in reference to my goal marathon time sternly read, “2:59, get up now!” I chose to believe that the frequency of these events meant that my life was dynamic (rather than unstable). But at this point, their frequency had also led me to question my ability to achieve my goals.

I was concerned that my hay was not in fact in my barn. I was quickly redefining the normally straightforward term “victory.” And I realized I had not been imagining the race much at all, nor was I poised to produce any results that would approach qualifying as exciting.

The emails were resolute in their chipper goodwill, and they mocked me. I had signed up for the race brimming with ambition, trying to break a major threshold — three hours. Now I would have to count less on physical preparation than on an essentially baseless but still very strong desire not to fail. The barrage did have one salient message — there was nothing else that could be done. Like any standardized test, cramming rarely delivers. It was time for the taper.

With steadfast determination, I focused on the taper’s holy trinity: eat more, run a lot less, and sleep. I was bringing my A-game to all three.

Eating a diet almost entirely devoid of protein is more or less a lifestyle for me, but I ramped up the carb-loading effort in honor of the week. With an eye toward ingredients both local and seasonal, I picked up a couple of bags of candy corn at my neighborhood CVS on my way home from work. Corn syrup would do nutritional double duty as both vegetable and grain group that night.

Running less was no problem at all, even if the reduced mileage routine too closely resembled the peak of my training. Sleep was the greatest challenge — I am generally a non-sleeper, except when facing off with a snooze button — but I resolved to persevere. I relied on a trick I learned as a young runner in high school. As we prepared for our state championships, my older teammates shared a secret they called, with disarming accuracy, “the night before the night before.” It was simple: sleep well two nights before a race, and erase all the misdeeds of the previous several months: salvation in a convenient one-off, eight-hour interval. I believed fervently in the redemptive powers of the night before the night before.

I also spent the week stoically avoiding alcohol and drinking a lot of water.

My relationship with hydration is a fraught one. Shortly after I encountered the searing logic of the “night before the night before” aphorism, my track coach, a geyser of energetic authority whose commands I interpreted as though inscribed on stone tablets and posted on a mountain, gathered us just before that same championship race. “From now on,” she told us, “I want you to go home and drink two gallons of water every day.” I had not yet discovered my tone deafness for exaggeration, let alone my profound aversion to moderation. Her words echoed in my mind: “Hydration is the key to victory.”

So I arrived home from practice at 9 p.m., asked my mother for an old gallon milk jug that was waiting for its trip to the recycling facility, rinsed the old flakes of milk from inside, filled it to the brim at the kitchen sink and set it down on the table with a glass. I proceeded to spend the next hour drinking that gallon of water, and then another, until tears started to stream down my face all on their own and I had to visually connect the action of swallowing the final few drops with crossing the finish line of the very significant-seeming state of Rhode Island’s 1,500-meter run in first place. Then I bolted for the bathroom, stopped myself from vomiting, and went upstairs to do my math homework.

I didn’t win the state meet that year, but I did learn an important lesson about taking things too literally, and maybe about trying too hard.

I would not make the same mistake again. These days when I train I abstain from drinking water under the masochistic and also likely wrong theory that doing so amplifies the water’s potency during the race itself. But otherwise, generally, I aim for moderation.

Soon, the night before the night before had come and gone, and it was time to visit the race expo. If you’re ready for the race, the expo is inspiring, a final rousing send-off to the starting line. If you’re not, it serves more as a requiem for regret. But really it’s a celebration of all things running-related. Other people’s sports heroes are Michael Jordan and David Beckham, maybe Tiger Woods before he got into trouble with cocktail waitresses. Mine is Bart Yasso, inventor of my favorite Kill Me Now workout, which involves 32 laps around a track. And he would be there.

After waiting in line to get inside, I asked the eager looking woman who greeted me where to get my number.

“You can head to the ‘Local Competitive’ line,” she told me.

I followed her directions, feeling a bit like a fraud but also, momentarily, like a celebrity. For the next 24 hours, “Local Competitive” would be my new rallying cry.

Then I started to navigate the retail section, which was a gauntlet of free samples. I ordinarily am a free sample enthusiast, but something about the marathon tends to encourage behavior more common in locusts. A humming throng, five bodies deep in every direction, had gathered around the Poland Spring booth. I walked up to see what they were after, and discovered that everyone was, in fact, eagerly consuming little paper shots filled with water.

I stepped around them—forget scavenging, I was there to invest in a few critical resources. Before the race I like to eat my trifecta for success: a Powerbar, a banana, and a bottle of green juice. New York City now faces a major shortage of the former, which correlates to the gradual discovery that they are incompatible with the low-carb lifestyle embraced by so many here. The expo’s reserve (strawberry banana, peanut chocolate blast) was abundant, and essential. Others clearly felt the same: next to me, other runners were carefully fondling a selection of energy gels. If we were all doing it, it couldn’t be that weird. I paid for my Powerbar.

My other big splurge was $12 on special anti-chafe ointment, which I picked up mindful of my skin’s post-race tendency to look like someone ran over it with a vegetable peeler. At the checkout line, the woman scanning my ointment looked at me and smiled.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You’re a hero.”

She might as well have been reading from my Gmail inbox. I told myself that even if I had failed to train, I was crushing the taper, smiled weakly, and left. I wished I had trained for this race.

As the night before the night before melted into the even more aptly named night before, which is so obviously important as not to merit special consideration, I knew there was nothing else I could do.

I went for my last run, light and contemplative, more ceremony than anything else, and thought of the Last Supper. I dwelled on the crucifixion that awaited me the next day, long and painfully slow. And then I resolved to face it. “The hay is in the barn,” I told myself. In the early morning sunlight, so prophetic of good tidings, I almost believed it were true.

I headed back and did what I do in any high-stress, low-preparation situation: I made a list. I whipped out my Five Star notebook, which usually serves as a rather dull record of things that I do everyday, written simply for the satisfaction of crossing them off (run 10 miles, shower, cook dinner). In this case, it would be a list of things to bring to the race, which was now in 13 hours. Staring at the blank sheet of paper, I could feel the alarm mounting and I knew I needed to fill it. “Marker,” I wrote, and then felt the alarm mount more. It was mounting uncontrollably. I did want to bring a marker to write my name on myself so people would cheer for me, but surely there were more pressing priorities. I collected my thoughts and filled part of the page:

• oatmeal
• 2 drinks
• waterbottle
• warm top
• warm bottom
• bobby pin
• 3 elastics (braid)
• pace chart

Then I stopped. It was sobering — there was essentially nothing to bring. All I really had to get me through the race were my legs. I gathered together the reinforcements and put them in a small pile in the corner of my bedroom. Then I thought twice and added a pink polka-dotted thermos my roommate gave me for Christmas the year prior. Ready to go.

I wasn’t sure what tea to pick for the thermos so I chose the orange-colored one. I inspected the label. “Imagine the invigorating bite of a sweet orange in a market in Marrakesh and you get some sense of the taste of Tazo Wild Sweet Orange Tea,” it read. I couldn’t think of anything more different from the harsh SAT testing facility that had been supplanting the marathon in my mind than a Moroccan orange market. Maybe this was just what I needed.

I applied the chafing cream I’d picked up earlier and immediately regretted it. It felt slippery and alkaline, like Desitin, the pasty ointment I used to put on my baby brothers to treat their diaper rashes. I tried to stifle the thoughts of full circle that were percolating.

I looked at my reinforcements, from the hair elastics to the thermos, and again strove to replace skepticism with enthusiasm, confidence, and hope. I especially hoped they were enough to avoid another Mile 24 with the last few lines of The Hollow Men on mental repeat, as has befallen me at that point before, which is typically when things fall apart. (“This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper”…). T.S. Eliot would not get me this time — nor, for that matter, would Mr. Achebe. Whimper or bang, no matter what, I would finish.

What choice did I have? That’s what heroes do.

Photo by Lisa Larsson

Not long ago this summer, I found myself in the final throes of a race. My organs were treading a fine line with failure, my lungs seemed to be bleeding, my legs filled with nails. The finish remained maddeningly out of sight.

It was not going well — and I needed something to pull me back from the brink. Every runner has a trump card: a final squeeze of energy gel, a gaze fixated on the finish, an imaginary escape from a killer. This day I discovered mine, just ahead of me: another girl, completely benign, except for one flagrant transgression — she was running the race in a skirt.

There are no shortcuts in running. Nothing will make you faster — not appearance, not clothing, not footwear (if you even choose such indulgences at all in this era of barefoot running apostles). It’s all about how you train, augmented by a healthy dose of old-fashioned genetic advantage. This can turn out to be either fortunate or just sad, depending on where you fall. Born with the appendages of an impala? You have so much potential.

I was not. So I find running apparel can verge on running voyeurism — paying for the athletic profile you want, as opposed to actually running longer, or faster. You may not have the height of an Olympian, or the weight for that matter, but an Under Armour top can be very intimidating.

The flip side is also true. Stick a girl in a skirt during a race and put her anywhere within my sight and presto: running apparel takes on motivational properties a Nike marketer can only dream about.

As a rule, I don’t care much about what I wear. It’s hard to care what your shorts look like when you’re distracted by impending self-inflicted asphyxiation. My running shirt of choice is a threadbare green number with the words “Alaska 79” blocked out in blue across the front, which commemorate the fact that my mother bought it when she went to Alaska in 1979. The holes keep me remarkably cool in the heat. The breeze flows through them easily, like air conditioning. Clothes like these feel elegant to me in their sparseness. They do not distract from the task at hand.

So I’m generally suspicious of those who feel more confident when their shorts are Puma’s latest take on the color red, or more protected from the rain in a dry-fit sweat-wicking dual-zippered cocoon of a jacket that implies that $220 is enough to defy the drenching properties of rain. It seems like the equivalent of a short guy in a monster truck. It’s compensating. None of those things actually contribute to the reason why you’re running in the first place.

I could stand to invest a little more in clothes. The ones I do wear have hems with an uncanny ability to dig into my skin in the exact same spots and leave behind very conspicuous cuts and welts. They are tiered like shiny bleachers in beveled rows across my chest. They are shockingly gruesome. It is not unusual for me to come home from a run to discover etched into my side the shape of a giraffe, which is also the shape of my key chain.

This is to say that running apparel can serve a purpose — and when a runner decides that running like a girl means running in a skirt, that purpose is to ignite otherwise unattainable speed.

In a race, I’m really only competing against half the field. If you are both a woman and competitive, you have a distinct advantage. Most of the people around you are men. That means they essentially serve to push your pace, and if you pass them, all the better for your time. If they keep ahead, fine. As men, they’re naturally supposed to be faster. The only real issues in your race are other women, and they deserve the bulk of your focus. Still, unless you’re going to win, you’re going to get passed. So where do you draw the line?

For me, as I learned in that summer race, I know a race is only over for me if two things happen, in tandem: A girl passes me, and she is wearing a skirt.

Lately, there has been a deluge of skirted women in every race I’ve participated in. The ensembles come in a rainbow of colors: from basic black to a more patriotic red, white, and blue pleat. Blame resurgent feminist backlash, blame Lululemon. All are excessive and unacceptable.

One recent weekend, with marathon training well underway, I turned up for a crack–of-dawn “long training run” in Central Park, with hundreds of other people who feel that running 16 miles at trying paces is a far better way to spend a summer Sunday morning than sleeping. I showed up just in time to miss my intended pacing group, so I spent most of the run in solitary cadence with a pleasant middle-aged Irish man named Clifton from a place called Dingle. We discussed all manner of commonalities, from the city of Prague (we liked it) to the semi-toxic energy gels available at races there (we didn’t) until we realized that we had both run the marathon in that city just months before.

And then she arrived. Her approach was gradual, but her pace steady and even-keeled. She was wearing a skirt, the length similar to a peppy cheerleader’s, with a tight spandex tank top to augment the ensemble. She passed us.

It was intolerable. A race was underway, and she was choosing to constrain herself by the same fashions that women spent years fighting for the right to free themselves from, for the sake of some notion of fashion. The skirt is fine for other sports, where uniforms are simply that. It’s also fine for the rest of the day, when the wearer may have other priorities aside from performing in a race. But to reinsert them in the purest form of athleticism, to add another layer of clothing that so clearly obscures the function, and worse, that feminizes it in a meaningless and distracting way — it is nothing short of shocking.

Clifton was distracted by the runner in front of us. Though there were other women in the pack, wearing shorts of similar length, something about the skirt drew his eye. I was already exhausted, but I told him I needed to go. I needed to leave the skirted runner behind.

My sudden nemesis probably had no idea what was happening as I hied myself past her, with far too much commitment. But as far as I was concerned, our one-sided showdown was not quite a victory for me — in fact, that day’s sorry stagger was far from that — as much as it was a victory for the dignity of the sport and its participants. I found my ace. Victory would not come in a skirt.

Photo by Jeff Moriarty

One sultry afternoon in New York — the type of day when weathermen chatter excitedly about Ozone Alerts and even the air seems to sweat — I bid goodbye to the reassuring cool of my “garden level” apartment (a nice name for a renovated basement) and hit the asphalt. It was a perfect day to be on an island — any island, that is, except the Island of Manhattan, where I happened to be. It was also time for a 20 mile run.

There are several unfortunate things about the training dictums of the New York Marathon. The one that struck me on that particular day is the contrast between Marathon Sunday in November and the initial days of training, months before. It comes down to the ordinarily boring topic of weather, which explodes into boundlessly exciting variables when referenced in the context of running.

The marathon itself occurs on what is usually a frost-laced morning in a makeshift Staten Island “Runner’s Village” under the Verrazano Bridge. Runners spend the morning in an existential delirium, where you dread the lung-annihilating fate that awaits you on the one hand, and anticipate it just so you regain sensation in your toes on the other. The first weeks of preparatory running, meanwhile, often are staged in temperatures that would encourage the less intrepid — or the less insane — to trade their Nikes for flip flops and retreat to the shade.

On this particular day, temperatures were hanging around 105 degrees. I told myself it didn’t matter; at some point, 90 feels the same as 100 and anything after is just extra credit.

A more prudent runner, the type that plans ahead and follows through, would have awoken earlier and knocked this obligation — no, this achievement — off the list first thing and moved on with their day, to anywhere cool. I was not that runner.

The streets were oddly deserted for a Saturday afternoon. Usually they are packed with bodies: towering women in towering heels walking foot-long dogs, carefully disheveled hipsters wielding cigarettes like sabers, tourists looking up at the buildings above rather than the path ahead — so high!

I never look up at the buildings anymore. I’ve lived in New York for five years, and for me the sidewalk, ordinarily a straightforward path between points A and B, is an obstacle course to be carefully navigated. I refuse to take public transportation to run—and the price I pay is generally metered out in knocked shoulders and too – near misses with cars, bikes, pedi-cabs and other wheeled vehicles at almost every crosswalk I encounter. Even if my heart rate falls during the eternal wait to cross the street, the stress that awaits after the light turns green raises it again.

I learned this when I first moved to New York, to an ill-fated duplex apartment adjacent to a homely erotica shop known as “Kinematics,” on the oddly forlorn outskirts of Times Square that Mayor Giuliani never bothered to sanitize. In the middle of everywhere, but also nowhere.

I lived in an overflowing apartment of rowers and runners, all thrown together by the debatable common denominator of having just graduated from the same college. That September, I thought I would never run again; high-tailing it up Sixth Avenue amid the hordes simply seemed a task too daunting.

But I persevered. Soon I came to appreciate the towering ladies for their thinness — easily dodgeable — and I found that their dogs, with legs so short, could be hurdled with similar facility. The cigarettes — beacons, or flares. And I hadn’t been doing tourists any favors by giving them wide berths; they were in New York, and they deserved an authentic experience. Now I careered through their pictures — it’s the digital age, after all, and they could take another. If I jostled a shoulder, no matter: I called out a quick “I’m sorry!” and carried on.

In the process, I maneuvered myself into a curious position within the ubiquitous New York hierarchy of self-transport, as it plays out on the sidewalks: for an hour a day, I was enemy to car, cyclist, and pedestrian alike.

But none of these lessons were needed today, as the streets were totally vacant. Once the streets started to radiate steam, everyone took off for other islands. I decided to leave mine too. I headed for Brooklyn.

As I descended through China Town, odors from dim sum and dumplings permeated the streets. I ascended the Brooklyn Bridge, catching a faint breeze and chasing it down. I arrived in Brooklyn. Winding my way through the streets — infinitely shadier, infinitely more adorable — I found my way to Red Hook, where no subway cars go. Under an overpass and into uncharted territory, adorable no longer. In the 1990s, LIFE deemed this the crack capital of America. But I have as much faith in gentrification as the next person. It does have a waterfront, and sweeping views of the Statue of Liberty. I decided to try my luck.

The sweeping views were spectacular, the urban scenery an abundance of shadowy bars hiding behind peeling aluminum siding and neglected neon signs. But as one hour blended to three, my endurance began to slip. My head was a cauldron, and The hem of my clothes started to cut into my skin.

From time to time, as I embark on new regimens to get faster or fitter, I do things like try yoga. For some runners, this is successful, and for others, enjoyable, but for me it is agony. The worst has been the type of yoga where approximately 20 individuals who’d likely place themselves on the more abusive side of the masochism spectrum seal themselves into a room and turn up the heat. Then they start breathing hard and alternate one-footed balancing exercises with rolling around on a sweat-soaked mat. The heat is overwhelming; you sweat from places that you didn’t know could sweat. They call this Bikram Yoga.

I was trapped in the bowels of Brooklyn, with no idea where I was anymore, no longer wearing a shirt, and soaked. But during the yoga, I would invariably emerge with a shocked look on my face, sweat dripping down, and poring over two questions in my mind (I just did that? I just paid for that?). This time, I knew that I had gotten what I wanted to get out of my run. My heart was pounding, I was leeching the last of the liquid in my body and probably cultivating blood the consistency of porridge, but I felt amazing. I was Bikram Running.

I found a bridge, cleared it and stayed coherent until I made it home. This was marathon training at its finest. And there was plenty of time til November. For now I would focus on outlasting the city summer’s heat; awaiting a race’s start for want of sensation in the extremities could wait for months to come.

Photo by John McNally

The story of the American marathon is an extended 26.2-mile legacy about barriers — and, perhaps more specifically, breaking them. I should know. I’ve done more than a few marathons at this point. (Six, to be precise. I am counting.)

I’ve counted myself a runner for more than half my life. I ran in high school, devoting a maniacal degree of energy as a overachievement-inclined teenager in Rhode Island to pursuing state titles in the mile, the two mile, the 5K, and any other distance that involved so many laps that officials had to hand out popsicle sticks to competitors to keep track as they ran past.

Hitting the road took on a literal slant as I set out each afternoon to escape hyper-attentive parents, well-intentioned teachers, and an overflowing house of seven. The roads were freedom.

As can be typical for distance runners, I often straddled the tenuous line between pastime and fixation. I trained harder. I grew faster and sometimes, infuriatingly, slower. If one element of my highly inward-looking (introspective or selfish?) teenage life didn’t feel up to par, a chance for redemption always awaited at the starting line of the next race.

I ran in college, honing my speed both through afternoon practice (traditional) and at 4 a.m. sprinting across campus to get papers in before forbidding deadlines of dawn that I’m sure professors never envisioned would be interpreted literally (creative). When injury struck, I’d lament the withering of my quadriceps the way other girls would fret over their expansion. I’d rise at dawn for frost-bitten runs with my beleaguered teammates as others were returning from books or bars.

And I kept running after college, where I find myself now, on the post-grad marathon circuit. I drag myself out of bed at what feels like ungodly hours on Sunday mornings (admittedly the term ungodly sometimes is applied to 9 a.m.), scraping the frost off my shoes to join thousands of Coolmax-clad runners like me chasing each other through Central Park. We spend hours towing ourselves up and down the length of Manhattan, all complicit in the silent but highly competitive phenomenon that is the running scene in New York — a parade of high-fructose energy gels, varsity t-shirts, shrieking heart rate monitors, and expensive sneakers bearing suggestive names like “salvation” and “turbo” (neither of which have fully delivered).

American distance runners today have the exclusive vestiges of any proper subculture. They collect spikes and reflective vests, and they accrue racing bibs and medals the way others do DVDs or business cards. They know their Powerade from their Gatorade and know when to use both. They’ve contemplated imbibing flat Coke during races, and know the shortest path between two points on a street that others would consider an already pretty straight line. They use words like turnover and drafting and kick, which when applied to a race take on significance altogether different from their standard meanings in the English vernacular. Their gods are terrestrial, of Ethiopian or Kenyan or even Moroccan provenance. For a sport that is at its core almost uniquely minimalist, runners have managed to eke out remarkably complex routines and accessories, all in the name of performance. Such rituals provide comforting distraction from the lingering reminder that once the gun goes off, the only thing that’s going to finish the job is your hopefully stalwart set of two legs.

It’s not a little crazy.

But back to barriers. Now I’m training for my seventh marathon, this November in New York City. I’m hoping to shave nine minutes off and dip below the three-hour mark — one of the biggest thresholds in marathon running. As for whether I succeed, only time will tell.

Photo by Alessandro Pautasso