On Why A Man With Nothing To Prove Runs Himself To The Edge On Purpose
June 24, 2026
So … I ran a marathon two years ago. The BMO, here in Vancouver. And I want to tell you about my goal, because I am proud of it.
My goal was to finish and not die.
That was it. The whole plan. Not a time. Not a personal best. Not to beat anyone. Just: cross the line, and remain alive while doing so.
I am happy to report I accomplished both.
It was close, mind you. Somewhere after the thirty kilometer mark, my body began filing formal complaints. I felt like fainting, a few times. I felt like quitting, more than a few. And once or twice, somewhere in those last stretches, I genuinely felt like I might die, right there on the pavement, in front of strangers, in a numbered bib.
But I didn’t. I kept going. One foot, then the other, the way you do when stopping has somehow become harder than continuing.
And I finished.
* * *
When I got home, Sue looked at me, sweat-soaked, wrecked, barely vertical, and she said, with real feeling, “You are my hero, Richard.”
And I said, “I know.”
(A good husband would have said something humble. I said “I know.” This is why we have been married forty years, she has learned to lower the bar and I have learned to clear it.)
* * *
People ask me why. Why would a man my age, with nothing to prove and knees that have opinions now, get up before dawn and run himself to the edge of collapse on purpose?
It is a fair question. Nobody made me do it. There was no prize. There was no one chasing me. I paid money, actual money, for the privilege of suffering for several hours and then limping for a week.
And the honest answer is: because something in me needs it.
I have come to believe that a life with no hard thing in it is not actually an easier life. It is a smaller one. We think we want comfort, the soft chair, the level path, the day with nothing difficult in it. And then we get a stretch of exactly that, and something inside us goes quiet and grey and starts to wither. We were not built to coast. We were built to climb, and ache, and arrive somewhere we weren’t sure we could reach.
The marathon is just the version of that I can sign up for online. But it is the same hunger underneath every real thing, the long marriage, the raising of a child, the work you can’t do well without it costing you. We don’t grow in the soft chair. We grow at kilometer thirty-one, when every reasonable part of you wants to stop and one stubborn part says: not yet.
* * *
I will run again next year, God willing, and the knees willing, which is a separate and less reliable authority.
My goal will be the same. It is always the same now.
Finish. And not die.
And when I cross the line, wrecked and barely upright, I will come home to Sue, and she will tell me I’m her hero.
And I will say, “I know.”
Because at sixty-seven, you take the win, and you do not pretend it was nothing.
***
Richard