Should you find yourself in an airport before a transatlantic flight with nothing to read, I suggest you pick up a copy of Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia. The book starts off as an alternate history of naturalism in the early 20^th Century, and then turns into something more like The Matrix, if The Matrix were retold on a cosmic scale and ended with a war in heaven fought between four-armed Sleestaks and Grizzly Adams-like avatars of trillion-year-old seeds of consciousness in a primeval Rhine Valley palimpsested in space-time over the killing fields of World War I: ghosts evolving free will in a simulation powered by galaxy-sized, entropy-resistant computers at the end of time.

Around this time last year, I queried The Believer about interviewing Dean Karnazes, the ultra-marathoner. My letter read, in part:

"...Wired Magazine recently described Karnazes as "The Perfect Human." He is a legendary endurance athlete, and the author of a best-selling memoir entitled Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner. He won the Badwater 135 (a death-defying race run in July from the bottom of Death Valley to the top of Mt. Whitney; one hundred and thirty-five, in this case, referring to both the number of miles and the temperature); ran a marathon to the South Pole in sneakers; ran three hundred and fifty continuous miles for charity in 2005 (in eighty hours and forty-four minutes); and last year ran fifty marathons in fifty days, one in each of the fifty states. Then he decided to run home, from New York to San Francisco. On December 21st, however, in St. Charles, Missouri, twenty-eight days and one thousand three hundred miles into the return trip, Dean Karnazes finally broke down and caught a ride.

It's my understanding that Karnazes intends to run five hundred continuous miles for his next challenge. I propose to conduct an interview while he does so, running beside him for as long as I can. Even at my present level of fitness, I expect I can maintain a conversation with him for at least ten miles—long enough to discuss his capacity for suffering, his experience of time, the limits of human endurance, Thoreau, fad diets, David Blaine, performance-enhancing drugs, extreme sleep deprivation, the films of Werner Herzog, and a range of other questions. Ideally, however, I would like to complete a marathon while interviewing him, and then run one more mile, to see what happens.

Please let me know if this sounds like something that would be appropriate for a future issue of The Believer..."

It wasn't, apparently. But I couldn't shake the idea. So about a week a later, I ran my first marathon on a nearby high school track. In the rain, no less. At the time, I had never run farther than 13.1 miles. Which was my goal that day too. When I reached the half-marathon point, however, I decided to keep going. At about 17 miles, I decided I would never forgive myself for stopping. So I didn't.

I finished in 3 hrs. and 58 mins. Next time, I want to go farther (and faster), and break out of the track's punishing geometry. A 50K, perhaps. Somewhere beautiful. Meanwhile, the interview seems less important to me. It isn't that I've lost interest in my questions. Far from it. Rather, I now believe that I'm the one who should try to answer them--as best I can, mile after mile. And that if I do run into Karnazes on the road somewhere, I shouldn't ask him anything. I'll just try to keep up.