Didn't the first guy to run a marathon drop dead?

He did indeed. Pheidippides, a Greek messenger, in 490 BC ran 26.2 miles from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens, announced the Greek victory over the Persians and promptly dropped dead.

In September of 2010 I decided that I was going to become a runner. Not just any kind of runner, I was going to become a distance runner. A marathon runner, Pheidippides and his legend weren't going to dissuade me.

Statue of Pheidippides along original marathon course.

Anyone who knows me knows that this is ridiculous for the following reasons:

1) I am a glutton. I love food so much that a phrase was coined around me at a former place of employ. During the shift meal at this Manhattan restaurant people would be reprimanded by being told not to "Gretchen" the food if they were taking too much and instantly snapping up the preferred lukewarm leftovers. I also have been known to have Chinese buffet championships with my little brother (who outweighs me by a good hundred pounds). I love eating.

2) I am a smoker. And not an occasional smoker, I am a pack a day for the last ten years smoker. A fact made all the more disgusting by the fact that I am currently 27 years old and smoked for two years before reaching the pack a day level. I am not one of those self-loathing smokers who finds the habit disgusting, I am a smoker who loves it. I love everything about it. I love packing them, opening the pack, flipping the lucky and the way that I always managed to smoke them in almost the same order every single time. Maybe my compulsive nature just needs to find a new ritual.

3) I am not a jock. I have never been what one would consider an athlete. I once walked the bi-annual elementary school mile run. I don't know that it could even be qualified as walking, I think I dawdled it. It took me 21 minutes and 21 seconds and I crossed the finish line with a bouquet of dandelions in hand. My gym teacher was less than impressed. I danced competitively growing up but I was never the most fit girl in a leotard. I was considered a bit of a stud amongst my high school theatre friends, but one can imagine the level of fitness necessary to achieve that label in that circle. I think I was considered "athletic by association" at best as my four brothers (well, three of them anyway) all oozed athleticism as did all of the cousins on the Page side of the family. Of all of them, I am sure that I am the least athletic. Debate could open that up and make my brother Adam the least athletic due to his delicate build, but I'm fairly confident that he could take me in a fight.

I had dabbled with the idea of becoming a runner previously, but had never gotten further than the treadmill at the Columbia gym. I hadn't even gone as far as investing in a proper pair of running shoes. I had logged a fair amount of miles on my discount cross trainers when I got the news that shaped my decision to actually embark on this journey. My grandfather was dying. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer the year before, but now he was actually dying. This had been an inevitable event since the diagnosis, but every time things seemed hopeless something would always turn up that made it seem like this wasn't going to be the end. Nothing like that turned up this time.

My grandfather was an important person to countless people in our community, in our state and in the world of athletics. It was a running joke that anywhere you went if you said you were from River Falls that someone would say "Do you know Don Page?" This joke is funny when you're a twelve year old on a plane heading for a summer vacation, less funny when you're a 26 year old heading through the Times Square subway station two days after your grandfather has passed away. Amazing that it never occurred to me that the inch tall Bucky Badger patch that has been sewn to my backpack for a decade would ever lead to a thirty second conversation that would conclude with me sobbing in the arms of an elderly stranger on the busiest subway platform in Manhattan during the morning commute.

But, I digress, it was the week in between receiving the call that he was nearing his end and the morning that I embarrassed some poor Wisconsin tourist in Times Square that made this goal a reality. I have been very fortunate in that I haven't had to deal with the deaths of many people close to me. In fact, there have only really been three deaths that have had a profound impact on me, two of them being grandparents. With my other two experiences with death I was at home. This time I was more than a thousand miles away in a city in which it is exceedingly easy to feel isolated waiting for a phone call and realizing, as I spent the entire week avoiding any real sort of contact with anyone, that I didn't know my grandfather. I knew he was a four sport Badger athlete, I knew he coached, I knew he officiated, I knew he was an administrator and an incredible fundraiser. I knew what he did, I didn't know who he was. I knew the outline, I knew the legend, but I didn't know him. And it had now reached the point where it was entirely too late.

I spoke to my father about this as soon as it dawned on me. It started with some easy questions. "What kind of music did Grandpa listen to?" He apparently didn't listen to music, which struck me as odd because it's so much a part of shaping my daily life. He listened to AM radio, mostly sporting events. The only time I can remember doing anything remotely close to listening to a sporting event on AM radio was this past year while riding in the back seat of my father's Durango, hungover from a five martini wedding the night before and begging him to turn it back to Rush Limbaugh so I wouldn't have to listen to another minute of the Packer broadcast and bitching about the fact that I was out of ginger ale. I don't really qualify a steady stream of hungover, freely associated pissing and moaning as "listening to the radio."

My grandmother listens to music. She attends the theatre, she likes jazz and classical music, she loves modern art and architecture, all shades of blue and quaint Polish dishes. She loves to play cards, she's a ravenous reader and she lights up when she tells a story or hears one that she finds particularly amusing. I know these things about my grandmother because we have a common thread, one that I think was refined by the fact that I was the only non-athlete of their grandchildren. Everyone else had things to share with Grandpa when we went to visit, successes in basketball or baseball that he probably already knew from watching their games. I think he realized later that he and I had missed each other a bit and he began to ask me questions about shows I was seeing when I would make my weekly phone call after moving to New York. I appreciated his effort, but the connection just didn't have time to materialize.

When my father called me to tell me that it was only a matter of days for Grandpa and I realized that I had missed having this relationship, I didn't know how to cope with it but running felt right. My little brother coined it as "cranking up the incline and running through the tears." I was numb, I was running six miles a day, I wasn't talking to anyone in New York about what was going on back at home and the people at home all had each other to talk to (making me feel as if I was somehow intruding on their grief). I had quit smoking a few weeks before this and used Grandpa's worsening condition as a legitimate excuse to leap right off that wagon and start lighting up again. Incidentally, smoking a pack of cigarettes and running six miles a day is difficult.

And so, this journey was born. It's been five months since I began. I've come to see this goal as a way of making up for the relationship I will never have the chance to build with my grandfather. It may very well be irrational, but I feel that if I can become the athlete that he never knew me as I'll be able to understand more of who he was. I never idolized my grandfather in the same way my brothers did, and I don't know if I ever will, but there can't be much harm in trying.

"Run like hell and get the agony over with." - Clarence DeMar, AKA Mr. DeMarathon. Winner of 7 Boston Marathons.