When I moved here from Washington in January, I had resigned myself to not running a marathon in the fall. After all, there are obvious challenges to training for a marathon in Baghdad: the heat, the dust, the pollution, the violence.Your Marathon
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The biggest challenge, though, has been the only thing that made training conceivable: the treadmill.
The office where I work has a treadmill. After a few trial runs, in an impulsive fit of determination – or, as it turns out, hubris – I signed up for the Marine Corps Marathon, to be held Oct. 25 in Washington.
People think this is nuts. It’s one thing to head indoors for a jog when the weather turns foul. It’s another to put in the long miles needed for a marathon. A colleague here from Reuters, Missy Ryan, a 3:40 marathoner no less, said she had never managed more than 55 minutes on a treadmill.
The Internet, though, abounds with Web sites saying it can be done. My hometown running buddy, Caleb S. Rossiter, a master-class runner who once ran a 2:39:19 marathon and has schooled me in hill and track work, recalled that Christine Clark of Alaska juggled family, work and weather and qualified for the Sydney Olympics by doing most of her training on a home treadmill.
Only, I’m no pro. I’m middle-aged. I’m overweight. I’m a recovering smoker. I’ve run four marathons, most recently in New York last year, where I bonked in the Bronx before staggering across with a 4:19 finish.
Still, no one I’ve come across actually recommends it. It is not impossible to run outside in Baghdad. The Times’s bureau faces a park on the Tigris River, a loop of which is a perfect 5K (3.1 miles). My Times colleague Dexter Filkins, in his book “The Forever War,” described his runs there as a metaphor for what was happening in Iraq. The park became increasingly deserted and militarized, cut off by barbed wire and sandbags as violence began to escalate, shrinking the space to run.
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