“And then there's the perverse joy of subtly working in references to marathon training in daily life, say at the post office or while waiting outside my first-graders' classrooms at the end of the school day.”

“„We can continue our training marathon.“, she wound one.„Training marathon? This sounds after work.“„Mh, against this kind of marathon I haven’t argue anything.“, she answered and smiled at him mischievously.”

“My men are my references. They're waiting outside for the books. They're dangerous.""Men like that always are.”

“A freshly red-painted train caboose had, for decades now, made its home on a green, little patch of the world outside of the one-room post office. Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.”

“I started out on a treadmill—and I just did my first marathon. And all while sitting in a wheelchair.
”

“A novel is something that stands at the end of a lengthy process called writing. It is not a preexisting Platonic form embedded within the writer... I do not have a Boston marathon inside me waiting to get out. The marathon is a peak experience I am rightly entitled to only as the culmination of years of regular training and love of running.”