“„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.”

“Listen,” he said, raising himself up on one elbow. “You don’t just decide one day you’re going to run a marathon, right? You have to do some training first.”“Aren’t you being glib about this?”His hands slid around her, inside her sweater, touching her naked back.Everything in her wanted to melt. Oh, just let it go, she told herself. “Am I the marathon?”He smiled and nodded. “The New York Marathon.”“The Boston is harder," she muttered.“Okay, you’re the Boston, then.”“And what was she? Just a little warm-up?”“She was like a 5K,” he said, so near her ear that she got goose bumps. “Well…maybe a 10K.”

“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.”

“If you insist on the chase," I say, my voice much surer than I feel."Then you better start training. 'Cause, dude you're in for a marathon.”

“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.”

“Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons. The truth will win this marathon in court.”