Marathon

To run a marathon, to sustain a relationship, to overcome illness with dignity--all are lessons in physical and spiritual endurance, knowledge hard won indeed. In this splendid book, Richard Harteis recounts the parallel stories of training for his first marathon and, on a deeper level, the course of this long relationship with one of our greatest living poets, William Meredith, a relationship shadowed by the older man's crippling stroke.

Harteis was forty-one when he decided to run his first marathon in New York in 1987. A successful writer and health professional, he was in the seventeenth year of his relationship with William, who was nearing seventy, and he had just had a brush with serious illness himself. The marathon would test him as did caring for and loving William, now severely impaired in speech and much dependent on him. In this book he has given us an account of the profound bond between two men and a meditation on the discipline required to achieve difficult goals, physical and spiritual.