You didn't beat me. You merely finished in front of me.

It's not so much that I began to run, but that I continued.

You can't get where you're going unless you know where you've been. Record your training on a daily basis. In my office, I have a set of loose-leaf notebooks dating back to 1963. I record items such as the date, time, location, surface and conditions, and distance, along with my weight. I also record what I did to warm up and cool down, and any comments concerning the actual run. Various running diaries can be purchased at book stores. Or you can even record your miles on a simple calendar. After you race, you can look back on your training and figure out what you did wrong--or what you did right.

We all have bad days and bad workouts, when running gets ugly, when split times seem slow, when you wonder why you started. It will pass.

Running has the potential to significantly increase your life span and to impact positively the quality of your life. It's not so much the running of a race that affects your health, but the lifestyle changes that often accompany the commitment to run. To become a successful runner, you need to: (1) follow a proper diet, (2) eliminate extra body fat, (3) refrain from smoking and avoid heavy drinking, (4) get adequate sleep, and (5) exercise regularly. Epidemiologists believe that the proper combination of diet and exercise plus preventative health maintenance can extend life by as much as six to nine years!

In purchasing shoes at discounted prices either online, in malls or even at legitimate running stores, be careful of what you purchase. They may be seconds, shoes that have been returned to the manufacturers and recycled. Sometimes it is only a blemish, other times it may be some tiny problem that you can live with given the price. But be careful: Often you get what you pay for. Even in specialty running stores, discounted shoes may be old, meaning they no longer have the same bounce as right after manufacture.

Normally I recommend that runners do their long runs anywhere from 30 to 90 or more seconds per mile slower than their marathon pace. This is very important. The physiological benefits kick in around 90-120 minutes, no matter how fast you run. You'll burn a few calories and trigger glycogen regenesis, teaching your muscles to conserve fuel. Running too fast defeats this purpose and may unnecessarily tear down your muscles, compromising not only your midweek workouts, but the following week's long run. Save your fast running for the marathon itself. There are plenty of days during the rest of the week, when you can run race pace.

Even when you have gone as far as you can, and everything hurts, and you are staring at the specter of self-doubt, you can find a bit more strength deep inside you, if you look closely enough.

Running has the potential to significantly increase your life span and to impact positively the quality of your life. It's not so much the running of a race that affects your health, but the lifestyle changes that often accompany the commitment to run.

To become a successful runner, you need to: (1) follow a proper diet, (2) eliminate extra body fat, (3) refrain from smoking and avoid heavy drinking, (4) get adequate sleep, and (5) exercise regularly. Epidemiologists believe that the proper combination of diet and exercise plus preventative health maintenance can extend life by as much as six to nine years!

If you want to be a runner, you need to feel free to fail. Consider for a moment the fact that even the best baseball players fail one out of every three times they step to the plate. But they come back swinging again. If you train intelligently, if you race intelligently, you should be able to do better than a .333 batting average. But if not, keep swinging.