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but 4.30 is definitely on; even 4.15 is not beyond the bounds of possibility. And so, a recurring theme of many of the best tragedies, it was my unseemly ambition that brought me down. My body threw in the towel when I started asking it to do this extra distance in less time.
    When it happens, a grade-two tear of the calf muscle feels like someone has whacked you across the back of the leg witha stick. But I knew that already. Grade-two calf tears and I go back a long way — back to the mid-1990s, I seem to remember. The typical rehab for this sort of calf tear, for someone of my age, is six weeks plus. If the patient turns out not to be patient at all — and I am a very impatient patient — then that period extends accordingly. I treated this particular tear with more than usual deference, at least initially. I did my rehab, got the scar tissue broken down and did all the exercises my PT told me to do. Then, just as I started getting better, I lost all patience, tried to run, my calf broke down again after a few hundred yards and I was back to square one. This happened several times. So eventually I just did nothing: complete rest. The tear occurred on 4 December 2010. It is now 30 January 2011. I am standing at the starting line of the Miami Marathon — and, more significantly for me, my first marathon — and I haven’t been able to run for the two months leading up to it.
    I am therefore, as they say, a little ‘undercooked’ — and that’s probably putting it mildly. Until Friday lunchtime, if you had asked me whether I was going to run, I would have told you ‘no’ — or some more emphatic variation on that theme. And I think I would have almost been sincere. This was the official position that I used not only in my dealings with others but also, more importantly, with the rational part of my mind. But there was a small, sneaky, irrational but enormously influential part of me that always knew that I was going to find myself standing at the starting line of this race. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to find myself driving over to the Miami Beach Convention Center on Friday afternoon to pick up my race packet. I still had to deal with the rational part of me, of course. Just keeping our options open, I told it. Indeed, my rational self replied, is that why you also purchased a calf sleeve, and interrogated just aboutevery runner you met at the Center about how to approach running a marathon when in a seriously under-trained state? That’s the rational part of me — he can occasionally be a little snide. But despite the abundance of countervailing evidence, I think I was still spouting the ‘just keeping my options open’ line when I crawled onto the train at 4 a.m. this morning. But now, it seems, the time for options is over. Perhaps I should have listened a little more to the rational part of me. This was all very preventable.
    The most likely scenario, given the events of recent weeks, is that my calf immediately breaks down again and I don’t even make it as far as the MacArthur Causeway. I suppose that would be a little humiliating — my abject failure on display to the thousands who run past me. But suppose it doesn’t happen like that: suppose my calf pulls itself together. Then the question is: how long will it be before I am wishing that it had gone? I’m not entirely sure what sort of shape I’m going to be in, but I suspect it’s not going to be good. Just how far am I going to be able to go? I could always call it a day at the half-marathon mark. But will I even get that far? Just how painful is this going to be?
    Then there is the question of time. Suppose I do make it around the course. Just how long is that going to take me? This has nothing to do with pride. Well, if I am being honest, I suppose it may have something to do with it but, vanity aside, the one thing you absolutely, positively don’t want to do