Other parts of Again to Carthage offer a bit of marathon training advice: focus on building endurance, stamina, and speed by targeted workouts, not arbitrary long runs. And perhaps most movingly, there’s the observation that what really counts is not the climax, the Big Event — it’s all the work to get there. From Chapter 36:

“What I mean is that someone sees a race, and they think that’s what you do. They sort of know you had to train, but they weren’t watching then, so they don’t understand how incredibly much of it there is. But to us, it’s almost the whole thing. Racing is just this little tiny ritual we go through after everything else has been done. It’s a hood ornament.”

And then the hero and his trainer-coach-friend agree that, whatever happens, “Everything else is icing now. It’ll be okay. I’ll be okay.” — echoing some of elite ultra runner Eric Clifton’s remarks. The treasure is there, every moment.