One of our favorite writers is Ben Cheever, a two-letter man who has published both fiction and non-fiction. His new book is called Strides: Running Through History With an Unlikely Athlete- an amiable, enlightening and perceptive account of his adventures and experiences running, with a healthy dose of the history of running thrown in for perspective. With the New York City Marathon scheduled for this Sunday, we thought it would be a god time to chat with Ben.

You charmingly convey the sense of pride you felt in your development as a runner. At this point in your life, you've run in approximately 50 marathons. You make it seem very easy. Here's your chance to come clean- can anybody do what you've done?

I've run dozens of marathons, but the race still scares me.  That's a long way to go.  The wall is not a figment of the imagination.  A first marathon--like  that first mile--can be a life-changing experience.   Someday one of these races is going to get me. And I'll be heartbroken until I run the next one.   Jim Fixx said that anyone who can walk can run.   I'm not certain he's right there, but most of us can run. And most of us don't. Which is fine.  Whatever gets you through the night.  Without running, though,  I don't think I'd make it until morning.    

You discuss the findings of some evolutionists who believe we developed as a species because of our aptitude for long distance running. Where do you come out on that?

The chimp doesn't have our arch or Achilles tendon. There's some feeling now that we evolved to be runners shortly after we evolved to stand. Dr. Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah and Dr. Daniel Lieberman of Harvard see distance running as a significant step in the development of man. The piece they ran in Nature Magazine in 2004 got an enormous amount of attention. Mostly from runners. Bramble and Lieberman are both runners.

Apparently runners kept running long distances and then dropping dead. How come this isn't so much a deterrent anymore?

This is a terrible secret. I hope you won't spread this about. And please don't attribute it to me. I'm already unpopular enough. But here's the deal: we're all going to drop dead. It just looks worse when you're running. Like banging all the secretaries looks worse when you're  the Pope. Or not being able to pronounce "nuclear" when you're the leader of the free world.

You mention that in the Middle Ages, several cities in Italy had foot races for prostitutes. What was the point of that? (Perhaps this was the start of the description `fast and loose.')

Prostitute races are reported on in an excellent book titled Running Through the Ages, by Edward S  Sears. A race, or Palio held outside the walls of a vanquished city was a way of underlining the victory, like pissing on the mailbox. And if you could get your whores to hold the race, well that was supposed to be even more humiliating. Pope Alexander is supposed to have had a race for prostitutes in Saint Peter's Square.  I'm not certain this is true although he seems to have used prostitutes a lot, even if he never asked them to race around and around inside of the Vatican.

Sort of an oddball question, but who's your favorite movie runner? I think I’m most impressed with the way Daniel Day Lewis ran in The Last of the Mohicans.

Daniel Day Lewis is great, of course, and Henry Fonda is slightly less compelling in the 1939 version of the movie. There are many legends of white men outrunning Indians. Even Johnny Appleseed is said to have warned settlers of an Indian attack. I  think the legends are so popular because it almost never happened.   The Indians were almost certainly faster. Ripley's Giant Book of Believe it or Not for 1976 reports that a Pawnee named Big Hawk ran the mile in three minutes and 58 seconds. That was in 1876. My favorite text description of a track race comes at the climax of John L. Parker, Jr.'s  Once a Runner: a race that would have taken less than four minutes to run takes over 17 minutes to read out loud.

Your account of running the Medoc Marathon in the wine country of France is very funny. (For those who don't know, wine is made available to the runners, not water.) You waited until the 10 mile mark to drink some wine. How much more did you drink? Did you get tipsy (or, for that matter, drunk?) If so, how was it to run that way?

I was uneasy about taking that first drink, but then this is also often true in civilian life. Once I'd started drinking wine, I felt that I was running quite well. Race organizers sat me down at the finish and served me beef and more wine. I'm not sure exactly when I got drunk, but I got drunk.

You've run marathons in all these interesting places- France, Greece, Kenya, Baghdad, White Plains. If someone had to pick one, which would you recommend?

Pick your favorite city and they probably have a marathon.  Paris has a marathon, Dublin has one, and so does Venice.  They vary dramatically, of course, but you can get a lot of solid information on the web.  Start at the Runner's World website, or go to MarathonTours.com.

At one point someone pokes fun at runners by saying, `you're all high as kites.' How does the runner's high stack up to others you may have experienced?

It's natural to confuse one high with another, but they're different. One is earned, the other bought. One is almost certainly good for the the brain and heart, the other is almost certainly bad for the brain and heart. Both are habits, but then tithing is one sort of habit, and child abuse is another.

One of your subjects makes an interesting point, that those whose talent at running shows at a young age seldom achieve at the highest levels, because they have trouble adjusting to adversity. True in general?

It was Damon Runyon who wrote, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." And yet those who can overcome adversity often go on to extraordinary achievement. Take--just for instance--Helen Keller and Stephen Hawking. Motivation seems often to originate with the disadvantaged. I suspect that the successes of African runners are not entirely attributable to genetic advantages. They run as if they'd rather die than lose.