Marathons

In the 1977 New York City Marathon, a friend and former colleague of mine was disappointed by his worst performance in five years. But there was an excuse. He had spent a sedentary year gaining stomach flab and losing cardiovascular fitness, writing a book that was to be published that day.

His name was James Fixx, and the book, "The Complete Book of Running," was to become one of the best sellers of all time. Less than seven years later, he would die at age 52 of a massive heart attack after his daily run on a rural road in Vermont.

The pang that comes with each year's running of that race is more acute today after news of the collapse and death of a 28-year-old marathoner, Ryan Hall, during the Olympic Trials in New York's Central Park yesterday.

When Jim Fixx and I were atop the McCall's Magazine masthead in 1967, he was an easy-going man who weighed 214 pounds and smoked two packs a day. A decade later and 60 pounds lighter, he became rich and famous for The Book that, along with its sequel, sold more than a million copies.

One of the smartest people I ever knew (a Mensa member who had written books of games for the "super-intelligent"), Jim was also far from being or becoming a driven type-A. After the running books, he wrote a memoir mocking his sudden success and fame.

But in an age that insists of an explanation for everything, deaths such as those of Jim Fixx and Ryan Hall are jolting reminders of how thin the crust of earth on which we walk, or run, every day really is and how easily any of us, even the most highly conditioned, can fall through and disappear.

As we admire the winners and marvel at the grit of all those who run the course, the Marathon can be a moment for forgetting differences and savoring our fragile common humanity.

Murder, He Wrote

In 1992, Joe Eszterhaus, the Mr. Sleaze of Hollywood scriptwriters (a very competitive category) gave us “Basic Instinct,” in which a best-selling author is suspected of committing the ice-pick murders described in her novels.

Now Life has outdone Awful Art in Poland (no joke) where an “author, travel writer and intellectual whose best-selling novel described a grisly murder has been jailed for 25 years for committing the crime he had so vividly portrayed.”

Krystian Bala makes the movie’s Sharon Stone character look tame. His victim was “humiliated, starved and tortured, before having his hands bound with a rope that was looped around his neck in a noose.”

In addition to writing “Amok,” with details about the killing that had never been publicized, Bala kept taunting Polish police with e-mails and finally clinched their case by selling the victim’s cell phone on the Internet.

Bala claims he was framed.