Eight months into my master's racing career, I'm pleased to say that I'm not asking myself why I run up to 125 miles a week and train twice most days. But other folks have.

After more than twenty-five years of running and racing, I'm still a "special needs" kind of guy. Like a burglar, I travel everywhere with the tools of my trade in a gym bag. Shoes, shorts, shirt, socks, and ibuprofen. I sneak out, often as unobtrusively as I can, for ten miles here, five miles there.

Once I'm gone, I'm rarely missed. Except by those who wonder what it is I'm doing with my life, or why I'm always late. But that's O.K. with me. I'm training.

On vacation recently, as I laced up my shoes for a second run from a relative's house, I suspected I was being watched.

"Didn't you run this morning?" my 80-year-old aunt asked.

"In fact I did," I replied. "Fifteen." It could've been fifteen minutes, for all she knew--or cared.

With the ensuing silence, I realized I was supposed to provide some justification for heading out yet again. I thought of the weather and the surpassing sunset as reasonable answers, but to indoor people, those niceties were non-factors.

"I like it," was the best I could come up with.

My aunt answered right back: "I like jelly donuts, but I don't eat them all day."

I love my aunt, and I wasn't about to bore her in an attempt to explain my fathomless motivation for logging 20 miles that day. Yet as I loped along the road that evening--during a spectacular sunset, I might add--I realized that mine is a peculiar quest, lacking any practical point of reference in the everyday lives of most people.

My mother-in-law once characterized all runners as inherently selfish. Since she's now my ex-mother-in-law, I'm forced to concede her point to a degree. Granted, running is often a solitary pursuit, though the best runs are shared with a friend or two. But when training at any level of intensity, most of the miles are, of necessity, logged alone.

Training can be an end in itself. One excellent runner I know was reluctant to race, because it got in the way of his training.

That's not me. I live to race. That's why I train. Since becoming a master's runner, I've raced in California, Florida, Michigan, and many points between. Sad to say, but of the dozen or so races I've run this year, I've been pleased once. Maybe not at all.

It would be nice to say that I raced to win, but I don't win very often. Truth be told, I never have, the odd Marine Corps Marathon notwithstanding. Occasionally I'll sneak in a win, if the real competition is elsewhere, or if the prize money isn't significant. But mostly, I get my butt kicked.

Still, it's what I do. Sadly, perhaps, it's what I do best. Talk about a modest calling: "Nobody gets his ass kicked better, or more often, or in more places, than do I."

Mickey Mantle was criticized for playing baseball past his prime. Too bad he wasn't a runner, where with age, the bar is lowered, and they call you a master. Don't know what I'd do if I couldn't compete. Get a life, perhaps.

Seventeen years after my first Boston Marathon, I returned last spring to compete in the master's race. I ran like a man possessed up Heartbreak Hill, nearly 18 miles into the race. Four miles later, just past Boston College, I unraveled like Monica Lewinsky before Ken Starr's grand jury.

I lumbered down Beacon Street toward Boston, the agony in my legs matched only by the grief in my soul. My race was lost, and Fatuma Roba was closing fast. Still, the crowds in Kenmore Square, twenty deep standing in the rain, roared as I waved and chugged by.

I was there.