Marathoners recall love at first run

Somewhere along the way, all of the 45,000-plus souls who will start Sunday's New York City Marathon were inoculated against couch-potatoism. Herewith is an account of how a handful of elite professionals began to run . . .

"I was 13," said Lauren Fleshman, 30-year-old former Stanford University All-American and national 5,000-meter champion who is attempting her first marathon. "I got in trouble for being late to PE class in middle school, and my punishment was to collect a hundred recyclables during lunch break, which is mortifying for an eighth-grader, or participate in the eighth-grade track meet."

She was a "dedicated softball player" at the time, she said, "so running was not something I did for fun." But she chose the track meet and, though she remembered finishing second in the 800 and the mile, the real attraction was "the coach telling me about all the social things they did on the team. We did cross country in the fall and, I mean, cross country has to hook 95 percent of kids by high school that give it a try.

"The atmosphere is great. The kids are such good kids. It's a wonderful union of high school dorks. I was leading the charge of that."

Kenya's Geoffrey Mutai, 30, the reigning Boston Marathon champion and among the favorites Sunday, started the way so many of his countrymen do. "When I started running, I don't know when it was, but it was because my school was far away from my home, and shops were far away from my house. So everywhere, I used to run. I liked it."

Some seemed destined to prefer running over other sports by their genes. Ed Moran, 30, a native of Staten Island who won NCAA distance titles at William & Mary, was "probably 4-11 and 90 pounds soaking wet when I got to high school. The only reason I started running my sophomore year was that my high school was about 30, 40 minutes away from my house and my parents told me, if I wanted to stay after school and hang out with friends, I was going to need to find an activity.

"And most of my friends happened to be on the cross country team at the time. I was terrible. Around 29 minutes in my first 5k. But I loved hanging out with my friends. That was enough for me."

For Meb Keflezighi, 36, silver medalist at the 2004 Athens Olympics, it was the seventh-grade PE challenge: If he could run a mile under 6:15, he would get a T-shirt and his picture on the gym's window. He had just immigrated to California with his family from war-torn Eritrea. He ran 5:20. "It made me friends," he said. "I didn't speak English at the time. They would give me five; that was the body language we had."

That, and the body language of movement.