June 4, the sun shines on Traralgon and it shines on me. At 6.30m when I head out, the temperature is 4 degrees C (“feels like 2 degrees C”). A heavy fog lies upon the earth.

A mystic silence reigns as I set out on the 42.195 kilometres of the Traralgon Marathon. Although I’m starting my run one hour before the remaining 61 runners, I am not alone; my eldest grandchild drives his electric skateboard at my side.

The sun comes up at 7.30, warming my body and my spirit. The track, a rail trail, gleams as we move along towards that rising sun. Cobwebs, suspended from grasses and bushes, each of them a so-delicate necklace, that sparkles with sunkissed dew.Cows graze nearby, leaving generous splats for us to dodge. (I succeed, my grandson not quite.)

On his back the grandson wears a pack, ferrying supplies to replenish my body: planets*, reptiles** and salt tablets, and a flagon of water, as urged by Emily, the endurance sports dietitian and triathlete. My own project looks modest in comparison to Emily’s. As the weeks before Traralgon shrank to days, I rationalised: It’s not that far. I’ll run as far as I can, perhaps halfway, and when I can’t run anymore, I’ll walk… I’ll discover whether my legs remain capable of 42,000 steps.

As often as I daydreamed thus in hope, came that voice of dull prudence, Don’t be silly. You’ve never been so undertrained,you’ve never been so old…

Where lies wisdom? Where hubris, where cowardice? Thoughts alternate. Yes I am old, yes, I’ve had a stroke and, yes, the end approaches. I could sit and wait, retire from life and all risk and hope; and wait gracefully to die. An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick/Unless…Unless soul clap its hands and sing. A decision makes itself. I’ll run!

This lovely marathon course winds and bends its ways between tall trees and low bushes and no trees at all. In nearby fields of pasture, tall grey gumtrees stand, gaunt, without foliage. What killed these survivors of fire and flood? They stand, each alone, each a memorial statue of its own demise.

At 8.00 o’clock, we pause for salts and serpents*, of which Emily commanded me to consume three every hour. This pause refreshes legs and lungs. Plenished now, those organs respond eagerly to the delights and sights on all sides. We cross little bridges over small waters and large, each bridge individual, this one of wood, this of metal, this one grassed, the next gravelled, the next paved of wood.

This being a rail trail, we reach the former rail station at Glengarry. Here, Jesse the skateboarding grandson, helps me to flout fairness in sport. He procures my performance enhancing substance, astrong latte, please Jesse, with sugar! This encourages lungs and legs already high on endorphin.

Everything smiles as we plod without pain towards Toongabbie Siding, where we sight a dark figure that moves ahead of us across the landscape. We close on this shifting shape and recognise Nick, close friend and ever-generous chauffeur. He and Jesse leave now, for their return to commitments in Melbourne.

I come to the turn, which is the half-way mark, all smiles. Ah, happy runner, happy, happy foolish, self-fooled runner, strong in the legs but too weak in the head to read a map properly. Utterly unaware that this out-and-back marathon course is not symmetrical, I discover the Toongabbie Loop, which now adds five kilometres of running. Why do I smile? What cheers me in my benighted state? It is my own laughable absurdity that cheers me so.

Forty minutes pass in happy solitude. More cows of course, more trees, more sun, and, the occasional fast marathoner, who now overtakes me, overcoming my one-hour start. Back at Toongabbie siding I’m overtaken by Kirsty, my marathon friend from Boston and the South Australian bush. Where is Sally, the third of our Boston threesome? She follows, in better time than mine. We swap stories of our morning so far, we sip salted drinks, then ahead sweepsKirsty, a real runner, on her way to finish in four- and a-half hours.

Alone again in the sunshine, recalling my first Traralgon Marathon, the first of fifty-seven. Another sunny day in winter.

Traralgon is Victoria’s Country Marathon Championship and Victoria’s first. All in all a pretty lustrous affair. Running under his nomme de jamb of Pheidipides, Howard Goldenberg completed his maiden marathon at Traralgon thirty-nine years ago. That year 181 runners started and 141 finished. I still have the official printout of the results. At the foot of the second of two roneoed sheets of paper (this report antedated the internet), you’d read: In 141st place, PheidipidesGoldenberg; time: 4 hours, 31 minutes, 31 seconds.

Every time I run a marathon I write one. That simple passage through time and space, so simple, so elemental, you mightn’t credit it worthy of remark. But every running feels remarkable to the runner. In the marathon the runner encounters his sole self, discovering some things about herself she’d prefer not to know and others that make him feel a little proud. In a marathon, as Zatopek remarked, we all die a little. The event is charged with significance for this runner because an often-solitary passage through time and space always involves encounters with others. It is the comradeship, the fellow feeling, the respect that elevate our experience. In that sense the marathon is a metaphor for our lives.

A watcher of the Barcelona Olympic Marathon might have caught images of the leading bunch of five as they passed their drink stop with seven kilometres to go. They had, running in intense humidity and heat, slowly outpaced a score of household names from Kenya and Tanzania and Korea and Japan and Australia. These five were the bravest of the brave on that particular day. One of these five, one only, would go on to become immortal. Four of the five grabbed their special drinks at the 35 KM mark. The fifth grabbed and missed. And ran on. Turning back was out of the question. The four drank and ran and drank again. One of the four passed his unfinished drink to the fifth. I do not recall whether the drink-giver won the event – I fancy he did not – but in that moment he joined the Immortals. Such small moments are the glory of the marathon.

All this reads a bit portentously. Most running – and all of mine – is more comedic or shambolic than deep. In the field of my third Traralgon I sighted at the Start the famed and cherished Cliff Young, Australia’s most famous potato farmer, a previous winner of the Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon. Cliffy used to train in his hobnail work boots. If he needed a haircut he’d trot the thirty kilometres from his farm to Colac, then run back home again. That day in Traralgon I wondered if I’d get close to him. Around the three Kilometre mark my legs became over-excited and accelerated and I hauled him in. Running a couple of paces behind Cliff I admired the light lacework of his tracksuit material. I drew closer. The lacework was in fact the work of a legion of hungry moths. Through the moth holes I could see and admire the pale skin of those spindly old legs…

A cry in the wilderness brings me back to now. Another cry, shrill and repeated. A flash of impossibly curly fair hair, and a form on the track ahead. The hair and the form,and now the face, I recognise as belonging to Rachel, my firstborn. A long embrace and on we race, one full kilometre, after which Rachel gasps, I’ve just done a full marathon, and retires to her car to drive to Glengarry for a stop, a planet or two and more coffee.

Phil Kayumba, Rachel’s partner, now materialises, tall, lean, young, the swift spirit of hope. Phil sings but one song:

Howard goldenberg/looking good/running well

Howard goldenberg/looking good/running strong…

and today he’ll sing it often as he pumps me full of sunshine, breathing it into my ear as he spirits me to the Finish.

A long pause at Glengarry, more coffee, more chocolate planets, more gummy serpents. After a12-minute pause, we are off and ‘running’, really just plodding. Somehow nothing hurts. The sun smiles on me, Traralgon Harriers smile on me as thy run past. They cry, Go, Mister Goldberg!

Keep going Mister Goldberg!

Who are these strangers? Whomever they be, they are in league with the elements, with my kin, with my friends, with the volunteers who bless my path.

Phil is in my ear: Only 13 kilometres to go, you can do this Howie.

No Phil, it’s eighteen.

No Howie, just thirteen.

Phil is correct. In my masterful map-reading failure, I’ve undercounted the kilometres run. Phil’s news comes as a gift. Phil’s simple song sings itself to the rhythm of our falling feet:

Howard goldenberg/looking good/running well 

Howard goldenberg/looking good/running strong…

One foot strikes the grassy path, the opposite foot follows. A stranger to volition, to strain, to suffering, I float above, with love at my side, love all around, love and joy awaiting and greeting me as I puff and plod absurdly the final thirty, hilly metres to the Finish. Cheers, a medal, drinks for the hero.

In all my scores of years’ ruminating about the meaning of a marathon, time and again recurs this deep and bright truth: my life is like the marathon, an effortful passage through space and time, made rich by love and companionship. Meaning congeals within me. As Malamud wrote, I am a man, which is not very much. But it is a great deal more than nothing.

*The planets that sustained me were Mars.

**The serpents were jelly snakes.