This is how I found myself standing in the rain in Abilene, Kansas preparing to run a marathon with my new friend, forty-six-year-old Randy Barten, the noxious weed director for Dickinson County. We are in his hometown, eyeing the starting area of his first planned marathon, touted as the nation's flattest (only forty-one meters separate the highest and lowest point on the course) and a race one runners' website rated at two-and-a-half stars out of five.

The previous year, Randy Barten took to longdistance running with the knowledge that it was a sport in which everyday Americans could feel comfortable participating. Abilene had started an annual community marathon that year, but Randy did not feel he was ready for such a long distance. Instead,he ran in the simultaneous half-marathon, a distance he told me he liked "because it was halfway between running the marathon and not running." Unknowingly, he finished the half marathon in the exact middle of the 111-person race –56th place. His finish was the most average of the race, using both the median and mean standard. After reading about this marathon and examining the results, I tracked Randy down.

During our marathon, Randy nears the point where runners are allowed to veer off the marathon course and onto the remainder of the half marathon course. He takes the long road. But he questions whether he should have. His left knee, wrapped in a band to nurse a twinge he felt earlier in the week, is starting to stiffen. Maybe there's something about veering toward the halfway that runs in the Barten family. Randy says the year before, his son Eric, a college freshman, and another youngster led a cow to the marathon's 13.1-mile turnaround point, then hung a homemade sign around the animal's neck that read, "HOLY COW, YOU MADE IT HALFWAY!"

"I'm glad he'll be there again this year," Randy says. I assume he means his son.