McManus and some friends ran the New York City Marathon last year, without training. McManus was on one knee, down for the count, at 20 miles, but somehow finished. This year he wanted to prepare. He thought it would be good for him, and his men, to have a goal. He E-mailed Janet Messina, who heads the marathon registration effort for the New York Road Runners, from Iraq.

"He came up with the idea to run and then said all of us had to do it, and then we didn't have a choice," Isaac Moore says.

Some of the guys, stationed in the town of Husayba, built a .44-mile loop around the perimeter of their camp. In McManus' camp, in Al Qaim, the loop was longer, nearly a mile. McManus went on the New York Road Runners Web site and followed the training regimen laid out for the marathon. Messina helped them out further by furnishing them shoes, clothing, running sundries.

Usually they would run at 5:30 in the morning. Sometimes it would be after they were up all night, fighting a war. Moore recalls one morning when he was getting his miles in when mortar shells started hitting about 100 yards away.

In another instance, about 40 minutes into a run, an emergency radio call came in about Marines who had been hit by a roadside bomb. Immediately the runners were off to get their helmets, flak jackets and weapons, and soon were in their Humvees, going off to secure a place for a helicopter to land and to transport the injured to the helicopter.