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Senior year of high school, you’ve got that weird moment where you have to choose a senior quote. If you’re from Summerville, South Carolina, a lot of folks choose country music lyrics (“A country boy can survive!”) or Maya Angelou or, if you’re a big lit nerd you might choose a depressing Robert Frost couplet about snowy horses and existential gloom. I wasn’t that kind of an 18-year-old.

My senior quote was “Start slow, then taper off” which, at the time, was just lazy, glib nonsense. In fairness, I was only calculatedly lazy but I was chronically glib, and I don’t exactly recall where I found the quote. For whatever reason — let’s take as a given the aforementioned glibness — I chose it to represent my senior mindset, and there it was captured forever.

As it turns out, the quote was a piece of sage advice by a fellow named Walt Stack, who was a renowned ultramarathon runner and coach in California who ran some 62,000 miles in his life across many marathons and ultras. As you might surmise, his coaching style was focused overwhelmingly on slow and steady running. He was one of the original “Just Do It” athletes for Nike.

Of course, I knew none of this when I was 17 and just trying to say something funny and memorable alongside my yearbook photo, though the quote was not especially funny nor notably memorable. But it’s on my mind this week as I enter the dreaded marathon taper period.

On February 24th, I’ll be running the Publix Atlanta Marathon. It’s a roughly figure-eight shaped course that starts in downtown Atlanta near the former CNN Center, loops out 13 miles north, then loops another miserable 13 miles south down and around the former Turner Field. This will be the 11th time I’ve run the stupid thing, and my 12th Atlanta marathon overall. It’s not a fun course, with usually around 1,200 feet of elevation change and mediocre crowd support. But it’s my hometown race, and every year I get sucked in.

Last year I fell in step with a fellow runner named Ted, another guy roughly in my same age category with a much more impressive beard than mine. We ran together for a few miles toward the end where the course gets particularly gruesome. He said that he was from California and was doing Atlanta to check Georgia off of his list of 50 states. He asked me if I’d run it before, and I said yeah, that it was my tenth time. He laughed and asked me why I’d repeat such a miserable race, and I confess that 20 miles in I didn’t have a good answer. I still don’t, really.

The next two weeks are my taper weeks, when I get to dial back my mileage and save up glycogen or ketones or carbs or whatever kind of biological mumbo jumbo we make up to try to predict how a race will go. I’ll be neurotic about what I eat, justifying bad decisions (“beer is carbs!”) and treating every sneeze like imminent pneumonia. I’ll say things like “the hay is in the barn” if I’m dragging one day, and I’ll stare at the map, trying to rehearse what it will feel like when I’m feeling chafed and exhausted on Hank Aaron Boulevard. Maybe I’ll catch a surge of energy and run up one of the hills I walked last year. Maybe I’ll make a new friend. Maybe I’ll feel great and finally qualify for Boston.

But probably what I’ll do is what I’ve learned to do, and what I told myself to do back in 1991, even before I knew what it felt like to run more than a half mile or so at a time. I’ll find a steady pace and a song I like, and I’ll enjoy being alive and in joyous motion. I probably won’t go as fast as I like, but I won’t go as slow as I could.

Stack died in 1995 at the age of 86. The other quote he’s known for is “I’m going to do this ’til I get planted,” which was true: he ran into his 80s.