IOWA CITY — At age 41, Ben McCollum ran his first marathon.

McCollum, the head basketball coach at Northwest Missouri State at the time, accidentally ran the first half of the race faster than he wanted. His average minute-per-mile pace at the half-marathon mark was 8:32. McCollum tried to do the math and realized what was going to happen.

“I knew,” McCollum says, “I was going to hit the wall.”

In some ways, long-distance running is the ultimate mental battle. There was no one else stopping him from finishing the race — no one trying to defend him, like during his playing days, nor an opposing coach trying to disrupt his game plan.

When that wall came, it was quite literally a battle with himself.

“I never walked,” McCollum told the Register. “Not one time did I walk. But when you hit

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