Every Fourth of July, the small town of Seward draws elite athletes who perform amazing feats of strength and endurance on steep Mount Marathon.

I am not one of them.

Oh, I'll be there, all right, far, far behind Cedar, Kikkan, Holly, Ellyn and, in fact, most of the Mount Marathon pack. I've done the race almost every year since I arrived in Alaska in 1987, and have the T-shirts to prove it. This will be, I think, my 20th race. I like to tell people I am the slowest person who has done it the most times.

Slowpoke or not, I take Mount Marathon pretty seriously. Year-round, the mountain haunts me, at least in my anxiety dreams, in which I forget to bring my shoes to the race, or my shorts (this actually happened once), or I arrive at the start line 20 minutes late, or I forget the route, or I discover that -- whoops! -- I somehow forgot to train.

For non-Alaskans who don't know about Mount Marathon, here are the basics: It's not a marathon. That's just the name of the mountain. It's the nation's second-oldest trail race, now in its 83rd running. It has its genesis, according to legend, in a 1908 Seward barroom bet over whether someone could get to the top and bottom of the mountain in an hour.

The distance is about five kilometers, but that's irrelevant. What counts is the 3,022-foot vertical rise and run down. I'll skip details about the route, other than to say that it's incredibly steep and sometimes terrifying -- a sweat-pouring, heart-pounding, thigh-burning climb and descent. Those who have been on it know the worst parts, which pretty much comprise the entire bottom half.

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There are risks aplenty -- cliffs, falling rocks, slippery snow, cow parsnip and, in recent years, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. No one has died in the race, but last year Brent Knight, at the time the leader in the men's event, seemed to come pretty close when he collapsed, green-faced, within sight of the finish line.

There are much tougher running races in Alaska -- the 14-mile Matanuska Peak Challenge, with its 9,000-foot vertical climb, comes to mind -- but none create quite the spectacle of Mount Marathon. The town swells temporarily to 10 or more times its normal size of 2,500 people. There's an entire celebration built around the race, with a street fair, parade, mini-kids race and all the trappings. It's an only-in-Alaska ritual, inextricably linked for some people to the Fourth of July.

"It is so much fun, and I love it," says Karol Fink, a state dietician and health program manager in Anchorage and a former Seward resident who serves on the race committee and is a frequent top-10 finisher. There is great camaraderie in this on-the-mountain reunion of friends, she says. "If you live there, you have to do the race," she says.

My motivation? If I didn't do it, I'd feel like a wimp for the other 364 days of the year.

Some people say I'm lucky just to have the opportunity to compete, and some would argue that duffers like me don't even belong in the race. This wasn't an issue when I started running Mount Marathon and could simply drive down to Seward and sign up on race day. Many years prior to that, I'm told, race officials practically begged people to run, and refunded the $1 entry fee to everyone who crossed the finish line. Those days are long gone.