Imagine the Odd Couple running a marathon, and you've got Jennifer Meissner Long '94 and Lori "Duey" Dutrieux Manning '92.

The two alums, who have been close friends since their basketball days at Adrian, have nearly opposite personalities. In 1997, they both decided to run the Chicago Marathon-but in very different ways.

In Duey's case, it was her spontaneous nature kicking in.

"Duey is adventurous. She's the type of person who would do it on a whim," Jen says. "I can't see her training a lot for it-and she didn't. But she's the type that would do it on minimum training and get through it."

Jen, on the other hand, is more disciplined. She says she is pretty good about eating right, stretching right, and wearing good shoes. While she'd never run a marathon before, she is known for her no-nonsense determination.

"I didn't wonder if Jen would finish at all," Duey says. "She's an excellent runner. She takes her running very seriously, so when she says she's going to train for a marathon, I'm sure she followed her schedule to a tee."

And she did. Then a resident of the Chicago area, Jen started training about six months before the race. She was dedicated about her traditional training schedule, and she slowly increased her distance to as much as 22 miles.

Meanwhile, time marched on at Duey's home in the Indianapolis area. As the October race drew closer, she finally started getting serious. "It was around late August, maybe it was even after Labor Day," she says. She didn't really follow a schedule or even keep track of miles, although she figures she did run somewhere around a 15-miler. "I figured I might be able to finish half of it, and it was all downhill from there."

The night before the race, Duey and Jen met with some friends at the Northwestern/MSU football game. "I think Duey went out and partied and I went home to bed," Jen says.

In the end, they both finished. Jen carefully adjusted her speed up and down to stay very close to her 9-minute miles, and her final time was right around 3:51 (three hours, 51 minutes). Despite her training, it wasn't easy.

"They say a marathon is cut into two parts, the first 20 miles and the last six. That's true."

Duey finished at 4:31. She kept focusing on making it to the next water station, which she walked through for a drink before heading on. She remembers one station in particular.

"They started playing the Rocky theme song, and I knew I was on my way," she says. "The whole race was so exciting. There were thousands of people there, I felt like an Olympic hero."

It wasn't the last time that Jen or Duey took on a marathon. Duey ran Chicago again the next year, and Jen has been steadily improving her time in the other three marathons she's run. All this running seems to have taught them the same lesson: it's mind over matter.

"You have to forget the pain," Jen says.

Duey agrees. "I truly, truly, truly believe that running a marathon is 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical," she says. "The only difference is how sore you feel the next day. I could have used a pair of crutches, and as soon as Jen Meissner finished, she probably ran a 3-mile cool down."