Unlike most 8-year-olds touring New York City, Wesley Paul began his sightseeing on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, standing elbow to knee with 4,822 strangers.

Paul was ready to run the 1977 New York City Marathon, and while the magnitude of the moment did not faze him  it was his fourth marathon, after all  the scale of his surroundings did.

Having come from Columbia, Mo., and not even 5 feet tall, Paul gazed in awe at the nearly 700-foot towers of the bridge. “I didn’t know people could build stuff like that,” Paul, 40, recalled recently.

Paul ran without parental supervision across five bridges and five boroughs  watched by relatives standing on sidewalks  to finish the race in a startling 3 hours 31 seconds. He is the youngest marathoner recorded in the marathon’s 40-year history but not the only child to become infatuated with a distance many adults find torturous, even life-altering.