A Monday Riddle

How is life in the Trenches like training for a marathon?  It's not, you say?  Well, you'd be wrong.  In so many ways, it is exactly the same, both for those of us working in the Trenches and for our clients.  You see, when you train for a marathon, you work backward from the race date to organize your training.  Your taper runs are a week or two before the race, and your mileage increases until it reaches the maximum right before the taper starts.   When you prepare for trial, everything is calculated back from the trial date.  Discovery closes a month or so before trial, custody evaluators start to work 90 days pre-trial, giving their reports 3 weeks pretrial, and court ordered settlement conferences are also just after discovery closes.  The trial is the marathon, and everything is calculated to lead up to that moment.
Clients also have to deal with the marathon timetable.  Most of them are first time marathoners, so they are working up their mileage without any prior experience of what it takes to train for the race, much less run it.  Training for a marathon takes place over a long period of time, at least 3 months, if the runner is used to running, longer if the runner is inexperienced.  Most divorce clients are inexperienced runners, so training, the period leading up to trial, takes longer than they realize.  It's also much harder.  There is always a time during any period of marathon training where you're tired, when all of a sudden, even running a medium run is difficult.  It's the time when the inexperienced runner begins to wonder whether they'll be able to make it the distance.  And so it is with the family law client.  There is always a point in the case where nothing is moving forward, when it feels like the pain will not end, that the divorce/custody/support trial will never come, much less be finished.   That moment, however, is usually the turning point, from which the training/preparation builds steam.  The client doesn't know this, however, and despairs, and without an experienced attorney/trainer to guide them, might give up.  Those of us in the Trenches not only provide legal advice and representation, but also the voice of experience that helps our clients get through to the finish line and on with their lives.