I ARRIVED in arctic bay in the permanent daylight of late June, our passenger plane/cargo transporter (mail, fresh strawberries) touching down on the gravel airstrip in a blaze of dust. The other runners and I said goodbye to the NASA scientists and Japanese tourists continuing 225 miles northwest to the last stop, at Resolute, and disembarked onto the windswept mesa.

Most everyone was from the East Coast or California. A few were marathon virgins like me, including a laid-back thirty-something Manhattan couple, Josiah and Jennifer; he was going to try to keep up with her in his first marathon and she was going for her tenth—even though she was wearing a foam neck brace from a recent fender bender. The rest had been running for decades. Forty-eight-year-old Bob, a quiet Navy graduate professor, admitted after a little haranguing that he'd run the Boston Marathon in just under three hours. Bill, a soft-spoken bachelor in his sixties, was headed to Hawaii next, for his 101st marathon—or 351st race, if you count the 250 ultramarathons. Bruce, a 60-year-old minister, and his retired architect boyfriend, Robert, had completed marathons on every continent and joked about their own short-shorts before any of us dared. The veterans kept the mood light, teasing that we newbies must feel "like a sackful of cats on the way to the river" as we trundled down the hilly race road. The jokes mattered. Arctic Bay necessitated them.

Established in the sixties, the town is one of the last hamlets, or what Americans call "reservations," to which the Inuit were forcibly relocated after living nomadically for five millennia—a fact glaringly absent from tourist brochures. The place consists of 175 box houses in various states of completion, perched on stilts over the permafrost and surrounded by collapsed komatiq sleds, disemboweled Ski-Doos, and rusted water tanks. Most of the locals had left to hunt narwhal at the floe edge for the summer.

I should have followed their lead. I'd arrived a whole week early, in fact, because I wanted to get to know the place, maybe take up some offers to share a seal-meat dinner or carve some ivory. But the next morning, when the other early arrivals left on a guided camping trip to join those locals, I stayed behind. Seven hundred fifty loonies? That's almost 670 bucks!

Note to self: idiot.

Since the health department had closed the only hotel, I was billeted in the "crew trailer," a metal bunkhouse for the repairmen often flown in to fix the town's two generators. For eight days, I breathed diesel fumes, sizzled bland breakfasts of outrageously expensive eggs on outrageously expensive toast, and watched delayed broadcasts of the Tour de France on a soft-focus TV. Fidgety from withdrawal, no smokes in tow, I wandered the lifeless hamlet, nodding absently to kids in FUBU sweatshirts, walking across ice floes to stand out on the frozen bay, and brooding forlornly on the husk of a dog carcass decomposing near the stony beach. By day three, even Annaleen, the leggy, motorcycle-jacket-wearing Dutch model stalled out here working on her anthropology thesis, couldn't distract me from my cigarette jones.

Here I was, in one of the most remote places on earth, a settlement that fascinated me so much I wanted to arrive days early, and I was ignoring the one person who'd offered to show me the town's good side. I was hiding from a lonely Dutch model!

Soon enough, I was holding a pack of Export A's that ran me $13.25 Canadian.

I removed a stubby fag from the flat, wide pack, struck a match, and inhaled deeply as the tip crackled into a glowing cherry. The 16 milligrams of tar stained my teeth a bit yellower, gave me that wonderful ashtray breath, and then swirled into the nooks of my dentistry, upping the chances I'd suffer gum disease. Microscopic chunks of nastiness, incinerated at 900 degrees, raked the soft pink tissue lining my trachea, challenging it to permanently scar and exponentially decrease the amount of air I could move. As the soot disappeared into the bottom of my lungs, toxic particles coated the alveoli, small air sacs no bigger across than the width of a hair, sat there, blackening them. Sixty proven cancer causers seeped into my bloodstream, hastening dozens of diseases and illnesses, from cataracts to leukemia.

And then the wonder drug kicked in, the nicotine having reached my brain in seven seconds, faster than mainlining heroin. At the horseshoe-shaped pleasure-reward pathway at the top of the spine, the nicotine molecules triggered a flood of dopamine, and suddenly the Arctic appeared not desolate but full of potential again. I remembered better why I was there (to transform from Marlboro Man to Marathon Man). I could concentrate more clearly on how to prepare for the race (get good sleep two nights before). My senses grew keenly aware of what was important in my immediate surroundings (Annaleen). And I could better solve any problems (boredom). I realized I probably wasn't going to kick the habit anytime soon.

It wasn't an epiphany, just acceptance of fact: I could inhale a tar tube, rip out two hours' worth of seven-minute miles, and savor the comedown with another smoke. My body could do that. For now. And just as well, because the determination required to rapidly place one foot in front of the other barely approximated the strength of spirit required to skip a brown-leaf meal.

I hadn't run from the addiction; I'd run headlong into it and come to find that I was weaker than I ever thought.