When Molly Clinard decided to run a full marathon – all 26.2 miles – on a dinky quarter-mile track, her husband Nolan thought she was crazy.

“If drudgery is what you want,” he explains, “there’s no better way to get it than to run a marathon on a quarter-mile track. As long and arduous as a marathon can be, at least there are some things in a real marathon that’ll take your mind off the drudgery.”

Do the math: Running 26.2 miles on a quarter-mile track amounts to 104.8 laps – over a period of several hours – running on the same circle of asphalt and seeing the same ol’ scenery lap after lap after lap.

That’s drudgery.

But Molly had made up her mind. An avid runner, the 39-year-old High Point woman had been training since July to run in what would be her first marathon – the Richmond (Va.) Marathon, held Nov. 14 – but she’d come down with flulike symptoms only a few days before the race.

“I was definitely too sick to go,” Molly says, “but I was so disappointed that I made up my mind that in the next two or three weeks, I was going to make an attempt to run a marathon somewhere.”

So on Nov. 28 – during a family Thanksgiving gathering in Cleveland, Ga., where Nolan’s parents live – family members hastily but enthusiastically organized The Molly Marathon at a small community park in town. The event may or may not be the only marathon ever run on a quarter-mile track, but it almost certainly is the only marathon in which the runners – well, OK, the runner – broke a strand of toilet paper at the finish line, rather than a traditional tape.

“Yeah, they made a finish line for me ... out of toilet paper,” Molly says with a laugh. “It was such a hoot. We had a lot of fun.”

Family members used an old T-shirt to make Molly a not-so-official-looking runner’s bib – she was number 00001, of course – and 13 of them accompanied her to the track, where they cheered, gave her high fives, provided water and snacks, and even took turns running laps with her to help minimize the monotony.

“They couldn’t have been more supportive,” Molly says.

Aside from her running companions, Molly only had one way to break up what she calls “the sheer monotony” of running all those laps around a quarter-mile track – running the other way.

“Sometimes I would turn around and run the other direction, just to change things up,” she says. “I think I turned around three times while I was running.”

Molly won’t say what her time was – she wasn’t particularly pleased with it – but other family members marvel at the fact that she even finished the run.

“Though I myself have run a few marathons, I don’t believe I could force myself to complete an entire 26.2 miles alone on a 1/4-mile track like (Molly) did,” says Mary Clinard Borge, Molly’s sister-in-law. “I told Molly that the real feat was overcoming the mental challenge of running all of those laps.”

For Molly, she not only accomplished her goal of completing a marathon before her 40th birthday, she did so with a team of family members on hand to help her celebrate.

“It was so much fun to have them there – a real family affair, if you will,” she says. “It was probably better than going to run the Richmond Marathon, because I wouldn’t have had them all there for that.”