Russ Clayton is a young man who keeps losing the important people in his life. Each time someone disappears, he finds himself left adrift. The Universe stacked against him. He only finds peace running alone on the roads of his small town in Kansas. Russ finally believes that everyone in his life is gone. Feeling abandoned, reckless, and liberated, he gives himself up wholly to the running by setting an impossible goal. But, he needs help.

Long ago, Brad Coy was the fastest marathoner on the planet, but a man who also lost everything he valued to a cheating Russian runner named Yuri Grimlov. Finding a kinship, Coy and Russ team together, retreat to the desert, and undertake a quest to shatter the brain's protective hold on the body that prevents us from reaching our physical limits of speed and endurance.

On the other side of the world, Grimlov has been charged with restoring Russia's tarnished reputation for doping its distance runners. He takes two young twin boys from their family and subjects them to his special mixture of psychological manipulation, doping, and scientific training. The boys, however, come to him already strongly shaped by their fraternal rivalries leavened with a heavy dose of their mother's demanding ethics and branded by their father's superstitions.

Inevitably, Coy and Grimlov face off again, Russ discovers whether he really ever was alone in the world, and the Twins confront the limits of their love for each other.