MANHATTAN (CN) - Before crossing the finish line of the New York City Marathon, the Second Circuit's Judge Denny Chin remembers setting a more modest benchmark in the courthouse fitness room.
"The first time I ran five miles on the treadmill was at the gym in 500 Pearl," Chin said, referring to the address of what is now known as the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse. "I was like, 'Wow, that was a big step,' because remember, back then, I was trying to recover from my surgery."
Chin - the first Asian-American to win federal judicial appointment on the East Coast - had been on the Southern District of New York bench for just four years when in 1998 he underwent triple-bypass, open-heart surgery.
"I had not been a runner," Chin, now 61, said in a candid interview inside his chambers.
As part of cardiac rehabilitation, however, the President Bill Clinton appointee began walking on a treadmill three times a week.
"Each week, I'd go a little faster, stay on a little bit longer," Chin remembered.
Presiding in the Second Circuit for the last five years, Chin has his chambers in the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse. A Merriam-Webster dictionary used by the Supreme Court justice for whom the building is named now rests in the waiting room of Chin's chambers, with the civil rights icon's name stamped twice on its cover page.
This room also has a courtroom sketch from a pretrial hearing in the case against disgraced financier Bernie Madoff, whom Chin ultimately sentenced to 150 years behind bars for what he described at the time as an "extraordinarily evil" Ponzi scheme.
Another sketch shows a priest perched behind a wrongly convicted Jose Morales, whose habeas case before Chin inspired the "Law and Order" episode "The Collar."
Believing the reality of Morales' innocence outweighed the principle of priest-penitent privilege, Chin issued the critical opinion permitting the testimony that set the man free.
Chin's decisions would grace the silver screen again later when he threw out a Fox News copyright lawsuit against comedian Al Franken, who had not yet become a U.S. senator, for parodying their "fair and balanced" slogan in the book "Lies and the Lying Lies Who Tell Them."
His full-throated defense of fair use fell a decade before his landmark decision throwing out a copyright challenge against Google Books.
But Chin had many miles to run - sometimes, dozens at a stretch - before he would encounter any those cases.
Shedding 40 pounds, Chin's training took him onto the streets, and he brought his law clerks with him. They would meet at 7:30 a.m. outside the courthouse for early-morning runs that sometimes passed over the Brooklyn Bridge, the East River and the Hudson.
"For a while there, people thought that to clerk for Judge Chin, you have to be a runner," he said. "There certainly was a time when, once a week, we'd meet here at the courthouse and go out and run four miles or so and then come back."
Chin's former clerk, Jodi Golinsky, remembered seeing this reputation take root.
Now general counsel for a credit card venture, Golinsky said Chin made such an impact on her that she continues to send him a bouquet of flowers every year on the anniversary of his heart surgery.