“I’m getting pretty low,” Kevin Gallerani told me the other day. “Cutting it close.”

“Me, too,” I replied. “Almost time to start breaking up the furniture.”

I may have been joking about taking an axe to the dining room table, but was serious about a sad reality: My supply of seasoned firewood, like Kevin’s, has been diminishing rapidly.

For diehards who heat with wood, this time of year often turns into a game of beat the clock, in which participants hoard the last available stick until the forsythias blossom, robins chirp and lines form outside soft-serve ice cream shops.

Kevin, his wife Alison and I had been chatting about the joys and travails of wood heat, enjoying a respite after a group workout organized by the Mohegan Striders running club. These weekly training sessions attract a wide variety of runners, from casual joggers to serious competitors preparing for next month’s Boston Marathon.

I reflected that struggling to make it through the end of the heating season is a lot like staggering the last mile of the fabled 26.2-mile foot race.

“You’ve just turned onto Boylston Street. The finish line, straight ahead — only a couple hundred yards to go! But around Mile 25, someone strapped a refrigerator on your back. Can barely lift your legs. Lungs bursting, head pounding, muscles cramping, stomach churning. The crowd is cheering, and you grit your teeth. Come on! Keep going! Hang in there!”

“That’s it, exactly!” Kevin exclaimed — one more push to the finish; one last load of wood.

After riffing on this theme, we gabbed excitedly about kindling, mauls, sledgehammers, wedges, saws, stacking procedures, stoking tips, stove design, the BTU properties of red oak, white oak, black birch, silver birch, hickory, swamp maple, sugar maple, beech …

Meanwhile, I could see nearby acquaintances edging away, careful to avoid making eye contact.

For normal people who rely on oil, propane, electricity and other, less labor-intensive energy sources, getting trapped in a conversation with wood-heat fanatics is almost as tortuous as non-runners forced to listen to marathoners review their mile splits and pulled hamstrings.

Even dedicated distance runners accustomed to suffering sometimes find it difficult to understand why anyone in his right mind would crawl out of bed at 3 in the morning to stoke the stove, or worse, start from scratch with newspapers, kindling and matches when the fire has gone out.

“Why don’t you just turn up the thermostat?” they wonder.

I sometimes ask myself the same question — particularly after I’ve been outside all day, carelessly neglecting to stoke the stove, and re-enter a house that a Nunangat Inuit would find chilly.

Short answer: Wood is a renewable resource. Every spring for decades, I’ve planted hundreds of seedlings to replace the trees I’ve cut down for firewood.

In addition, unlike running, kayaking, biking, swimming or other exercise, you actually have something tangible to show for all that cutting, bucking, splitting, hauling and stacking.

Few sights are more satisfying than a full woodshed, and to that end, my son Tom, neighbor Bob Graham and I have been cutting trees killed by gypsy moths for the past several months. I don’t plan to get caught short again any time soon.

So far, we’ve stacked about five cords of oak and maple in the driveway, which eventually must be lugged uphill for storage. We piled another five cords or so outside one woodshed and filled the other with six cords — in total, enough to last at least three years.

This entire supply won’t be seasoned, or dried properly, until next fall, when the whole burning routine starts all over again.

I can hardly wait.