The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

Our sport seems mindless only to people who never run long enough for any thought to form other than “When can I stop running?” But the only way to succeed as a long-distance runner is to do it mindfully, to be aware of the body and the world it is moving through.

We live in a world of mutually assured hallucination. That which we imagine to be immutable is not.

if enough people decide to believe something else . . . then that other reality supplants our own.

There were times, many of them, during the course of my first divorced year, when I would say to myself, “Things will have to get back to normal,” not realizing that reality is democratically determined, and I only have one vote.

“If you’ve ever been fat, you will either be fat the rest of your life or you will worry about being fat the rest of your life.”

There is sadness, and there is hate, and bitterness. There is regret and fear and doubt and there are the injuries done to us and there are the injuries we do to others. But the lesson and practice of running is, again, a faith in the possibility of positive change. That, if you run enough miles, with enough dedication and the right kind of mind-set, if you accept the limitations of what’s possible but refuse to accept the rutted path of what’s painless, if you keep at it, if you keep going, you can become what it was you were meant to be.