The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

I went from being a person who ran to being a runner.

Citizens of these United States don’t so much travel as we are processed through space, like some sort of industrialized extruded meat product, human Slim Jims. Metal boxes carry us to processing centers that put us on conveyor belts that put us in metal tubes that take us to other processing centers and conveyor belts that put us in different metal boxes that take us to temporary storage cubicles, many of them with lovely minibars for overpriced sustenance. Like hamsters in Habitrails, we think we’re free, because that’s what the enclosure’s designers want us to think. If we didn’t do something drastic to punch through the walls, we’d never even know we were trapped.

Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, I am a person unstuck in time.

He must have felt, as I did when I arrived at that age and station some decades later, that he was getting older before his time, that—like the astronaut in the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey—he could look across the room and see the old man he was going to become, huddled over a soup dish, or tucked into a bed with the covers up to his chin, laboring to breathe. He decided to get some exercise.

the run has become what it will be, different from every other run you’ll ever have or attempt, because every time you run you leave a little something on the road, and you pick up something to replace it.

Instead of the Walking Dead, we are the Running Living. The urge to transform can come from within, from a sense of either loss or surfeit in your life. I have known people who ran because they felt there was something missing, and they thought if they could pick up some speed they might find it. I have also known people who’ve found themselves laden like Marley’s ghost, with chains of stress and responsibility and unwanted pounds, who began to run in the hope that all or some of it would shake off from the jostling.

What dissuades people from any new effort, at least most people, is the looming specter of failure.

Most runners these days look like telephone operators in the 1950s: their ears are stuffed with other people’s conversations.

We self-hating teen boys were just another kind of monastic order, down the street from the nunnery, and

we chose a different way to flagellate ourselves.

Watch a track and field competition—there will be an array of bodies, from the tiny, slender long-distance runners to the broad-shouldered and heavy discus throwers. Each of them is a superb athlete and very, very few of them will ever end up on the cover of Men’s Fitness or Shape with their shirt and/or pants off. Health has a thousand ways of expressing itself, and the least important way is how much fat you can pinch between your fingers.

To cook for others is not only a form of caring, it’s a form of connection. The transformation of raw ingredients into cuisine is often called alchemy, but the true alchemy is what happens to you, the people you cook for, and the relationship between all of you.

Get out there! Punish yourself! Feel something! Sometimes pain seems like the only solution to a general numbing.

I once again reached the starting line of the Boston Marathon. I had lived a year filled with catastrophes, only one of which was a bombing. But, for the next four hours or so, I would not be a father bereft, a tragic hero living out my own private opera. I would just be a guide. I would never finish the race if I dragged all that with me. So I dropped all of it on the pavement and ran.

Runners slow, and runners fail. Some are grinded away by the friction on knees or feet, or a chronic lung or heart problem; some unlucky bastards are knocked down on the road. But the mark of a runner is to always get up.

But if there’s one thing that I have gained from my running career, it’s not the strength or cardiovascular fitness to run ten or twenty-six miles at a time, but the patience and focus to stay in the mile I’m in. Run long enough, and everything comes into view, be it a finish line or a home, a new one or one remade. What running has given me, most of all, is the practice of persistence.

Relationships may have something in common with running, in that you can practice and study and think and train and suffer and regroup, and learn from your mistakes and improve, and learn to avoid what pains you can and live with the ones you can’t, but in the end, all of that doesn’t matter. The only thing that really matters is whom you choose to do it with, and whom you do it for.