The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

Get up. Start. Go. Move. Take a rusty first step, like the Tin Man. You will squeak. Go.

because every time you run you leave a little something on the road, and you pick up something to replace it. Every step and every run is a transformation from what you were into what you are becoming: a runner.

Heraclitus said, “What does not change is the will to change,” and thus our motivations are inexhaustible as we propel ourselves doggedly down the dawn streets.

Gradual, Goal, and Group.

Even in World War II, messages were sent across a battlefield by use of “runners,” who, we can presume, ran.

“Hey,” I said. “I see a lot of you wearing headphones. And I’m going to make a suggestion: take them out.” They stared at me like I was a lunatic.

But after a while, I started to leave the headphones behind. First I gave them up for races. It occurred to me that if I was going to train and practice and focus on achieving something, when the time came to actually do it I could at the very least pay attention. A race, most especially and counterintuitively a marathon, requires more focus on the moment than someone who’s never done it might imagine.

runs as well. I am typing this, obviously, staring at a screen. The computer is also playing music, which I enjoy as I write. When I finish writing in a little bit, I will go have myself some lunch, and of course I’ll play some music or news, and maybe even look at another screen. After lunch, I’ll go rake some leaves or do other tasks, with headphones firmly in my ears; I’ll enjoy music over dinner, and then finish my day by watching another, larger screen, with some content that, I hope, can command my entire attention. If I don’t leave my headphones behind when I run, I wouldn’t spend a single minute of my waking life free from input.

I have a friend who wears headphones on long solo runs because, he

says, “I can’t spend that much time alone in my head...

can, and he should. Spending that much time inside one’s head, along with the voices and the bats hanging from the various dendrites and neurons, is one of the best things about running, or at least one of the most therapeutic. Your brain is lik...

When I decide to run alone, with nothing in my ears but the air and the occasional gnat, it gives me a chance to rehearse the things I’m too shy or self-conscious to actually say, and to put them into words with the help of my constant left-right-left metronome.

In my running mind, and only there, my opponents are dumb with sheepish recognition. And every time I let off this toxic steam—rising and evaporating with the other noxious gases from my sweaty self—I can feel the tension leave my arms and legs, and my gait becomes looser and freer. I come from a long line of shoulder-hunchers, and as I rant and I run I can feel my back straighten and my head rise. It’s as if the dark thoughts I give silent voice to are quite literally holding me down, weights tied to my neck and clavicles, and as I indulge them I cut them and let myself rise again.

And then, as my vents clear, I begin to think about running. 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.

I think about my motion, and my breathing, my muscles, and their state of agitation or stress or relaxation. I note my surroundings—the downward slope I would never notice driving this street, the hawk’s nest I would never see for lack of looking up, the figure in a window caught in a solitary moment of their own. I think about the true meaning of distance—about the learning that ...

“Take off your headphones. A 5K is a little over three miles, and let’s say you run a ten-minute mile, so that’s about half an hour. You can spend half an hour without distractions. Pay attention to what you’re doing, pay attention to your body, pay attention to your breathing. Some of you are about to run your first race ever—be here for it.” Some of the runners took my advice, taking off their headphones and stowing them in their bags. I watched those people as we all shuffled to the line, and started to watch for the first indication of someone spelunking into the darkest depths of their own head, their lips starting to move as their own inner monologues emerged to fill the sudden silence.

It only occurred to me, much later, as I viewed online videos of the bombing, how important William’s gutsy last mile really was. We crossed the line at 4:04. The bomb went off as the clock read 4:09. Five minutes later. Which might well have been the five minutes that William would have needed to walk those last miserable blocks, had he given in to the urgings of his hip, gut, and mind. But he ran the bravest and toughest mile of his life, not even able to see clearly what he was doing, just because he wanted to be able to say he did it, and by doing so, he crossed the line alive. I got an email from William the next day, from his home in Austin. He wrote: I have really sore legs. I am ready to start training for the next marathon, and I’m going to have a lot more long runs. I had the speed, I just need to really increase my endurance. Thanks very much for being my sighted guide; you made the marathon a great pleasure. The only problem[s] were the bombs.

“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.” I came across those words in the manuscript of the play Fighting International Fat by Jonathan Reynolds,

I

sought a second

opinion, from Christine M. Korsgaard, Ph.D., a Harvard professor and a foremost expert on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Many of my critics made an argument that began with “What if everyone did what you did?” and in doing so, were unknowingly (perhaps!) relying on Kant’s seminal 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant called this notion “the categorical imperative,” and Professor Korsgaard proceeded to beat me about the head with it. “It’s applied as a thought experiment,” she wrote to me. “Imagine a world in which everyone acts on the same principle that you do, and ask yourself whether, in that world, you could act that way, too.” I understood this as a formal statement of the turnstile principle: If you jump a turnstile, the subway will run fine without your $2.25. If everybody jumped the turnstile, the subway would collapse for a lack of funds and nobody would go anywhere. And since you can’t stop anyone else from jumping the turnstile, you have a responsibility to at least make sure you don’t do it. The professor also took issue with my argument that I had used few public resources in my run: “Why does the public consent [to let the marathon use the road...

When I asked Carey what penance I could perform, he offered two choices. I could work a shift at the chip verification station at the expo for an upcoming Chicago Marathon, sitting there for hours, making sure runners had the right packet, so as to understand how thorough the marathon is about making sure every participant is correctly accounted for. Or, I could take a shift at a water stop—“The last shift, when everybody’s been through it,” said Carey, cheerfully—with a broom and a bucket, cleaning up thousands of cups, so I could observe, firsthand, how much work and supplies and drudgery goes into looking after the paid, official, honest runners.

And that’s how I ended up at the mile-18 aid station two years later (I was out of town for the 2012 Chicago Marathon) filling and stacking layers of Gatorade cups along with some high school girls. And I was glad to be there, and grateful for the chance to make amends.

And you don’t bandit races. Because, as Kant tells us, if everybody did it, we’d all be back to running on our own, and there wouldn’t be an “everybody” to run a race

with.

I. The woman who “won” the 1980 Boston Marathon by taking the subway to a spot a half mile short of the finish line and then running across it, three minutes before the first actual female finisher, Jacqueline Gareau. Ruiz was actually crowned the winner—literally, with a laurel crown, as they do in Boston—before witnesses came forward to expose the scam a week later, because in those more innocent days no one could imagine anyone doing that.

Run Less, Run Faster and created at the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training (FIRST) at Furman University, applies an essential insight to running: too much of anything is bad.

consulted the experts at Runner’s World, including former Boston champion Amby Burfoot, and they created for me an exact and demanding training schedule. It was daunting. My usual marathon training had me running thirty miles a week, perhaps thirty-five or forty on those weeks with a twenty-mile run on the weekend. This schedule would double it, to sixty miles a week and beyond. I would do the runs on a strict schedule, changing from hill work in the beginning, to build a base of leg strength, to speed work and tempo runs, along with long runs. One day on the schedule, about twelve weeks into the sixteen-week training period, called for a ten-mile tempo run on a Saturday, followed by twenty miles the very next day. Good news: I could slow down for the twenty miles. Thanks, Amby!

I started the race fast, as I had been starting every run, fast enough to PR, but it would take effort. Since I had abandoned punishing myself to get faster, I used geekery. In the rebooted 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica, when they want to move the bulky spaceship a vast distance very quickly, the crew “spins up” the “Faster-Than-Light Drive.” Not “crank,” not even the Star Trekian “engage,” but “spin up,” a phrase that evokes effortlessly increasing momentum. So after clocking 6:18s or better for the first five miles, I started saying to myself, aloud, “Spin up! Spin up!” And so for the first time I think ever, I actually accelerated in the final mile of the race. I came roaring around the corner where I live, passed my house, waved without slowing down, and flew the final half mile to the finish, at light speed or better, crossing as the clock ticked over 39:09. My fastest time ever, by almost a minute.

what I have tried to remember, and occasionally achieved, is that sense of handing myself over to the moment I was in, trusting that what had brought me there would carry me through, allowing things to transpire not with effort, but with something like ease, even grace.

Marathoners are like tuna salad: we go bad in the heat.

During our first Christmas season in the house I would sometimes go for a run in the afternoon and come back in the darkness, looking for the small menorah candles amid the greater glow of our goyische neighbors, a quiet sign that, as the letters on the dreidel indicate, Nes Gadol Hayah Sham, a great miracle happened here.

The problem with being a midlife crisis runner is you start your transformation just as everything else in your body is going to hell. Inside this fifty-three-year-old body is a thirteen-year-old runner, and as much as he would like to, he can’t get out.

The man who trained for and ran a 3:09 marathon in 2011 is gone; there are some days when I glance at a shop window as I run by and see someone who looks like that guy, but if I stop to make sure, he vanishes, because I am standing still, and he never was. The loss has not been so much ability but focus and desire; now, far more than otherwise, when the urge to stop comes upon me, I give in. So I am a middle-aged man, born in 1965, and I am a runner, born

(after some false starts) in 2005, and that is what I shall be until both pass on, some indeterminate time from now, at the same moment. I’ve come too far to retrace my steps now. The kind of runner I will be, in the next decade, and the one after that, will be different: less competitive with himself or others, less eager to find new worlds to conquer, but also less obsessed and less narrowly focused on the next square of pavement ahead. 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.

People ask me about the benefits of running, and there are many, even more than the ones discussed in this book, and I have realized many of them—better health, increased energy, the deep-seated thrill of setting a goal and, through difficult work, surpassing it. I have run many miles in many different places with many different people, and each one was worth the effort. 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. And maybe, too, a habit of hope. Running sometimes sucks, but every

run ends, and tomorrow is a new opportunity to take a first step. The differences between running as a lifestyle and “jogging” as exercise are many and much debated, but the key one is this: You “jog” as necessary exercise, something to endure. You run with the expectation that this outing, today, will be the day when it all comes together, when instead of your feet propelling you along the ground you’re actually flying, and your feet only serve to keep you anchored to the ground. Joggers wait to finish; we runners expect to get somewhere.

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. As I said, we are cruelest to ourselves. When somebody else is counting on us, somebody we don’t want to disappoint, well then we get up early. We show up. We put our own struggle out of our mind and focus on the other person, and all of a sudden our feet no longer touch the ground. 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. I’ve run around the earth, maybe more than once, and I’m still right where I started. But everything else has changed, and so much doubt and pain and struggle has fallen away, so that the only thing left to me, of all the things that weighed me down when I began that circumnaviga...