The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

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...