The Incomplete Book of Running - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Sagal is the host of the Peabody Award-winning NPR news quiz Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me!, one of the most popular shows on public radio, heard over four million listeners each week. He is also a playwright, a screenwriter, the host of Constitution USA with Peter Sagal on PBS, a one-time extra in a Michael Jackson music video, a contributor to publications from Opera News to The Magazine of the AARP and a featured columnist in Runner’s World. He’s run fourteen marathons across the United States. Sagal lives near Chicago with his wife Mara.
 
 

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The Incomplete Book of Running

Preface

In the midpoint of life, I found myself lost, in a dark place. So I tried to figure out exactly how many miles I had run to get there.

There are obsessive runners who record every fraction of every mile in logbooks piled years-high on their shelves, but I, a distracted, undisciplined person who is lucky if he remembers to write down his name on a check, am not one of them. I’ve subscribed to various digital services in recent years that supposedly automatically upload all my mileage to websites for the exercise community, but no service will let me use my preferred log-in password, “IFORGOT.” So let’s try some rough calculation.

I started running at fifteen and pretty soon I was obsessively traversing seven miles of suburban pavement a day, more on the weekends, and I kept that up until the weight loss and hollowed look of my eyes began to freak everyone out, including myself, and then I backed off. So let’s say about two thousand miles for my high school career. I jogged sporadically in college when schoolwork or girls or depression or depression about schoolwork and girls didn’t get in the way, and they got in the way a lot, so let’s just throw on one thousand miles for my entire four years of higher education.

My young adulthood was spent in LA, where sometimes the air was so thick with smog I could imagine seeing the atmospheric particulate matter I had sucked into my lungs coming back out of my nose like a French inhale, so I didn’t run much in those five years. Then, like Kurt Russell, I escaped LA and lived out the last of my twenties in Minneapolis, where the air was cleaner but significantly colder, so my running was pretty limited there as well. Let’s be conservative and say one thousand miles for the whole decade, bringing us up to four thousand, and let’s do the same for my thirties, the years in which I became a parent and got a real job and discovered that telling the mother of my young children that while I completely understood how tired and worn out she was after caring for them all day while I was in the office, I still needed to get a few miles in to improve my mood . . . did not do much for hers. Let’s say another thousand for that busy yet indolent decade. As I approached age forty, my guesstimate at my lifelong running odometer stands at five thousand miles.

And then something changed, a change as significant as any other in my life, and perhaps more. Becoming a husband, father, radio host, they all changed my circumstances, significantly and for the better, at least most of the time. But becoming a serious runner at the age of forty, as a way to forestall the mortality that seemed to be (and of course was) closer than it ever had been, changed who and what I am, physically, emotionally, mentally. I went from being a person who ran to being a runner.

How many miles in the thirteen years since then? Fourteen marathons—that’s 365 miles right there—plus countless half marathons and ten-mile races and 10Ks and even the occasional 5K, plus miles and miles and miles of training for those races, or doing recovery runs from those races, or just getting out for a run because sitting in the house or office for one second more seemed unbearable.

I have run every single street in my suburb west of Chicago a thousand times, so much so that if somebody remodels their porch, I notice it. Chicago’s Lakefront Trail is a strip of mixed-use recreational pavement that runs for eighteen miles sandwiched between Lakeshore Drive and its namesake, Lake Michigan, and I have run every mile of it so many times that each step of each repetition brings back a specific memory: Here’s the stretch where I ran that frozen half marathon in January 2013. Here’s where my running buddy Chris and I finished our twenty-mile training run in 2006 in such ragged shape that we told ourselves we’d just try to get to the next lamppost, nothing more ambitious than that, and we counted them out in gasps as we stumbled back to where we parked. Here’s the decorative fountain at the midline of the old McCormick Place building that according to Chicago writer Aaron Freeman is the unofficial divider between the northern and southern sections of the path, and thus the divider between White People Exercising and Black People Exercising. Here’s Grant Park, where I skittishly started my first-ever marathon in 2005, and thanks to a polygonal but closed-course map, also where I dragged myself over the finish line four hours and three minutes later. There’s Navy Pier, a god-awful yet inexplicably popular tourist attraction, and, because of some terrible sin committed in a prior life, my workplace for twenty years. Let’s keep going; I spend too much time there as it is.

And of course I’ve run in places other than Chicago. Everywhere, in fact. It’s been almost fifteen years since I went on a trip without packing my running shoes, shirt, shorts, and socks. On my many trips for Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, the radio show I’ve hosted since 1998, if I didn’t go for a run, I wouldn’t have a chance to get out of the hotel or performance space and see where I was. Once, in a city I won’t name because I don’t want to embarrass Virginia Beach, our hotel was part of the same new mixed-use complex that included our theater. I stepped out of the chain hotel, slowly turned 360 degrees, taking in the Victoria’s Secret and the P.F. Chang’s and the Auntie Anne’s and the generically comfortable and generically welcoming gastropub connected to the generically civic auditorium, and I realized that nothing anywhere in my line of sight gave me a single clue as to where in the United States I might be. So I took off on a run, and ended up in a really shitty part of town next to a rail yard, but at least it was shitty in a charmingly regional way.

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.

If visiting a city, I would head for the city center, or if in a state capital, I’d orient toward the building with the golden dome. If in a university town, I’d head for the campus and run on the leafy pathways in the quad, then look for the football stadium, and once there, rattle the door handles. Sometimes I got lucky. Once, at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, I returned a kickoff 110 yards for a touchdown, versus fierce if imaginary opposition.

I have seen remarkable things, and passed them at moderate speed. I have seen sea lions at the end of a deserted pier under the Golden Gate Bridge mating, wrestling, or arguing, or—in the manner of humans—all three at once. I have run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art just like Rocky and every other middle-aged mook in the world, and I have surprised cows on a country road in New Hampshire and Matthew McConaughey on...