Peter Sagal - The Incomplete Book of Running

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Also by Peter Sagal

The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things

(and How to Do Them)

Simon & Schuster

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New York, NY 10020

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Copyright 2018 by Peter Sagal

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

Some of the material in this book appeared in different form in Runners World and AARP The Magazine.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2018

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Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui

Jacket design by David Litman

Jacket photograph by Kyle Cassidy

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-4516-9624-0

ISBN 978-1-4516-9626-4 (ebook)

To my father, who woke me up and said, Time to go

If you cant play sports, run. If you cant run, run long.

Author unknown

If youre going through hell, keep going.

Commonly, and erroneously, attributed to Winston Churchill

I n 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. Ive 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 lets 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 lets 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 didnt get in the way, and they got in the way a lot, so lets 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 didnt 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. Lets be conservative and say one thousand miles for the whole decade, bringing us up to four thousand, and lets 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. Lets 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 marathonsthats 365 miles right thereplus 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. Chicagos 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: Heres the stretch where I ran that frozen half marathon in January 2013. Heres where my running buddy Chris and I finished our twenty-mile training run in 2006 in such ragged shape that we told ourselves wed 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. Heres 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. Heres 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. Theres 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. Lets keep going; I spend too much time there as it is.

And of course Ive run in places other than Chicago. Everywhere, in fact. Its 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... Dont Tell Me! , the radio show Ive hosted since 1998, if I didnt go for a run, I wouldnt have a chance to get out of the hotel or performance space and see where I was. Once, in a city I wont name because I dont 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 Victorias Secret and the P.F. Changs and the Auntie Annes 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.