The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

  There are, broadly speaking, two ways to approach marathoning. The first is tactical. You plan your race, sketch out goal splits for each mile, plot when to take nutrition and when to take fluids and when to press and when to lay back and when to finally kick to the finish. This is a somewhat military approach, and in practice it has worked out about as well for me as it did for the World War I British generals planning out their attack on the Ypres Salient. And so I have come slowly to another view, based on longtime experience and disappointment. I now believe, along with Sun Tzu, that the war is lost or won long before the day of battle. You train, mentally and physically, as best you can, and on the day of the race you cast yourself upon the road and see where your legs can take you. You run until somebody or something tells you to stop.

  Today, for this marathon, I was supposed to help William get to where he wanted—the finish line—by the time he wanted to get there. I was worried I would screw it up. My nightmare for the day was William standing, frustrated, by the side of the road as I vomited or helplessly emitted something even less pleasant. I was at a moment in my life when I had disappointed just about everyone who claimed some duty from me. I wasn’t going to do it again. Not today. At least not for the next three hours and forty-five minutes, or so we hoped.

  We ran, and we talked more. William has the flat affect you sometimes find in people with neurological injuries, which, along with his sidelong glance, gives him an air of distraction, as if he is always thinking of something more interesting than he could share. But his wandering look was a thin shroud over his intelligence and humor. He liked my radio show and had many questions about it, particularly his favorite guest we’ve ever featured: the writer Carl Hiaasen. I told him some stories about Carl, and we cruised through miles five, six, and seven.

  Eventually we got to talking about my own life and what had brought me to this moment. I told him about my increasingly difficult marriage and its demise. It’s an odd thing to tell your troubles to a person with much worse troubles, especially if he would not agree with that comparison. William Greer is an ambulatory self-pity suppressor zone.

  The first half of the race sped by beautifully, as it often does at Boston. You descend gradually through the wooded roads of Hopkinton and Ashland and you settle into a groove—sometimes literally, if you don’t watch for the train tracks—as you run through the more built-up suburbs of Framingham and Natick. Early on, the crowds are sporadic, often gathered in front of restaurants and cafes, some of them apparently getting an early start on honoring the patriots of Patriots’ Day by binge drinking, as our founding fathers did, probably. The crowds were thickest at each town center, and as we ran by, children would come to the forefront of the crowds and stick out their hands for sweaty high fives.

  I’ve watched a few marathons, including back when I never had any thought of running one myself. In the crowd, there’s a growing anticipation as the leaders approach, preceded like dignitaries by waves of police cars, police motorcycles, and TV trucks. The elites come speeding by, their faces blank, and you applaud, and then you can cheer for the other elites—ones who have won races but won’t today—as everyone gets excited for the first woman, who is often met by cries of “First woman!” (Pro tip: she knows.) And then the crowds shout for the next few women, or perhaps a local or nationally ranked runner who’s doomed to finish thirty or forty places behind the leaders today, still an amazing athletic performance, one that won’t rescue him or her from obscurity but might earn a small sponsorship or an appearance fee at a smaller race.

  And then, like the flowing sheets of snow that follow the first bouncing snowballs of an avalanche, they come: the hundreds and then thousands of runners, crowded among one another. Their shapes gradually but visibly change from razor-thin to short, tall, bulbous, top-heavy, and bottom-heavy. It’s not quite a parade, not a panicked flight, not a mass migration, and not really a race between competitors, but it has qualities of all of them. It is a joyful, colorful, intense, grim, and sometimes unpleasant sight, depending on who you happen to see, where you’re seeing them, and how they’re feeling. If you’re watching at the eighteenth mile or farther on, you’ll see people walking, fading to the side of the road, grabbing at their calves, knees, or the ground itself. Stephen King once wrote a novel called The Long Walk in which young men have to complete a long-distance endurance walk, with the stragglers shot by guards. I assume he conceived of this story while watching the latter portion of a marathon field in the latter part of the course.

  Still, this was the early going, and so William and I cruised by the pubs and train stations of the western Boston suburbs happily and easily, along with thousands of other happy runners. The marathon had been underway for hours, and the crowds might have just arrived, or they might have been there all day. I appreciated their durability, and I understood it. When you’re standing there watching a race, you’re always tempted to walk away, back to your life, back to your job, but you always stay to wave at one more smiling face, one more sweaty brow. And you cheer. There’s something very pleasing about expressing unbridled enthusiasm, and the sidelines of a marathon are one of the few places on the public streets you can do it, unless your local team wins a championship, your kid is in the Fourth of July parade, or the allied forces have just liberated your city from the occupiers.

  Once we left behind the crowds in downtown Wellesley, and ran over the stripe marking the halfway point at mile 13.1, we entered a grove of trees, with few if any spectators, and from far ahead of us came a strange, high-pitched roar, which started out like the sound of an ocean in the distance and then resolved into human voices, limited to a narrow, high range of frequency. I grinned, and I promised William, “You’re going to like this.”

  It was the Wellesley Scream Tunnel, one of the great traditions of the Boston Marathon. The course cuts right through the Wellesley campus, and for decades, the Wellesley students have lined a barrier on the side of the course, erected specifically to keep them from overwhelming the runners. They are engaged in some sort of competition—informal or regimented, I never found out—to gather the most kisses from runners, so the girls all wave signs reading KISS ME! or KISS ME! I’M A HISTORY MAJOR or GAY/JEWISH/FROM CALIFORNIA, hoping to strike a chord in someone similarly situated. To use a few words freighted in both kissing and running circles, I thought William would make out like a bandit. He’s a blind runner! A hero, triumphing over his adversity! They’d be all over him! And me, his helpful guide, well, certainly my charity would earn me similar plaudits. If I had brought breath freshener, now would be the time to whip it out for a few puffs.

  To my dismay, William steered himself away from the shrieking women on his right, deigning to extend a warm hand to slap some offered in return. He was treating the Scream Tunnel like a nineteenth-century European courting ritual, careful to maintain a modest distance between himself and the single ladies. “What are you doing?” I actually yelled.

  “I promised Ellen,” William yelled back to me, “that I would never kiss anybody but her!”

  “She’ll never know!” I yelled back.

  “I would!” he said, and ran right past the last screaming girl with a wave. I stopped and kissed one at random on the cheek, grinned guiltily, and sprinted off after William. It was the first time I had kissed anyone since New Year’s Eve, when my wife and I had exchanged our last kiss ever, a dry peck that sealed off the prior two decades of our lives from whatever was next.

  Things began to go south for William as we continued to make our way east, the screams from the Wellesley women fading in the background. He told me he needed a porta-potty, so I found him one at the next water stop. Then again a mile later. Then again a mile later. As I stood outside the plastic shacks, waiting for William to reemerge, watching the minutes tick away, I was only grateful that it wasn’t me in there. If anybody’s bowels were going to cost William his goal, let them not be mine.

  William cruised up and past the Route 128 overpass,
a kind of warm-up for the real hills to come, and then he conquered the first of the true Newton Hills, Firehouse Hill, with a focus and pace that made me think he was going to handle all of them with ease. But Firehouse and the next hill took a lot out of him, and we weren’t two hundred yards up the third hill before he asked to walk for the first time. The longer you walk in a running race, the harder it is to get going again. The muscles start to cool and seize and as the exhaustion and pain fade it becomes that much harder to motivate yourself to start running and suffering again. I tried to push William, as I knew he had lost the chance to make his 3:45 PR, but he might still have a chance to hit a sub-3:50, and certainly, with a sustained effort, he could come in under four hours, which was his absolute standard, he had told me, for an acceptable race.

  But the day was rolling on, and we were slowing down, and then we came to Heartbreak.

  The name “Heartbreak Hill” became attached to this particular upward slope of Commonwealth Avenue because of the famous iteration of the race back in 1936, when an upstart delightfully named Tarzan Brown managed to blow past perennial champion Johnny Kelley right at that final hill, “breaking Kelley’s heart” as Brown went forward to the win. But over the years the name has come to define the hill as modern running’s most famous peril, the Minotaur of marathoning. If you are an amateur marathoner, then the mild hills of Newton—none of them, not even Heartbreak, are the kind of hill you’d even notice if you were driving up it while listening to a particularly good podcast—come at exactly the wrong time, miles 17 through 21, the part of a marathon known as “the wall,” when your inner physical and mental reserves are depleted and the last thing in the world you want to see, with apologies to the plaque hanging in every Irish bar, is the road rising up to meet you.

  Now, in addition to his stomach cramps, William had cramps in his left leg, and we had to stop to try to stretch it out. I watched him nervously. I had told him I would turn off my running watch and we’d forget about the elapsed time, but I was too invested in his success to actually do it. Besides, what was he going to do? See it?

  As for me, I felt fine. Better than fine. I had suffered through various marathons to various degrees; on my first Boston, in 2007, I had felt as bad as he did right now, for similar reasons. I remember giving everything I had to get to the top of Heartbreak, realizing I still had five miles yet to go, and practically weeping with misery. But this time, as focused as I was on William, his gut, his leg, his loyalty to his wife (damn him), and his race, I hadn’t even noticed my own fatigue. We stopped to walk part of the way up Heartbreak, to give his aching body a rest, but still I felt strangely fine: I was twenty miles into a marathon and all I could think about was figuring out a way to get us both running again.

  William made it to the top, exhausted and in pain, and for a reward we got a lovely vista of the five miles we had left to go before the finish. William stopped again and stretched out his cramping leg against a light pole in front of Boston College, where the students had come out en masse to cheer. One young woman shouted “Good job!” at William. He shook his head grimly, not agreeing at all, but I engaged her in conversation. Turns out Jess was a junior at BC and had run the marathon herself. “What are you doing on that side of the barrier?” I asked. She shrugged, laughing. “Well, come on, then! Run with us!” She and her friend, both wearing jeans, sneakers, and light jackets, crossed the barrier and the four of us ran together. I made sure they flanked William as we ran down the slope of Commonwealth Avenue heading into Boston proper, and blind or not, Ellen or not, I noticed him picking up his head and his legs and feigning confidence. The sight of a pretty girl has a powerful effect, even on the sightless. (For the record, William denies that their being attractive had anything to do with it; he just enjoyed the company of someone else to run with for a bit. Hello, Ellen!)

  But Jess and her friend weren’t dressed or prepared to run, and each step was taking them farther from their friends in the company of an odd-looking man and his squat, bald companion, so they stopped and wished us luck and headed back after about a half mile, and soon William asked to stop and walk again. I could see that he was frustrated, but the pain was greater than the frustration, so we stopped. I tried to motivate him by how close we were to the finish: “Do you see the Prudential building, William? It’s about four miles away.”

  “No.”

  “How about that big building up ahead? Can you see that? Maybe we can try running to it before our next break.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  It was only about four hundred yards ahead. We continued to walk.

  “My parents and my uncle and aunt are going to be waiting for us near mile 23,” I said. “Let’s make sure we’re running when we get there, okay? I want to impress them.”

  I surreptitiously looked at my running watch. Unless we started running consistently, we would not make it under four hours. In fact, we were looking at a 4:10 finish, unless William collapsed completely, which seemed possible. But he managed to pull it together enough to run by my family as my aunt snapped a picture:

  William had the courtesy to run another few hundred yards beyond them before walking again. He was in pain, and I was in a bind. I wanted William to run. I had adopted his goal as my own, and it had become extremely important to me—as a runner, as a person, as a guide, as a caretaker in need of someone to take care of—to get William to that line in under four hours. I might have wanted it more than William did, and I found myself getting almost angry at him for flagging. Next thing you knew, I’d be docking his allowance.

  But at the same time, I was there to be of service to him, to help him run his race, whatever the outcome might be. If he wanted to walk, we would walk. If he wanted to stop and get a cheeseburger and a smoke, we would do that. Still, I couldn’t help trying to nudge him one last time. “William,” I said, “I know you’re not feeling your best, but you just can’t walk the last mile of the Boston Marathon. You make a right turn onto Hereford Street, and then a left onto Boylston, and then, there you are, on the last quarter mile of the race, the tall buildings around you, the crowds six deep and shouting. It’s like your own ticker-tape parade.”

  William took it in but didn’t respond.

  We passed the mile-25 marker—one mile and change to go. William started running. I could practically hear him gritting his teeth with the effort required.

  “Where’s that first right turn?” he asked.

  “About two hundred yards ahead,” I said.

  “I’m going to have to walk when we get there,” he replied.

  Okay. So be it. My watch read a minute or two over four hours. William had blown it, or maybe I had. Walking now wouldn’t matter; he had missed his final goal. The race was a failure, or at least, it seemed, I was.

  But when we got to that right turn onto Hereford Street, William didn’t start walking. He accelerated. I was to his left, in my appointed place. He turned right and sped up. No words had passed between us. He ran hard, going ahead of me—straight toward a pothole, marked by a dented yellow traffic cone.

  In the entire marathon course, almost all twenty-six miles to this point, there had not been a single obstacle in the course or a significant flaw in the roadway, and now William was running directly toward the very first one. I had just enough time to register its presence—it was marking a hole that must have materialized on race morning—and I started to shout “Watch out for the—” but then William, suddenly gifted with the sight and reflexes of a ninja, deftly dodged around it. And kept going.

  I managed to catch up with him as we turned left onto Boylston Street, but then I intentionally fell behind a step. He didn’t need my guidance anymore.

  “Three hundred yards!” I shouted to William. He picked up his pace.

  “Two hundred yards!” I shouted.

  Boylston Street is lined with stores and bars, and it is a popular place to watch the marathon. You get to cheer the runners through their last happy sprints fo
r the finish. On cold Patriots’ Days, the shops—such as Marathon Sports, located right before the finish line—provide warmth when you need it, so they’re a particularly good spot for spectators with small children. It can be extremely crowded, but as the winners and other elites had long since crossed the line—most of them were already showered and dressed and enjoying their well-earned lunch—and the finishers were now all charity runners and slowpoke civilians, just about anybody who liked could walk up and join the throng on the sidewalks on Boylston Street.

  The people cheered and clapped. I waved my arms for even more cheering and clapping. “His name is William!” I yelled.

  “Go, William!” yelled the crowd.

  “The finish line is right there!” I shouted to William. I was shouting everything. If my daughters were there, I would have shouted “I LOVE YOU!” into their faces. “Can you see it, William? Can you see it?”

  “I can see it!”

  William Greer crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon and kept running.

  I said, “You made it! You can stop!” William stopped. I hugged his sweaty, trembling form, grinning like an idiot. “You did it! You did it!” I was as proud of him as I’d ever been of anyone in my life. By his own standards, William had failed. He hadn’t set a new PR, hadn’t finished in under four hours . . . by the goals he had laid out before we started, it was one of the worst marathons he’d ever run, and he was exhausted. I didn’t care. To me, he had won the damn thing, and the moment lacked only a laurel wreath to crown him.

  The adrenaline drained quickly from both of us, and seconds after his last sprint, William was now doubled over, struggling to breathe. A medic, on the watch for runners in distress, approached and asked if he needed help. William politely declined and kept trying to slow his breathing. About five minutes had passed since we had crossed the line, but we hadn’t moved more than a hundred yards away into the finishers’ chute, the long longitudinal area manned by volunteers, security officers, and medics, and stocked with boxes of medals, blankets, and refreshments for the triumphant runners.