by Peter Sagal
All William’s heroic dash had really done, from a clinical perspective, was shave five minutes off what would have been our final time. We had crossed the line in 4:03. The clock above the line now read 4:09. If he had walked that last mile, as he had intended to (and probably believed he would until the moment he refused to do it), we would most likely still have been on the course, approaching the line just then. A woman passed me on my left, one of the many exhausted runners streaming around us, as we started to finally walk away from the line, farther into the chute and toward its rewards.
There was a very loud noise.
Two
I’m watching my father in the basement, jumping up and down and waving his arms. I am about six, and he is too old for this nonsense. Propped open on the otherwise unused wet bar is a Royal Canadian Air Force exercise guide, inexplicably but widely popular in the late 1960s, instructing him to stretch and leap and reach for his toes, and then, finally, to jog in place, perambulating about the basement, his legs churning disproportionately compared to the good it seems to do him. Nonetheless, this is the first time I can remember seeing my father run.
My father was born in Brooklyn in 1936 as Matthew Malkin, and he spent his childhood there, in a time and place where the only people running on the street were either chasing someone or being chased. “Physical culture” was then popular only with soldiers, health fetishists, and closeted homosexuals. He was raised by a single mother, as his father, my biological grandfather Simon Malkin, had run off with a younger woman when little Matty was but one year old, completely and permanently abandoning both him and his ten-year-old brother, Robert. My father’s mother, Helen Malkin (née Kirschenbaum), thus became one of those rare and shameful things in respectable if poor Brooklyn Jewish circles: a single mother. “A shandah,” they would have whispered. “What’s wrong with her?”
When Matty was twelve or so, my grandmother came home and announced that he should dress nicely, because he was to meet someone, a special someone, and that he was to address this new gentleman, upon meeting him, as “Dad.” The marriage to Mark Sagal—a fortyish bachelor who did not have and perhaps did not want any children—soon followed, as did formal adoption of Helen’s son. Matty (now) Sagal duly followed his new dad and his old mom out to Mark Sagal’s new job in Highland Park, Texas, a suburb of Dallas filled with prosperous oilmen, their pleasantly dutiful wives, and their “colored help.” For a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, it must have been as alien as Ouagadougou. Decades later, after my grandpa’s death, I learned that this and other moves in his life might have had something to do with his unreliability as an engineer, which might have had something to do with his reliability as a drinker of the scotch and waters that, later on in the 1970s, I would watch him and my father stir and sip in Grandpa and Grandma’s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
I’ve looked through my father’s yearbook from Highland Park High. There are the tall, handsome/pretty blond Texans on the football and baseball and cheerleading squads, and there is Matty Sagal, with his shiny black hair and horn-rimmed glasses, in the school play, on the masthead of the school paper. If during that time in his life my father ever moved for pleasure, for exercise, or for competition, there is no photographic record of it. Off he went to college to study engineering, as his stepfather demanded, and then to graduate school, and then to marriage, and then, as one did then, to choose between two or three competing offers from large corporations, each promising full employment until a pensioned retirement and a comfortable death.
The choice made (Bell Laboratories), he and his wife, my mother, Reeva Sagal (née Scholnick), duly moved to New Jersey, and duly reproduced: first Doug, born in 1962, then myself in 1965, and then our brother, Roger, in 1970. By the time the day of that basement memory came around, Matty—now Matthew W. Sagal on his business cards, Matt to his friends, and Matt the Rat to his enemies in office politics—was a suburban dad—such as I was to become—working for a single employer that provided him security and income stability such that his children wouldn’t be suddenly jerked across the country due to the whims of their parents’ failures in marriage or employment or sobriety. He must have felt, as I did when I arrived at that age and station some decades later, that he was getting older before his time, that—like the astronaut in the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey—he could look across the room and see the old man he was going to become, huddled over a soup dish, or tucked into a bed with the covers up to his chin, laboring to breathe. He decided to get some exercise.
Thus, there he was in the basement, jogging in place, trying to get his knees as high as he could, occasionally waving his arms up above his head in the manner of a jumping jack. I remember him puffing his breath out and in through pursed lips, like a fish, his bald head beaded with sweat. “What an idiot,” I thought to myself.
From that day onward, riding the pressure wave of the 1970s running boom, he continued to run like an idiot all over suburban New Jersey, sometimes with me watching—on one disastrous occasion, with me following along in a community 10K on my banana seat bike—but eventually with me openly mocking. I protected my pudgy, uneasy, unattractive self with a layer of sarcasm that thickened as I approached adolescence, and I gave my father more than his fair share of it. “Funny, Dad, you ran six miles; I stayed here eating frozen waffles, and lookie here: we both ended up in the same place!” He didn’t react to these provocations. He just snorted a bit and shook his head and went to shower.
But secretly, I envied him. Like just about everyone in that time and place and demographic, my father had purchased a copy of Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running, the Koran of the 1970s running boom. I would leaf through it sometimes, when nobody was around, and for a slow, unathletic kid like me, it was a kind of porn.
I admired the photograph of the author’s lower half on the cover: the right leg, in the background, tucked up toward the shorts, the foot blurred in motion as it finished its upward arc, and then the left leg in mid-stride, pushing off the ball of an Onitsuka Tiger racing flat, the whole photo a Michelangelo masterpiece of delineated muscle. I would look at my doughy thighs, stretch them out, and search for any hint of muscle within. It was like looking for a needle in a stack of Jell-O.
The legs remain, I am happy to report, on the cover of the copy Jim Fixx’s son sent me after I wrote about the book for Runner’s World. On the back flap, the author comes running straight at you as if he can’t wait to give you the good news. Like all of history’s greatest evangelists—e.g., Saul of Tarsus—Fixx was a convert. “When he started running several years ago,” the flap copy reads, “Jim Fixx weighed nearly 220 pounds and breathed hard just thinking about exercise. Today, at 159 pounds, he has been declared medically fitter than most college athletes . . . and has run the equivalent of once around the equator.”
The book is just as I remember it. There are those particularly mid-70sish black ink drawings, strangely and uncomfortably like the ones in The Joy of Sex (which my father didn’t have on his shelf, at least not that shelf). All the runners pictured are skinny guys with sideburns and girls with ponytails, in cotton T-shirts and blissed-out faces. And then there is the heart of the book: the promises.
Fixx didn’t call them that, of course, but to me that’s what they were: Promises of what would happen if you—if I—could only run. Running will make you healthy and slender, a cure for almost any modern illness (chapter 1), happier and more peaceful (chapter 2), and you’ll be able to enjoy this peaceful, happy life long into old age (chapter 4). To do it, all you need is a pair of good running shoes, for which you should be willing to spend “as much as $20 to $40,” and shorts. Period. Fixx reserved his only doubt about running for shirts and socks. He wasn’t sure you needed either. (Pro tip: socks are good.)
I turn to my favorite chapter—chapter 14, “Eat to Run: Good News If You Really Love Food.” I did and do love food, and back then food was the only one of my many growing appetites I could practically i
ndulge, so I was in dire need of some good news. I used to read that chapter over and over, gazing at the ink drawing of the huge plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Fixx praises the then-new idea of carbo-loading, and even though I had yet to run a step, or ever imagined that I could, I had a head start on that art. To be able to eat what I wanted, and not feel sick or guilty or as if I were swelling like a balloon! The impact of this pretty simple book, so low-key by the standards of today’s glossy fitness bibles with their lurid color photos of the fantastically fit celebrity trainer on the cover, is hard to overstate. The book had thirty printings in its first two years and sold more than a million copies internationally—those figures coming from the foreword to Jim Fixx’s Second Book of Running, which Fixx published (somewhat sheepishly) as a sequel to The Complete Book of Running three years later, in 1980. But the more impressive figures are those describing the running boom itself. He estimates the number of runners in the United States as growing from six million when he sat down to write the first book, to twenty-five million as he published the second—a fourfold increase in just a few years.
This was the era of jogging suits and headbands, with the rise of Nike and the making of Michael Douglas’s most obscure movie, Running, in which the addicted hero starts the film putting on suit and tie and sneakers, then begins to run, and is soon sprinting across the Queensboro Bridge to pick up his daughter from his estranged ex-wife, with his tie wrapped around his forehead in lieu of a sweatband, as one does. When I saw that movie on TV one night in 1980, I couldn’t imagine doing any of those things.
As for Fixx, he went from being an obscure author of intellectual puzzle books to a wealthy, bestselling one, and a national and international celebrity doing the talk show circuit, appearing in ads for American Express (“Do you know me?”) and Quaker Oats, but not, despite a lucrative offer, Budweiser.
“He loved beer,” his friend Buzz McCoy told me. “But he just didn’t think it was appropriate for a fitness advocate to advertise it.”
McCoy met Fixx on the streets and trails of suburban Connecticut, where they both lived and ran in the 70s. He says Fixx was a social runner, talented but never intensely competitive, the kind of man who would jog in the last few miles of a race with a friend rather than blazing ahead to get a better time. It was his lack of ego, McCoy believes, that made his book so successful.
“His personality, his unassuming nature, and his modesty—it made running not a he-man thing, but something for forty-year-old divorced women, and young women, and people who had beer bellies, people who couldn’t walk in a straight line. It opened it up to them.”
And, I could have added, it opened it up to “husky” teenagers in suburban New Jersey.
In 1984, Fixx died at the age of fifty-two—satisfactorily and distantly old to me when it happened, now about my age as I write—of a massive heart attack suffered while on his daily ten-mile run. He was found, true to his creed, by the side of a country road, shirtless, in just shoes and shorts. There were those who cried, “Ha! Running will kill you!” Others pointed out that Fixx had inherited the same congenital heart defect that killed his father at an even younger age. Some pointed their fingers at Fixx’s dismissal of good nutrition—maybe runners can’t, or at least shouldn’t, eat anything they liked. But it was probably mostly this: Buzz McCoy remembers that for all of his friend’s obsession with running as a pathway to health, Fixx himself never saw, or even knew, a doctor.
Back in 1980, all that was yet to come. But on a certain evening in the spring of that year, when I was fifteen, I shuffled over to my father, my eyes fixed on the shag carpet, and asked him if I could get up with him the next morning to go running. He didn’t say any of the things that I expected to hear, like, “What? All this time you’ve been making fun of me, and now you want to come along? Guess you feel like looking like an idiot too, huh?” He just said, “Sure. I’ll wake you up at six.” And he did, too, damn him.
What had changed my mind about running? Well, at some point around that time, I had become painfully aware that I put most of my physical self, the five feet or so of it below the neck, to very limited use. Mostly, it transported my head from dining tables to classes to bed, stopping to occasionally point it at the TV. It was a waste of a body, and my appearance—pudgy, pale, bepimpled—wouldn’t have inspired anyone to disagree. My father was no Adonis—nobody in my lineage of stocky Jews has been, or will ever be, employed as an Abercrombie and Fitch model—but I could see the muscles in his legs, and he could walk up stairs without gasping, which seemed impressive enough. If he had looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Jenner—if he had those long, striated legs as on the cover of The Complete Book of Running—I never would have attempted to emulate him. Instead, I would have just left to find my real parents.
This is what I remember about that first run: my orange Keds, slapping against the suburban asphalt for all of a half mile, and then my lungs exploding. I remember the gentle upward slope of a neighborhood street feeling like K2. I remember my father at my side, glancing at me occasionally, still not mocking, taking no vengeance, not then, not ever. I remember gasping that I was done, and then shuffling back home, wheezing and coughing, while he continued on methodically up the hill.
Many, many years later, I asked my father what he remembers about that day, and he said: “You came along in a pair of sneakers . . . and puffed as you ran. But you came the next morning, and then again. After a while, you asked for (and got) a pair of real running shoes. In a few months, you amused your adolescent self by running around me in circles.”
He is correct. My improvement was so rapid—I was fifteen, for God’s sake, which is a gift even to those otherwise ungifted—that one day soon after I started to run, on a beach in Florida, I literally ran in circles around my father while he ran straight up the beach, creating a pleasing helical pattern of footprints in the sand. I was laughing like a schoolboy, which I was, and running like an athlete, which I had never, ever dreamed of being. Within the year, I was traveling with my father to 10Ks and longer races around New Jersey. I’d start with him, then wait around the finishers’ area for twenty minutes or more for him to methodically plod his way in, still looking like an idiot, but now no less, or more, than I did.
My running quickly went from casual to obsessive. I saw each community 10K as a new crucible to throw myself into in order to burn away some more of my excess. My times improved, edging downward asymptotically toward the forty-minute mark, but never quite beating it. I became good enough that I tried out for and was accepted onto my high school’s mediocre cross-country team, coached by a teacher who knew less about running than I did, populated by kids who, unlike me, looked like runners. When I showed up the first day for practice, I was wearing a souvenir shirt from a 10K, and one of the other runners asked if I had actually run it, or, perhaps, scavenged it from a corpse. That day, I remember, I went for my first practice run with the team and waxed him. I don’t know if I ever ran that well again.
My cross-country career lasted only a single season, and it wasn’t particularly successful, partially because of a terrible bout of food poisoning and partially because as much as I loved to race, I hated to be beaten, which I was regularly, like a drum announcing the hour. So many people ran in the community 10Ks I favored that I never had a hope of winning, but I couldn’t really lose, either, and instead ran for myself, to improve my own time. In a competitive cross-country race, a few won and many lost, and I always lost against all those taller, athletic kids with the natural ability and competitive instinct. All I had to offer was a kind of native stubbornness which faded the more I lost. I walked away from the team after my one year, deciding that the best roads to run on were the ones where my only competition was my past, slower self. As they say: Those who can’t play sports, run. Those who can’t run, run long.
Then came college, and very little time to run, and the discovery that—as with many other talents I thought I had—my running was much less impr
essive at Harvard than it had been in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. Many of the other students zipping by me on the banks of the Charles River—when I could find a half hour to put on my old Pumas—were legitimate track and cross-country stars, who passed me as if the hedge funds they’d soon be managing were just across the next bridge. In my senior year, I had a brief but passionate romance with a young woman who had left her prior boyfriend for me; when she changed horses again, the next steed was a ROTC officer who ran the Boston Marathon our senior year. A marathon? It seemed crazy, or superhuman, or both. My girlfriend left me for an insane superhero, one who might tear the head off my body, if he could catch me. Which he could, easily.
And so it went, through my twenties and into my thirties. For five years right out of college, I lived in Los Angeles, where running seemed dangerous enough to dissuade me. One night, I was running on the beach in Long Beach when suddenly I was blinded as a spotlight from the sky bathed me in a bright circle of white light. I looked up expecting an alien ship and instead saw a police helicopter; somebody was having some fun. Eventually, I realized all that brown stuff hanging around the horizon was being sucked into my lungs whenever I ran, and I gave up running to devote myself to more practical forms of exercise, like failure.
Then came a move across the country and a career and a wife and a job and kids and more and more moves, interspersed with the occasional spate of running, until a day in 2002 when I went in to the doctor for a routine physical. I stepped up on the scale, and the doctor flicked the sliding piece of pig iron with his finger.
“Height, five seven,” he said. “Weight . . . uh . . . two hundred pounds.”
He didn’t hear my screaming. It must have been muffled by all that fat.
