The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

  I began to jog again. I read Absolutely American, a terrific book about the military academy at West Point by David Lipsky, and became mildly obsessed with the story of one cadet, Jewish and stout, like me, who simply could not manage the running portion of the Academy’s physical fitness requirement. He kept trying to run the army standard—two miles in seventeen minutes—and kept failing. Two miles in seventeen minutes: I had been able to do that, once. I put my middle daughter, aged two, into our running stroller and set out, instructing her to yell “Faster, Papa, faster!” It took me a few tries, and a few girlish yells, but I did it. So did the cadet, by the way, although he didn’t have the use of a motivational toddler.

  Then we moved into a new house, a big, old, four-story Victorian, and soon after that, I woke up one morning to see runners zipping by; as it happened, the course of my suburb’s annual 10K went right by our front yard. A 10K? I used to do those. The next year, 2004, I entered the race. Did pretty well, too: around forty-five minutes. I was thirty-nine. I was four months from turning forty. I was afraid of dying. I decided to run the 2005 Chicago Marathon the next fall, on the theory that if I did that, I would not die. You may mock, but it has worked so far.

  I made every rookie training mistake there was to make—I trained alone, I overdid it early, I injured myself, I aggravated the injury through more running, so I was forced to take a month off—and the marathon itself was incredibly painful. By the time I got to mile 22, a miserable desolate stretch of freeway access road north of Comiskey Park, I would have quit, happily, except if I ever wanted to finish a marathon, I’d have to run twenty-two miles all over again and that seemed far more painful that the measly four miles I had to limp through now. I stumbled through Bronzeville and willed myself up Michigan Avenue, and then I climbed the overpass of Roosevelt Road like it was Everest and turned left and stumbled through the finish line and then, miserable and in pain and trembling from dehydration and exhaustion, I said to myself something I did not expect to hear myself say, something that became a hinge between my former life and my present, and led to, among many, many other things, the writing of this book.

  “I wonder if I could do that faster.”

  • • •

  Perhaps you would like to start running. You never have tried before, or you did and you hated it, and now you wonder how to begin moving in a way that will keep you going.

  Get up. Start. Go. Move. Take a rusty first step, like the Tin Man. You will squeak. Go.

  Do not buy anything first. Jim Fixx was right: you have everything you need right now. Someday you might buy better shoes, or specialized clothing, but you do not need them now. You do not need a gym membership or a treadmill or special shoes with rockers built into the soles. We have a tendency to purchase things with the expectation that they will improve us or cause us to become fitter, more active, but we believe this because we are the helpless objects of a multibillion-dollar, century-long campaign to convince us this is so, and partially because as a civilization we are only a few hundred years removed from believing that praying to the bones of saints would cure our arthritis. In fact, we are still in the thrall of superstition: there is little difference between a man in Detroit buying sneakers with Michael Jordan’s image on them in the hope that it will help him jump farther and a Chinese man buying powdered rhino horn in the hope that it will make him more virile. No difference at all, in fact, other than the fact that the process is significantly less painful, and final, for Michael Jordan than it is for the rhino. It is all sympathetic magic: the atavistic human belief that we can impart to ourselves the essence of a thing via an image or symbol of that thing.

  No: you have everything you need to begin. If you don’t have sneakers, just grab your most comfortable shoes, or go barefoot on dirt or sand. If you don’t have shorts, get an old pair of jeans and cut off the legs. If anybody judges you for wearing ratty clothes, one of the privileges and benefits of running is leaving people behind.

  Every first step is the same, every last step is different.

  You step outside, because real running is done outside, dammit, in the open air, where the endorphins hide. You hitch up your pants or adjust your sports bra and swing your arms a bit, and you imagine the next twenty minutes or two hours with excitement or apprehension or the kind of grim determination you might apply to eating something horrible in front of the person who made it, just to be polite.

  You lift one leg and swing it out, and then spring the other leg, contracting the calf to flex the toes, and for one brief moment you fly upward, but you fail to fly and fall onto the extended heel of your forward foot, and you try to fly again and again and again and you fail and fail and fail and then you are down the street or road or driveway and the run has become what it will be, different from every other run you’ll ever have or attempt, because every time you run you leave a little something on the road, and you pick up something to replace it. Every step and every run is a transformation from what you were into what you are becoming: a runner.

  But that is not the same kind of transformation as what is promised by the fitness clubs or the weight loss ads or the Bowflex infomercials. Those promise all of us poor suckers who hate ourselves a chance to transform into something else, something bigger or smaller or glossier or younger, something that can be oiled and lit. The muscle and fitness magazines on the airport kiosks are parasites sucking on the fleshy folds of the self-loathing, and they belong not with the other athletic magazines but with the tattoo and fetishist magazines, because they are for people who recoil from what they see in the mirror and want to erase it.

  Running isn’t even like other sports. If you play tennis, you master movements and learn reflexes that are essentially unnatural; no Pleistocene man ever swung a racket, and this is even more true for stranger sports like football or lacrosse or water polo or whatever latest version of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy the guys on ESPN16 are playing these days. When you run, you’re actually trying to forget everything you’ve learned about moving, and trying to remember how to do something you’ve forgotten. Try it now; put the book or iPad down and run around the room. There, you did it, pick me up again.

  Both Bruce Springsteen and Christopher McDougall say we are born to run, and who are we to argue? Running may be the answer to one of the oldest mysteries of evolutionary biology: How exactly did humans ever survive once we dropped (or were thrown, with some disgust) out of the trees? We have no claws, no terrible jaws, and we have a tenth of the strength of our nearest relative, the chimpanzee. We have our brains, but protohumans developed and thrived for a million years before the “great leap forward” of fifty thousand years ago, when a small band of Homos in Africa truly became sapiens and rapidly spread all over the world with their tools and culture to dominate the planet and eventually invent the Snuggie. No: we had some other secret weapon, beyond and before our ability to wonder what it might be. The best guess as to what it might have been lies in the answer to another evolutionary question, one that’s apparent every time you look in a mirror: Why aren’t you covered with fur, like every other living primate? What happened to our luxurious simian pelts? Darwin says it’s because at some point in our distant ancestral past, it became more advantageous for our species to lose its fur than to keep it. But why? Almost every other land mammal sports thick fur or hair, testifying to its utility as insulator, camouflage, and protector of the fragile skin. Whatever we gave up fur for, it must have been important.

  The secret to the survival of that bizarre hairless ape, precariously balanced on two legs, with its underbelly exposed to whatever efficient predator might want to casually disembowel it between bites of less stringy prey, is that it can run. We are evolved to run. Or we were “intelligently designed” to run, if you’re stupid.

  Our hairless bodies let us sweat and cool, our muscles can store enough energy for hours of effort, our lungs keep the fires burning. A cheetah can run at a speed of sixty miles per hour, but only in short bursts, after
which it has to sit down and read a magazine. But we humans can just keep on going, the Energizer Bunnies of the Serengeti. Not fast, like a cheetah or an antelope, or even in impressive mass stampedes like buffalo or horses or Walmart shoppers. But slowly, methodically, rhythmically, and for a long time, with a persistence that was as deadly to our prey as it was annoying. “Why the hell won’t that thing stop?” the exhausted emu said to itself, before lying down and just giving up, as we jogged up behind it, hungrier than we were before we started after it, or so argues McDougall, who describes the last living example of persistence hunters, a small tribe in Africa, in his book Born to Run. Bruce Springsteen’s explanation of why we run is to get the hell out of New Jersey.

  And now, a million years later, as you get up every second day just to do another three miles around the housing development, heaving and breathing and trying to distract yourself with a new podcast, you are actually becoming, in tiny increments, the thing you were meant to be. The soft fat stored from a modern diet of processed industrial compounds starts to dissolve and drop away; your unused muscles in your legs start to tighten and firm; your lungs fill and empty and fill and become elastic and clear. Your heart, that small beating thing, strains to meet the stress and finds that it can. You can feel it growing in your chest cavity, like the Grinch’s.

  It’s like one of those modern vampire or zombie movies, where some strange compound transforms the human body into something else, something much stronger, something much more dangerous than the weak and pasty suburbanites who become its prey. Instead of the Walking Dead, we are the Running Living. The urge to transform can come from within, from a sense of either loss or surfeit in your life. I have known people who ran because they felt there was something missing, and they thought if they could pick up some speed they might find it. I have also known people who’ve found themselves laden like Marley’s ghost, with chains of stress and responsibility and unwanted pounds, who began to run in the hope that all or some of it would shake off from the jostling. Heraclitus said, “What does not change is the will to change,” and thus our motivations are inexhaustible as we propel ourselves doggedly down the dawn streets. We are fueled by Gatorade and dissatisfaction.

  One of my heroes is Dan Savage, the author, sex advice columnist, and activist. Dan and I have some significant things in common: we are the same age, we are obsessive exercisers because we are terrified of getting fat (though Dan favors the gym rather than the roads), and we both love musical theater. Of course, Dan is also (famously, proudly) gay, argumentative, incredibly profane, and knows more about something called “sounding” than I ever want to. In fact, I only know what sounding is because I read about it in one of Dan’s columns, and I regret it to this day. I urge you not to look it up.

  Dan is a prolific coiner of neologisms and aphorisms—his most famous being “It Gets Better,” which is what he called the project in which he and his husband—as well as, eventually, thousands of other people, including the president of the United States—recorded messages for troubled or abused gay youth who needed hope for their future lives. He also came up with the “campsite rule” for relationships with much younger partners—leave them in better shape than how you found them—and the shorthanded advice DTMFA, or “Dump the motherfucker already,” applied to cases in which a person is needlessly dithering over the latest in a long line of abuses and insults from their partner.

  Also among Dan’s coinages is GGG, for “Good, Giving, and Game,” which are the qualities he says every person should strive to have as a sexual partner. To the extent it’s not self-explanatory, I’ll leave you to google “Dan Savage GGG” to let him explain it himself.

  I came up with my own variation of GGG for new runners. In this case, it is: Gradual, Goal, and Group.

  You need to make a gradual start because you’re out of shape. What dissuades people from any new effort, at least most people, is the looming specter of failure. If you are unfit and you try to run a mile, you will collapse before it’s over and agree to tell the Nazis whatever they want to hear. Most people hate running not because there is something painful or inherently tortuous about running, but because it has been so long since the guileless runs of their childhood that they have lost all capacity for doing it. You’d hate eating, too, if you hadn’t done it in thirty years and kept trying to put the food through the side of your cheek.

  There’s a saying in weight lifting: “train to failure,” which means you want to stress the muscles to the point where they fail and you literally can’t lift anymore. The notion is that the muscles will then repair themselves and grow bigger and stronger. Perhaps, but man, that hurts. I prefer another nostrum: don’t practice failure, because then that’s what you’ll learn. If you try to learn to run by getting up and running till you exhaust yourself, you’ll end up exhausted and frustrated. If you give yourself a goal that is tough enough to require effort but not so hard that you can’t succeed, you can engineer success. The trick is to make it hard enough to give you a small but real benefit by doing it, which, by coincidence, is about the same level of intensity that maximizes self-satisfaction.

  You are out of shape. You know you can’t run a mile. But can you run, steadily, to the end of the block? Possibly. Maybe. You really don’t know. You’ll have to try it. You try it. You did it! Wow, that was tough, but you gutted it out until the Berkowitzes’ driveway and from there to the end was pure Niestzschean will. Take a break, you deserve it. Walk a bit. Maybe to the end of the next block. And then, when you get there, run one more block.

  You are basically treating yourself like a third grader at the start, giving yourself a participation medal for every day you get out of bed and get your shoes on. You are self-administering a dose of success, and you are trying to get yourself hooked. I am not talking about the legendary runner’s high, the chemical effect of exercise-induced endorphins on the brain. I am talking about the pleasure of achieving something difficult—but not so difficult you can’t achieve it.

  Second: you want an achievable goal. As Paul Carrozza—the Austin, Texas, running guru who trained George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and a whole bunch of other people you have strong opinions about—said to me while we ran around Austin’s Town Lake, “We don’t help people exercise. Exercise is a chore. We train athletes. And training is a pleasure.”

  Let’s say you would like to play guitar. (I would.) It would be wonderful if you could simply play the songs you’d like to play, but instead you have to learn to play gradually: strings, notes, chords, practicing each step painfully until your fingers can learn the motions, and it becomes easy, and you can move on to the next step. You do this not because it is itself rewarding, but because you have a goal in mind: you want to play “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus, and you want to play it naked while wearing boots, like Miley Cyrus. This vision keeps you going, through the difficulty and the hesitation and the frustration. “Naked,” you say to yourself, as your fingers ache to reach a barre chord. “Work boots,” you think, as you realize you have no idea what a Gmaj7 chord even is, let alone how to play one. And so you persevere.

  Now, imagine if you had to get up, every day, and do those same things, without any purpose but to train your fingers. The task set before you is to do nothing more than to play a scale and a series of chords in progressive order. You work your fingers for hours and hours until you can do something pointless. You wouldn’t be enjoying yourself, you wouldn’t be getting any better, and you certainly wouldn’t be doing anything that could be called “playing the guitar.” You’d be bored out of your mind, and you’d quit, as any sensible person would.

  That’s how most people approach running. They decide, for whatever reason, that they need to exercise, perhaps to lose weight, perhaps to “get in shape,” though what shape, for what reason, is never specified. So they join a gym and get on the treadmill, or they buy one for their home, and then they do their thirty minutes or three miles, three times a week, defeating the screaming boredom
by watching TV or listening to the radio and generally counting down the minutes until this chore is over.

  Now this is better than nothing. Thirty minutes of aerobic activity three times a week is much better than indolence, and can in fact help you lose weight, regain muscle tone, improve your energy, and help win the war for the Allies, so if that’s all you can do, and all you want to do, I say good for you and I have nothing more for you, except to comment that the only reason to watch Morning Joe at the gym on the ’mill is to be watching, live, on the day that Mika Brzezinski finally snaps and stabs Joe Scarborough to death with a mechanical pencil. Treadmills were invented as a form of forced labor in Victorian prisons—Oscar Wilde was forced to work on one in Reading Gaol, powering a mill—and punishment for past sins, in my opinion, remains the only thing they’re good for. Go outside.

  But if you want to be a runner, find that goal. An excellent first one is a 5K, or a five-kilometer race. That translates to 3.1 miles and that is within the reach of just about everyone, barring disability or injury. They are common, with one or more happening just about every weekend in any metropolitan area, and they often are held to benefit worthy causes. There will be people at that race who intend to try to win it, and just might. But that won’t be you. This will be unlike any other athletic contest you’ve ever tried, including intramural soccer and Ping-Pong tournaments, in that you will enter it with no notion of possibly winning. You will enter it to finish it, at a run.

  The running press and the Internet are filled with programs such as Couch to 5K. None of them are objectively better than any other, although one might suit you and your schedule better, another worse. But each plan, if it’s from a reputable source, will have the same general outline: gradual progression from no fitness to speak of (the notional “couch”) to completing a 5K at a comfortable but still notable speed. Both the words “gradual” and “progression” are important. Any plan that starts you running too quickly or too far or for too long will burn you out within a week, and you’ll recoil. But the plan has to increase the load on your muscles and heart so that you actually improve.