The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

  • • •

  Clutching my medal, my costume safely and securely concealed again under my sweats, I walked back to my hotel and wondered if that was true. Had all the miles I’d run, all the races I’d finished, all the PRs I’d set, been useless, other than this silly informal jog up and down a cold St. Louis boulevard? Obviously not—I had lost weight, gained energy, learned discipline and focus, generally improved my health and disposition—but what good did any of it do? What is running for?

  Once upon a time, of course, it was essential. Even after we left the hunter-gatherer stage, the ability to move quickly over ground proved essential to all kinds of human pursuits, most importantly the violent ones. A horse, obviously, can outrun a human, but a human can run longer without tiring, even beating the horse in a marathon, at least on a hot day. (Horses overheat; we sweat.) According to legend, when the Greeks needed to send word of their victory at Marathon back to Athens, they didn’t send a horseman or a pigeon—they sent a man, Phidippides, who ran the whole way, delivered the message, and died—the worst postrun celebration ever. Even in World War II, messages were sent across a battlefield by use of “runners,” who, we can presume, ran.

  But now . . . well, sometimes you get to the bus stop just as the bus is leaving, and if you run you might be able to get up to the door and get the attention of the driver, and if she’s in a generous mood she might stop the bus and let you on. But otherwise, running, as a skill, seems to have no practical value in this world.

  This used to bother me a lot back in high school, when the various things I could do—write, act, make smart-ass remarks—didn’t do much to impress anyone (by which I mean girls) and the things I couldn’t do—play sports, purchase beer, have clear skin—seemed unobtainable. So over the course of many, many solitary laps run around my suburb, I came up with a scenario that went something like this:

  FADE IN

  DEEP WOODS—DAYTIME

  A LOVELY YOUNG WOMAN lies on the ground, a snakebite on her thigh. A DOCTOR cradles her head as she bravely fights for life.

  DOCTOR

  She only has two hours to live, and the only antidote is five miles away! We have no transportation and no way to communicate! She’s doomed unless . . . someone here can run ten miles in ninety minutes or less!

  THE FOOTBALL STAR, THE CLASS PRESIDENT, and THE HANDSOME MUSICIAN look down helplessly.

  PETER steps forward. He peels off his jacket, revealing a running singlet.

  PETER

  I’ll be right back.

  In the course of my marriage, I would often compare my sole hobby, even as I began to get good at it, to my wife’s. Raised by crafty Midwesterners, she could cook, sew, draw, play the piano, sing, and decorate a house. Me, I could run. Maybe after an apocalypse, I could fetch far-off supplies. Couldn’t be something heavy, though, because it’s hard to run while carrying things. Your hand gets sweaty if you hold it, and a backpack bounces around.

  Of course, something happens every day in every country around the world in which the ability to run far and relatively fast is essential to success. I was just blind to it, because I’m an American.

  I am utterly oblivious to the charms of soccer 99 percent of the time, but then every four years, during the World Cup, I fall in love for the first time again, an Eternal Sunshine of the Footieless Mind. A few years ago, I was watching the games, marveling anew at the players’ grace and athleticism—I’m an oaf—their astonishing skills—I can hardly kick a can—and their running . . . wait a minute.

  Soccer has to be the most running-intensive sport there is; the widely accepted estimate is that elite midfielders run a full ten kilometers, or about six miles, during a match. So, one day in front of the TV, I asked myself: could a middle-aged man, with no skills, no experience, and no real understanding of the game, but with a bouquet of marathon finishers’ medals, hold his own on a soccer field?

  Or to put it another way—could my ability to run a few miles without vomiting actually, finally, have some positive use?

  I put out a tweet; it was answered by Emily White, a Chicago-area singer-songwriter and longtime soccer enthusiast, and a few emails later I was a proud member of Team Orange in the Chicago Metropolitan Sports Association, an LGBT recreational sports league. Jonathan, the league organizer, said, “If you have never played before and have no knowledge of the game, then you will fit right in on that team.”

  First lesson: Soccer players can be catty. At least, these soccer players.

  I bought myself some shin guards for twelve dollars but figured old running shoes would suffice instead of cleats, especially since I had no idea if I would last past the first five minutes of the game. (My one prior attempt at soccer, at an intradorm match in college, had lasted exactly three minutes, until I stood wondering how I might get the ball away from an opponent, and he ran straight into me, knocking me out cold.) On a Saturday morning by Lake Michigan, I put on my new Team Orange jersey, shook hands with my new teammates (including the catty Jonathan), carefully and repeatedly warned them of my utter ignorance, and took to the field—rather, the pitch. See? Learning already.

  I was assigned to defense, which I assumed was the soccer equivalent of right field, where I spent most of my Little League baseball career. I was joined there by a pink-shirted opponent named Sean, whom I was supposed to defend. Sean was about six inches taller than I was, at least ten years younger, and chances were good he had played this game before. But I figured if he was posted out here with me, he must suck too, and how many marathons had he run, huh? I wondered if there would be a chance, given the rules of the game, to actually run circles around him.

  The game began. It didn’t have the lightning pace or surgical passes of World Cup action, so as the first few minutes went by I found myself standing around and idly watching the muddled action in the distance—again, much like Little League. But then a Pink player kicked the ball downfield to Sean, who received it with a distressing amount of skill and took off down the field toward our goal. I gave chase.

  And I couldn’t catch him.

  This was alarming. I honestly thought that I would be the best runner on either team—did I mention my eleven marathons?—but this wasn’t loping a long distance, this was mad sprinting, fifty feet at a time, and as much as I leaned forward and dug those old shoes into the turf, I couldn’t outrun him. Another defender intercepted Sean, kicked the ball clear, and the action moved back to midfield. I gave Sean another look and realized—finally—that even if poorer players were relegated to defense, as I had been, he played for the other team. He was a forward—an attacker. The prestigious position, reserved for the most skilled, and, as I had just found out, the fastest players. This didn’t look good.

  Orange and Pink were evenly matched, and the action flowed back and forth. Pink was more aggressive and had some skilled midfielders, so the ball was often down at our end. The action for me was moments of repose interposed with more mad sprinting. I kicked the ball once or twice—in the right direction—and even managed a header. I eventually began to think tactically . . . depending on where the ball was, I could move forward a fair distance toward the Pink goal, relying on my one skill to get me back in time if the action were reversed.

  Sean’s skills completely overwhelmed me, as you’d expect; I never once managed to get the ball away from him. But, as I eventually realized, I didn’t have to, and I didn’t have to overtake him. If I could just keep pace with him as he ran down the field, keeping myself between him and the Orange goal, he couldn’t take a good shot—he had to either pass (and a better Orange defender would intercept) or try a weak shot right into our excellent goalie’s arms. I like to think that he started to get frustrated—who was this short bald guy who could hardly get a foot on the ball, but who just wouldn’t get the hell out of the way?

  The whistle blew at fifty minutes, with a score of 0–0. I never got to show everybody the Goal Celebration I had planned, which involved a backflip and some West
ern line dancing. But Team Pink didn’t get to do any celebrations either. Because, in some tiny part, they couldn’t get past me.

  My GPS watch, which I kept running between whistles, showed an elapsed three miles run, which seemed a fair distance on a fifty-meter field. Most of that running was gentle jogging up and down the pitch, either following or anticipating the action, but there was a fair bit of mad dashing, usually in pursuit of Sean. I was tired, but not winded. I felt, appropriately enough, as if I had just run a fast 5K. To a great extent, my theory had proven true—at least in a recreational-level game, and at least on defense (i.e., not having to actually kick the ball toward a target), simply being able to run was a workable substitute for soccer competence.

  My new teammates congratulated me on a good showing in my first soccer game ever.

  “I like your hustle!” shouted our goalie.

  I thanked him, sincerely, and said, “Hustle is all I got.”

  I meant to keep up my soccer career, but of course I did not. My life is too complicated, and my travel too constant, to join a team and actually show up on a regular basis. And the last thing I needed was another group of people for me to disappoint.

  • • •

  Back home from St. Louis, I rejoined my wife and daughters who had returned from Minnesota. As we waited for the Chicago weather to start to warm, the increasing tension in my house ground me down. One morning soon after the Cupid’s Undie Run, I got up in the dark from the attic room I had moved into, dressed as quietly as I could in a technical shirt, tights, a hat, and gloves, and sneaked down the stairway, doing my best to step on the front of the stair risers so as not to make a noise. There was enough disruption in the house without waking anybody up.

  I jogged down the street to meet my running group. I could see them ahead of me, jumping up and down to keep warm while wearing their safety LED lights; they looked like a cloud of fireflies. And I would join them, and we would flit around the town, and return to the homes where we had started, having gotten nowhere, and learned nothing.

  By this time, the glow from my fund-raising win had long ago worn off, and I was dealing with familial and emotional issues that I had no clue how to handle, none of which were made any easier by cardiovascular fitness. As we started off that morning, I was gripped by the realization that all these years I had been training for the wrong challenge. Maybe the time and effort I had put into running would have been better spent learning to be a better parent, or husband, or—given the increasing level of tension between myself and my wife, and the seemingly unstoppable descent into open conflict—a more effective combatant. As it was, I felt useless, as if I had been practicing horsemanship for a decade and was now going into battle against tanks. Tanks with lasers.

  But then I was struck with a sudden memory: It was three years earlier, and I was with my middle daughter, the same one who was now urging me to move out of the house so that everybody would stop being so mad. I was walking her and her younger sister to school, down the block, as I did most mornings, and we were late, as we were most mornings. Ahead of us, across the blacktop and playground, we could see the last straggling students entering the school, and the teacher’s aide about to close the doors. We would be locked outside, forced to go around to the office to get (another) set of late passes, unless . . .

  “Papa! Use your running powers!” she shouted.

  I crouched, I smiled, and then I flew.

  Four

  As the weekend of the 2013 Boston Marathon approached, I found myself more and more grateful that I had agreed to run it. My domestic situation had deteriorated even further, and my home had turned into an unwilling host that was trying to eject me as if I were an infectious cell. I was less spoken to than spoken at. My absence was wished for so often and so vividly by my wife that the relief of giving in and leaving was greater than the satisfaction of defying her and staying. And by accepting an additional invitation, I got to leave a day early. Good job, me.

  The marathon was held on a Monday, as it always is—Patriots’ Day, the third Monday in April—but I headed to the airport on Saturday morning. My first stop was Hamilton, New York, where I was to give a presentation about the Constitution, based on the PBS special Constitution USA with Peter Sagal that was to be broadcast just a month later. In Hamilton, on the afternoon before my speech, I had been asked by a local running group to host a 5K race, starting from the town common, and as I looked around the group of runners, mostly college students, with mostly nifty expensive new shorts and singlets, most of them were adjusting headphones and picking out playlists before slipping their phones into their Velcro arm holsters. Most runners these days look like telephone operators in the 1950s: their ears are stuffed with other people’s conversations.

  I welcomed everybody to the race, made my usual jokes, made some stirring remarks about the running community, and then I started a sentence that I didn’t exactly know how I was going to end. “Hey,” I said. “I see a lot of you wearing headphones. And I’m going to make a suggestion: take them out.”

  They stared at me like I was a lunatic.

  In my long years of running long distances, I also have made great use of headphones and iPods. For races, I used to program special race-day playlists, which would always begin with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (a cliché, I know) and end with OK Go’s “Invincible,” which I loved not only for its anthemic encouragement—“When they finally come to destroy the earth/They’ll have to go through you first”—but also because of Damian Kulash’s sly aside, “When they finally come, what’ll you do to them/Gonna decimate them like you did to me?” Nothing inspires last-minute effort more than bitter irony.

  But after a while, I started to leave the headphones behind. First I gave them up for races. It occurred to me that if I was going to train and practice and focus on achieving something, when the time came to actually do it I could at the very least pay attention. A race, most especially and counterintuitively a marathon, requires more focus on the moment than someone who’s never done it might imagine. We scan our bodies for discomfort, we check our pace, we count the miles and measure our remaining strength against the remaining distance. Besides, if you think of the great images of athletic achievement—Roger Bannister breaking the tape for the first four-minute mile, Dick Fosbury winning gold with his newfangled Fosbury Flop at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Bobby Orr diving through the air as he won the Stanley Cup in 1970, catcher Jason Varitek picking up pitcher Keith Foulke after the Red Sox recorded the final out of the 2004 World Series—none of those people are, at that moment, listening to Squeeze’s Greatest Hits.

  Then as time went on, I started to give up my headphones for training runs as well. I am typing this, obviously, staring at a screen. The computer is also playing music, which I enjoy as I write. When I finish writing in a little bit, I will go have myself some lunch, and of course I’ll play some music or news, and maybe even look at another screen. After lunch, I’ll go rake some leaves or do other tasks, with headphones firmly in my ears; I’ll enjoy music over dinner, and then finish my day by watching another, larger screen, with some content that, I hope, can command my entire attention.

  If I don’t leave my headphones behind when I run, I wouldn’t spend a single minute of my waking life free from input.

  I have a friend who wears headphones on long solo runs because, he says, “I can’t spend that much time alone in my head.” I disagree. He can, and he should. Spending that much time inside one’s head, along with the voices and the bats hanging from the various dendrites and neurons, is one of the best things about running, or at least one of the most therapeutic. Your brain is like a duvet cover: every once in a while, it needs to be aired out.

  I am conflict-averse by disposition and funny by profession, and like the unpopular flavors of soda pop, my darker, angrier, and more earnest thoughts tend to accumulate in the dispenser and gum up the works. When I decide to run alone, with nothing in my ears but the air
and the occasional gnat, it gives me a chance to rehearse the things I’m too shy or self-conscious to actually say, and to put them into words with the help of my constant left-right-left metronome.

  Often, my inner monologues are serious responses to the daily news my day job forces me to joke about—speeches that might be delivered from presidential podiums or witness stands or news desks that the actual person in question just apparently isn’t smart enough to give. They should consult me—in my inner cable news channel, my speechwriting always works, and almost always inspires a standing ovation, groveling apology, or both.

  Sometimes, of course, these perorations are quite personal. In the declining years of my marriage, as our fights became more constant, and more frustrating, my runs became the place where I could say the things I was either too weak or wisely cautious to say out loud, condemnations and defenses that were never contradicted or interrupted because I was saying them into the air. On my runs, unlike in real life, there are no rebuttals, no counterarguments, no ripostes beginning with “Well, how about the time you—” In my running mind, and only there, my opponents are dumb with sheepish recognition.

  And every time I let off this toxic steam—rising and evaporating with the other noxious gases from my sweaty self—I can feel the tension leave my arms and legs, and my gait becomes looser and freer. I come from a long line of shoulder-hunchers, and as I rant and I run I can feel my back straighten and my head rise. It’s as if the dark thoughts I give silent voice to are quite literally holding me down, weights tied to my neck and clavicles, and as I indulge them I cut them and let myself rise again.

  And then, as my vents clear, I begin to think about running. Our sport seems mindless only to people who never run long enough for any thought to form other than “When can I stop running?” But the only way to succeed as a long-distance runner is to do it mindfully, to be aware of the body and the world it is moving through.