The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

  SAGAL: Basically, just remembering the moment, heard an explosion, turned around; second explosion. So within . . .

  SIEGEL: That quickly.

  SAGAL: . . . seconds, yeah.

  SIEGEL: Well, Peter Sagal, thank you very much. You’re well, I hope. I mean, you didn’t get injured . . .

  SAGAL: I’m perfectly fine, and I’m very proud to say that I escorted a blind runner, named William Greer, to his first Boston Marathon finish. I’m very proud of that.

  Reading this now, I’m both pleased and ashamed that I took the opportunity of a live breaking news hit to brag about my successful guiding. Why didn’t I just say, “Hi, Mom!”

  I walked back to our meeting place to find that William had been reunited with Ellen, whose face was streaked with tears of relief. I reported in person to my companions what I had just reported to the nation via NPR—that I basically knew nothing—and there, still in an odd bubble of denial and ignorance, though now tinged with apprehension, we said our goodbyes. William and Ellen presented me with a special plaque they had made before the event to thank me for my guiding service. It felt odd to go through with a little ceremony they had planned for a more normal day. We embraced, and went our separate ways to find home.

  The whole of Copley Square was blocked off. I walked around it to the west and saw a line of ambulances, dozens of them in a rank, just outside the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel. They were obviously there for casualties, and judging by the number of ambulances, they expected a lot of them. News helicopters were swarming overhead. My uncle’s house, where I was staying, was about two miles away, back along the course route on Commonwealth Avenue, but as I quickly found out, Commonwealth had been closed, running back for five miles or more. The police were worried there were more bombs along the route, so, forty-five minutes after finishing a marathon, I had to walk a four-mile peregrination through the Fens, until I could get to a place far enough beyond the street closures for my uncle to pick me up.

  During that walk, I spoke to Jake Tapper of CNN and Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal, and turned down a chance to appear on Glenn Beck’s network, TheBlaze. Okay, I didn’t just turn down TheBlaze, I told the intermediary who passed on the invite to tell TheBlaze that if I were the last potential guest on earth, and they the last network, that would be the end of the national media. Highlight of the afternoon, actually.

  I had to fly to Washington, DC, that night to do an event for the PBS Constitution documentary the next day on Capitol Hill, and I was already so late getting back to my uncle’s that I was in danger of missing my flight. I showered and rushed and made calls to the people who were waiting for me in DC, so it was really only when I got to the airport—in plenty of time, as it happened—that I could sit down to open my laptop and start streaming the news.

  I learned about Krystle Marie Campbell, Lu Lingzi, and Martin William Richard, all of whom had been killed, and the many others who lost limbs or suffered other terrible injuries. I learned that the bombings occurred at 2:49:43 EDT and 2:49:57 EDT, about thirteen seconds apart (my guess to Robert Siegel was low), while the race clock, marking the elapsed time since the start of our wave, read 4:09. I looked at our finish time, still on my running watch: 4:04. I thought about that. I thought about that a lot, at the airport and on my flight, and in the taxi on the way to my hotel in DC. Once there, I went to the hotel bar, ordered a martini, and read an email from my editor at Runner’s World asking me to write about the day. I drank off about half the martini in a gulp and wrote down everything that happened, finishing with this:

  It only occurred to me, much later, as I viewed online videos of the bombing, how important William’s gutsy last mile really was. We crossed the line at 4:04. The bomb went off as the clock read 4:09. Five minutes later. Which might well have been the five minutes that William would have needed to walk those last miserable blocks, had he given in to the urgings of his hip, gut, and mind. But he ran the bravest and toughest mile of his life, not even able to see clearly what he was doing, just because he wanted to be able to say he did it, and by doing so, he crossed the line alive.

  I got an email from William the next day, from his home in Austin. He wrote:

  I have really sore legs. I am ready to start training for the next marathon, and I’m going to have a lot more long runs. I had the speed, I just need to really increase my endurance. Thanks very much for being my sighted guide; you made the marathon a great pleasure. The only problem[s] were the bombs.

  Five

  My new town house looked, more than anything, like a very big hotel room . . . that is, it appeared as if no one had ever lived there before. All it needed was a minibar and a chocolate on the bedspread every night. It was big and mostly empty—furnished with the unwanted furniture from my former home, and those pieces that were unequivocally mine, like the armchair I won on Jeopardy! in 1988—but felt even emptier. My friend Patti had told me that, as the daughter of divorce herself, the thing that most wounded her was that her father moved into a new home so small it didn’t have a room for her, so I was determined to buy myself a large house with rooms for all three of my daughters. Then again, Patti was also my Realtor.

  I didn’t want a town house, at least not at first, but the houses that Patti showed me in my price range (it was not high, as I knew I’d still be paying for all my family’s expenses, as well as all the legal bills, for the foreseeable future) were weirdly too large. Seeing a place with bedrooms upstairs, and living room and dining room downstairs, it was hard not to imagine myself as a smaller-scale Charles Foster Kane, stumbling at night through empty rooms in my sad isolation. The town house, at least, with its vertical construction, meant that I could avoid wandering through the empty bedrooms simply by ignoring the stairway rising to the next level. Each child would have her own bedroom, on the top floor, with its own bathroom, good for teenage girls.

  So now I was “home.” I was also hungry. I needed to cook something. But what? And how? And, given my lifelong habit of stress eating, how much of it would I devour? Would this be the place where I finally lapsed into indolence or a second adolescence—same thing—eating dinners of corn chips and beer and frozen taquitos? Would I, a newly divorced dad, become the only worse thing I could think of . . . a fat divorced dad?

  “If you’ve ever been fat, you will either be fat the rest of your life or you will worry about being fat the rest of your life.” I came across those words in the manuscript of the play Fighting International Fat by Jonathan Reynolds, a pretty obscure place to find the underlying thesis of your waking life, but one doesn’t get to specify where one would like it to show up. That casual observation struck me then and now with the profound power of its obvious truth, much like Kafka’s observation: “The meaning of life is that it ends.” But of course, Kafka did not add that once you’re dead, you won’t gain weight. Which is a comfort to me, sometimes.

  I was, as mentioned earlier, a fat kid, and terribly self-conscious about it, although some of the people who knew me as a child knit their brows in confusion when I tell them this. To them, I might have been a tad chubby, yet well within the bounds of normalcy, but from behind my eyes I was a freak, slow and rubbery and comical, forced to shop in the husky section of the children’s clothes store my mother took me to for semiannual bouts of torture. At summer camp I was known as “Pumpkin,” which became “Plumpkin,” which I accepted at the time as my due, but I felt so ashamed about it inside and thereafter that I kept it a secret from everyone—well, everyone who wasn’t at Camp Becket in the mid-1970s—for forty years. Until now. Consider yourself honored.

  At the age of fifteen I looked into the mirror and saw somebody I didn’t like, so I started to run away from him. I used obsessive running as a way to make my fat self disappear, as quickly as could be managed. I lost almost forty pounds in that first manic bout of running, going from chubby to slender to skinny to thin to my panicked mother bringing me to the doctor. He tested me and found me to be in good shape,
if a bit bony—running seven miles a day will do that to you—and told me to be careful I didn’t lose too much weight.

  I did not tell him that I had been restricting myself to less than one thousand calories a day. I did not tell him how being so hungry all the time takes over your brain. When you’re really hungry, as people who fast or are starving due to circumstance will tell you, all you can think about is food. It’s why, instead of eating, I would spend the lunch hour at school reading cookbooks in the library. It’s why I would turn on the TV and wait through the tedious, meal-less shows for the commercials, hoping they’d be for a restaurant or a packaged food. I yearned to see a film clip of a bowl of steaming Dinty Moore beef stew like most adolescent boys at that time yearned to see a girlie magazine. It’s why I would lie in bed at night already tasting the lousy half grapefruit I allowed myself for breakfast.

  (Dieting aficionados of a certain age will recognize the half grapefruit for breakfast as a tell for The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, published by Dr. Herman Tarnower of Scarsdale, New York, which became quite the craze in the late 1970s. Dr. Tarnower, however, is now best remembered for getting himself murdered by a jealous girlfriend around the time I was on the diet in 1980. The late Dr. Tarnower was played by Ben Kingsley in the inevitable movie.)

  And for all that fasting and running and denying myself anything, and for all the pounds I shed, I would still take off my shirt at the beginning and end of every day—sometimes I would sneak off to a bathroom with a locked door to do it midday—and look at my protruding ribs and delineated hips and say to myself: “Still too fat.”

  That breaks my heart, to this day. That the fat kid had transformed himself into what he had always wanted to be: skinny. And he was too crazy to notice it.

  I am convinced that although it went undiagnosed at the time I was struggling with a form of anorexia. Research shows there are very few teen boys who starve themselves and waste away to nothing, as anorectic girls do, and those who do tend to be extreme cases. Rather, some boys have the same urge as some girls to destroy themselves through the vehicle of the body, but they do it via extreme exercise. If a boy cuts his calorie count down to eight hundred per day to make weight for wrestling, or if he just obsessively runs long distances, he’ll be celebrated for his devotion to bettering himself, even if he wants to better himself right into nothingness. We self-hating teen boys were just another kind of monastic order, down the street from the nunnery, and we chose a different way to flagellate ourselves.

  So I dieted obsessively, and I ran a lot. I lost a lot of weight. Becoming a Thin Person after not being one for all of my life was disconcerting, partially because, as said above, I couldn’t admit I was actually thin, and also because—surprise—my excess weight wasn’t actually the problem. I was the same hot mess, in a smaller bag.

  If I were the star of an 80s teen film—or more likely, one of the odder supporting characters—I would have either finally Won the Big Race and celebrated with a big meal, or found a girl Willing to Love Me for Who I Was, and I’d sit down with her to share a sundae as the credits rolled. As it was, this period of my life simply ended, and then I went off to college. There, I couldn’t starve myself, because I was too busy: girls; theater; new friends; classes; the challenge, shame, and thrill of finally knowing, beyond any argument or stretch of the imagination or ego, that I wasn’t anywhere near the smartest person in the room. I was overwhelmed and delighted and distracted, and what did you know: the dining hall had unlimited refills. It’s hard to deny yourself in one area when you’re desperate to indulge in all others. And so I gained the weight back, and stopped running for a while, then started again, and ever since then have engaged in the weird war with the mirror: getting fat, getting skinny again, always examining my reflection for more clues as to what I was at any given moment.

  As I’ve related, my late-life running boom started the same way as my first, twenty years before, when I found that there was a lot more of me than I wanted there to be. I started running again. I ran a race, and then I became determined to do a marathon, and I did, and then another, and I became a serious runner, and I lost thirty pounds along the way, and I’ll be damned if I gain them back.

  Or should I say: more damned. Because the obsession with weight, far more common among male amateur athletes than you might suppose, is a kind of curse. “I run to eat,” we say, and this is true, but we’re not so much taking pleasure in the food as in the immunity our running gives us. We hit the box of doughnuts at work or the side of fries with lunch, saying to ourselves, “I did my six this morning,” and feel, for a fleeting moment, that We Are Like Everybody Else, somebody who can indulge in sweets and fats without exposing ourselves as freaks.

  Being overweight in and of itself isn’t the issue. I know people of all shapes and I have learned that their sense of self isn’t in any way determined by how much they weigh, although it is often the case that they are deeply affected by society’s veneration of the thin and rejection of those who are not. It is, for some of us, simply the internalized horror of what we might become if we allow ourselves to get weak, to let go, to slow down.

  You should not run simply to lose weight, although if you do run, you probably will. There are a number of excellent reasons why you might not drop many pounds—one of which is that depending on how much you weigh now, and your history and your biology (far beyond the simple chemical transactions we call “metabolism”) and your age, you may not even need to lose weight. Bodies are different, and research has shown that different people have different “set points,” a weight that you settle into as your point of equilibrium, even if it’s ten pounds more than a similar person of similar build and height. Another is that by becoming fit, you will build muscle, replacing one kind of weight with another. But most importantly: that way madness lies. To obsess about weight is to abject yourself before the god of the bathroom scale, to try to placate its obscure will, to take its praise as Gospel and its disapproval as damnation.

  If you do, through some combination of circumstance or extraordinary self-discipline or madness—such as my high school bout of protoanorexia—manage to lose weight below your “set point,” your body will let you know, by possessing your brain in the manner of a demon of hunger. Everybody knows the feeling of their thoughts straying toward dinner as the day goes along . . . you start to get peckish about four, and before you even realize you’re hungry you think that maybe tonight you’ll stop at that good Chinese takeout place on the way home, or remember there are still some chicken thighs in the fridge you can fry up. Now, take that happy anticipatory peckish musing and give it methamphetamine. Just as I did during my hermitage in high school, you’ll obsessively focus on your next meal, whatever it is you allow yourself, and once it arrives you will gobble it up and end up licking the bowl like a starved dog, and then start thinking about whatever meal is next, and that will continue until you gain the weight back.

  And don’t even get me started on the body mass index (BMI). Under that rubric, even at my fittest, when I could reel off seven-minute miles one after another for ten miles or more, I was still officially overweight. Your fitness is not reflected in your appearance. Watch a track and field competition—there will be an array of bodies, from the tiny, slender long-distance runners to the broad-shouldered and heavy discus throwers. Each of them is a superb athlete and very, very few of them will ever end up on the cover of Men’s Fitness or Shape with their shirt and/or pants off. Health has a thousand ways of expressing itself, and the least important way is how much fat you can pinch between your fingers.

  Running has exploded in popularity in the last decade, and it’s hard not to correlate the sport’s growth with the obesity crisis. People feel fat, people are fat, people are terrified of getting fat, and then they see ridiculously fit people in spandex on the cover of Runner’s World, leaping through the blank Pantone background like gods and goddesses descending from heaven, saying, Why not give this running thing a try?r />
  If you read about the cover subjects in the note inside the magazine, you will discover that many of them aren’t actually runners but general-purpose fitness models, gifted with genetics, youth, and the ability to spend hours every day in the gym and get paid for it. Real pro runners—the kind of people who become famous by simply being very good at running—are too skinny. Readers don’t want to become a bony ectomorph with the gaunt, haunted look of a hunted elk. They want to become muscular, smooth, handsome/beautiful, with perfect skin and not a single hair—perhaps blown off by the rushing wind as they lope through the California sun. You can run to Zanzibar and never find that person looking back at you from a mirror. Recently, though, the magazine has been featuring “real runners” on their cover, although, strangely, not me. Yet.

  That said: physics applies to runners as well. To move a certain mass, you need a certain amount of energy. Most runners lose weight not simply because of the increased caloric expenditure, but because the body has a natural ability to adapt to whatever its purpose becomes. People who lift heavy things become bigger, thicker, more stable; people who move quickly and constantly become smaller, lighter, sharper, with less excess to drag along. The elite runners I’ve met look narrow and sharp, carved out of flat planes that cut through the air, like a stealth bomber.

  That probably will never happen to you, just as it never happened to me—even when I was in my top running shape, I was still short and squat, and I will die with the love handles I was born with. What can happen, though, is a transformation of your body, not just a loss of fat and gain of muscle, but a metamorphosis of body and mind. If you can pass through that difficult initial period, and become somebody who runs four or five times a week, you can increase your average daily caloric expenditure by a third or more. If you manage not to give in to the common urge to “reward” yourself for your run with an extra cupcake, the weight will come off naturally, and over time your set point, your body’s own equilibrium, will start to change.