by Peter Sagal
The editor and I went out together at a smooth 6:50-per-mile pace and kept it up, and even as the temperature rose, I kept my cool. He pulled away around mile 6, but I didn’t care—why, I was hardly racing! Just out for a quick stroll with a few thousand strangers on a sunny day in the traffic lanes of Lake Shore Drive! At any minute all of us might just decide to stop for a picnic. My pace was consistently sub-7 minutes per mile, and yet at the same time I felt completely within myself. I admired the trees and the grass and the concrete and kept running, and loped in at 1:29:15, two minutes behind Brian, and fifteen seconds better than my course PR. I had given up a chance to go after my half-marathon PR (1:28) and a chance to be on the cover of the magazine—I was even going to shave my chest—but I had gained something else: proof that success in racing did not have to equal misery.
This was a revolution. My personal highlight film of major race days is a catalog of self-inflicted miseries, like one of those “Faces of Death” videos from the 80s, and if you had asked me why I endured such tribulations in what is ostensibly my hobby, I would have said . . . Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? To see how much you can endure?
The project had begun with the assumption that in order to run faster as I got older I would have to suffer even more, following a graph line of rising pain proportionate to speed. But, it finally occurred to me, maybe success in running can be delinked from the amount of punishment you’re willing to endure to achieve it. Maybe the point isn’t to see how much you can stand, but to see what you can train your body and mind to do with less and less agita. Maybe the goal, as one ages as a runner and as a person, is not to learn how to suffer better, but to find your way toward a sense of ease and even—Had I ever used this word in the context of racing before?—pleasure. Is it possible, in this fallen world, to run fast and enjoy it?
When a month later the dreaded day came, that thirty-mile double-long-run weekend, I leaned into it. The ten-mile tempo run flew by, or rather I did, loping through my suburb at a ridiculous seven-minute pace, although as of that day it no longer seemed ridiculous. And the next morning, twenty miles at a 7:30 pace along the Chicago Marathon course during the race didn’t seem hard at all. The last test before my marathon would be my neighborhood’s 10K race.
As I have described, my midlife running boom was inspired in part back in 2003 when I watched that 10K race go right by the house I had just moved into. I ran that race the next year, and every year after it, my time coming down from forty-five minutes or so by thirty seconds each year, but never getting closer than six seconds to that seemingly impenetrable forty-minute barrier. If I was ever going to do it, this was the year, on a cool weekend just six weeks before the Philadelphia Marathon, ten weeks into the most rigorous training schedule I had ever endured, and while I was in the best shape of my life.
I started the race fast, as I had been starting every run, fast enough to PR, but it would take effort. Since I had abandoned punishing myself to get faster, I used geekery. In the rebooted 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica, when they want to move the bulky spaceship a vast distance very quickly, the crew “spins up” the “Faster-Than-Light Drive.” Not “crank,” not even the Star Trekian “engage,” but “spin up,” a phrase that evokes effortlessly increasing momentum. So after clocking 6:18s or better for the first five miles, I started saying to myself, aloud, “Spin up! Spin up!” And so for the first time I think ever, I actually accelerated in the final mile of the race. I came roaring around the corner where I live, passed my house, waved without slowing down, and flew the final half mile to the finish, at light speed or better, crossing as the clock ticked over 39:09. My fastest time ever, by almost a minute.
At forty-six, I had just traveled through time and shown up as my seventeen-year-old self. I was trained, fit, and equipped with Faster-Than-Light engines, deployable at will. I was ready for the marathon. The only sour note: my daughters hadn’t been there to cheer as I went by. They were still inside the house. I got there too quickly, too focused on the goal ahead.
Two days before the Philadelphia Marathon, I realized I had no notion of what the course would be like, other than that it would be about twenty-six miles long. So I consulted Ian Chillag, a Wait Wait producer, onetime Philadelphia resident, and 2:39 marathoner.
I asked him, “Any advice on the marathon?”
Chillag said, “Yeah, don’t be stupid.”
“Don’t be stupid?”
“Yeah. You’re always stupid. You always go out too fast. So don’t be stupid. You want to negative split this course. If you cross that halfway mark faster than 1:37:30, I’ll hit you.”
I promised Chillag that if I arrived at the halfway point before 1:37:30, I’d stop and wait for the clock to tick over before going on.
• • •
As I went to bed at my Philadelphia hotel the night before the race, full of noodles and spicy pigs’ ears from a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Philly’s Chinatown, I contemplated my secret—something I had told no one, not the Runner’s World editors, not my running buddies, not Chillag. My stated purpose was to beat my PR, which meant sub-3:20. My informal, public goal was 3:15, which would give me a five-minute cushion in case something went wrong. But my secret goal, one which I dared not speak out loud for fear it could not bear the weight of the air, was to finish in under three hours and ten minutes, requiring running a touch under 7:15 per mile for a touch over 26 miles. I had run a 1:29 half with relative ease, and a sub-40 10K—why not a sub-3:10 marathon? Other than, that is, my advanced age and sparse natural gifts and the weight of my lifetime as a mediocre athlete? I tried to get some sleep, interrupted by fitful dreams of earless pigs mocking me for my presumption.
Every marathon begins with a kind of boast. The crowd behind the starting line is divided into “corrals,” demarcated for runners at different intended paces, so as to prevent chaos in the first mile, as faster runners overtake or even trample slower ones in front. But even in those overpopulated races with strictly assigned corrals, such as the Boston Marathon, within those corrals people edge forward or retreat backward as an expression of their confidence at that moment, as derived from a complicated calculus involving weather, what they ate the night before, and anything else that might be twisting in their gut.
On this cool Sunday morning in Philadelphia, I had been assigned to the A corral, the first of three. At the very front of it were the elite runners—a smaller and less impressive group than might be seen at bigger, richer races, like Chicago or Boston—and then behind them, the rest of us: people who expected to run the race in about 3:15 or under. This was ambitious at my age and size and weight: forty-six years, 5'7", 175 pounds. But still, I edged forward, stepping around other runners until I could—mirabile visu—actually see the bony arms of the men who expected to win this thing. I wasn’t expecting to challenge them, but I was imagining something perhaps just as unlikely.
On cool race mornings like this one, runners wear throwaway clothes to the starting line, to keep us warm until we are allowed to begin exerting ourselves. Some favor trash bags, with holes torn out for the arms, but I think this is an unnecessary attempt at economy, not to mention unflattering. Any runner—any person—has enough old clothes redolent of sweat or spotted with paint or still smelling like the person who abandoned it in your apartment when they moved out. In my case, I was wearing an old NPR shirt, produced for some long-ago marketing campaign. Although we hadn’t started running, I wasn’t feeling cold. Maybe anxiety produces heat. I took off the shirt and threw it into a bin provided so that discarded clothing could be distributed to the needy. I imagined a panhandler wearing the NPR logo, reminding passersby how much they relied on his panhanding and thanking them for their support.
This time, I wouldn’t have to wait for the first wave to go off, or the second, before it was my turn. I was ready to jump at the first gun I heard. It fired, and I started to run. The field quickly spread, and I saw the elites lope away down Benjamin Franklin Parkwa
y toward the towers of downtown at a sub-five-minute pace. For one brief moment, I enjoyed the once-in-a-lifetime experience of running “in the pack” behind the eventual winner of a marathon. Then they left me behind, and I concentrated on the race I had come here to run: the one against time. Running those first few miles, through downtown Philly to the Delaware River, I felt effortless confidence, like an adept of jiujitsu, a tea ceremony master, a poker player with nothing but aces. A friend took a photo of me in the early miles of the course, when I was reeling off seven-minute miles without any noticeable effort, and there I am: not only fit, with my extended left leg as Jim Fixx–like in its muscularity as it had ever been and ever will be, but also happy. I think about that day a lot now. I had always believed that suffering was a requirement for anything worthwhile: art, educational success, professional achievement, marriage, parenthood. On this day, I had found another way, though it had taken thousands of miles to get there.
Mile 5 flashed by, and we were back into downtown, with cheering crowds along Chestnut Street, and I felt great. I began to cultivate a feeling of holding back, like a bandage on top of an itch I really, really wanted to scratch. Another 7:05 mile. It was fast—it was very fast—but it felt easy. It even felt cautious—I wanted to run faster, and knew I could. For the first time in any marathon, I began looking forward to mile 20 . . . because it was then, and only then, I promised myself, that I’d let myself tear off the bandage and go.
Legs spun, thirteen miles passed, energy gels were ingested, and we returned to the Museum of Art. The half marathoners diverted off to their finish and we marathoners turned left to run around the building and head northeast on the parkway lining the Schuylkill River. If the first part of the marathon was a parade through Philadelphia’s downtown core, the second half would be a trip out into the country . . . out and back on one road, six miles or so each way. The clock at the halfway mark read 1:33. I was way ahead of my stated goal pace, and two whole minutes under my secret one. I was being recklessly, intentionally stupid. Ian was going to hit me. “But first,” I said to myself, “he’s going to have to catch me.”
By the time I hit the twenty-mile mark on an uphill stretch in the riverfront neighborhood of Manayunk, that “itch” had faded . . . the marathon had reasserted itself, as it will, but even if I couldn’t accelerate through the finish as I had at the 10K, I was still two hours and twenty-four minutes into a marathon with six downhill miles to go, and anything was possible, including, it seemed, the impossible.
Then—tremors in my calves, those weird misfirings of nerves that feel like wires in your legs have been crossed, warning of cramps to come. It was calf cramps that cost me fifteen minutes in the 2009 NYC Marathon—I had watched my calf muscles spasm inward, leaving weird undulating half-inch indentations—and I wasn’t going to let that happen to me again. I stopped dead, near the twenty-three-mile marker, and spent thirty precious seconds stretching out my calves. “Behave,” I hissed at them. Would they listen? I started running again. I picked up speed. A mile flew by, no cramps. This was going to be amazing . . . a 3:05, maybe? Another mile zipped by, going downhill now. Gravity itself had signed on to Team Sagal! I got to the mile-25 marker and . . .
. . . BOOM. A gremlin whacked my hamstring with a ball-peen hammer: a sudden, vicious, explosive cramp. This had happened to me before, as well, in the 2006 Chicago Marathon, almost costing me my Boston qualifying time, and for a crazed moment I refused to believe it was happening again and kept trying to run on one leg, like Monty Python’s Black Knight. I hobbled to the side of the road, stopping dead for the second time, and stretched out my leg on the fender of a car, pounding the muscle with angry fists, cursing it, pleading with it, while three whole minutes ticked away, and the 3:05 pace group streamed by me, puzzled to see a bald man arguing with his own leg by the side of the road. I was so close, in so many ways, to succeeding beyond my secret dreams. If I lost it now, a mile away from the start, and had to watch the clock tick past 3:20 as I walked the last mile, I don’t think I could have borne it.
I pushed away from the car and ran a step. The leg ached, but the ache faded, and the cramp did not return. I absolutely refused to baby that leg, and insisted on accelerating back up to a seven-minute-per-mile pace: it was crazy, but at this point I was gambling with house money, and if my leg fell off, well, then dammit, I’d use it as a crutch to hobble the rest of the way. It seemed a miracle that this was possible: these steps, this mile, this whole race. I divided the last mile into quarters, and started bargaining with fate for each one. Just let me run this 400 meters, then you can tear my legs off. Okay, thanks, how about one more quarter mile? I came curving around the Museum, and the crowd all seemed to be shouting for me . . .
. . . I saw something strange to my left, a group of men kneeling on the pavement, as if in prayer, around something in the midst of them, which might have been a person . . .
. . . and then I was there, through the finish line, my watch reading 3:09. I had done it, definitively, smashing my PR of five years earlier by more than eleven minutes. I felt flush with achievement, with the energy, if not necessarily the legs, to run a victory lap around the whole damn twenty-six-mile course waving an American flag.
I had accomplished something that Dr. Fair’s statistics had predicted would be highly unlikely, if not impossible. But I did not feel as if I had pulled off some kind of miracle on asphalt. I felt—I knew—that I had put in four long, difficult, painful, rewarding, exciting, revelatory months, my finest as a runner, transforming the impossible, mile by mile, into the possible. I had not reversed time, or gotten any younger. But I had shown, at least to myself, that time and age are not walls but fences, and fences can be jumped.
• • •
A number of people, including Chillag, suggested that next I set my sights on a sub-three-hour marathon, which among runners is the informal barrier between being an excellent amateur and simple objective excellence. Sub-three people, while not quite the separate species that sub-2:30 marathoners are, are still different from the rest of us. If you run a 3:09 marathon, you’re a great amateur runner and you should be very proud, as I was. If you can run a 2:59 marathon, then you can do anything, including, perhaps, depending on the day and the field, winning the thing.
But no. I was exhausted and I knew that the gains from further training would decrease logarithmically. I had to essentially double my weekly mileage to get my 3:27 marathon time down to 3:09. Shaving off another ten minutes might require me to double the mileage again, and I was already pushing the limits of my family’s tolerance, and perhaps my own.
Besides, the ambition wasn’t there anymore. I had started the quest out of a deep-seated fear of my inevitable deterioration, and now that I had reversed its flow I was ready to relax and accept that now the tide would go back out. Beating back the ravages of time is a lot like trying to protect your sandcastle from the incoming tide, as I had done as a child and had done with my own children. You can delay but never prevent the inevitable destruction. I had proved something to myself, that I could accomplish something once inconceivable to me and, I would guess, to people who had known me either as the indolent brainy nerd I was as a child, or as the harried, slowly ballooning guy I had been in my thirties, as I was trying to juggle work and family. I was pleased, and I was proud, but I was also done.
As the marathon receded into the distance, I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with myself. I kept running five or six days a week rather than three, but the intensity faded, and pretty soon, my Great Race was beaten ceaselessly back into the past. The next year, 2012, was the last year of my marriage, with its many and increasing trials, and during that time, and in the years since, I have often tried to hold on to that feeling from the early miles of the 2011 Philadelphia Marathon. Not the confidence, or even, God help me, the sense of having been well and truly prepared for what I was enduring, because I knew, as my divorce unfolded, that I had never trained a single moment for that. No: wh
at I have tried to remember, and occasionally achieved, is that sense of handing myself over to the moment I was in, trusting that what had brought me there would carry me through, allowing things to transpire not with effort, but with something like ease, even grace.
Ten
When Erich Manser was thirteen, he was playing outfield for his youth baseball team in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. He had been an all-star shortstop but was moved back to center field after he started misplaying harder-hit grounders. Standing on the outfield grass, he heard the crack of the bat a hundred feet away. He looked up in the air and didn’t see much of anything but light. A second later, he heard two distinct sounds: the ball thudding to the grass to his left, and to his right, more distant, a parent’s voice saying, “I can’t believe he missed it!”
It was around then, Erich told me, that he figured he’d better try basketball instead. Bigger ball.
Erich was born with retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, a genetic disease that causes the slow, irrevocable deterioration of the retina, leading, in most cases, to blindness by the age of forty. Erich was diagnosed earlier than most, at the age of five, when his parents realized that he couldn’t see at all in dark rooms. “Night blindness” was in Erich’s case the first symptom of RP, but as the disease progresses, the result is an implacable narrowing of the field of vision, from the periphery inward. By the time I met Erich three days before the 2014 Boston Marathon, he saw the world “as if through a cardboard toilet-paper tube.” A small circle of blurry vision in front; nothing at all to the sides, above, or below.
