The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

  I could do that. I thought.

  Talking to Erich, joshing with Josh, meeting the other runners and guides, each of them bouncy and jittery and raring to go, I found myself getting excited to run the race. I started to forget the events of the past year and remembered what had been a bass note under the dirge for my family: my determination to be here, on this day, and do this, as a gesture of defiance and resurrection. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times right after the bombing, I had said I’d like to send a message to the (then unknown) bombers: “Go fuck yourselves.” (The Sun-Times didn’t print it.) The two bombers were now respectively dead and in prison. But it was still a message worth sending, and this was still the best way to send it, en masse and in motion.

  It was time to head to the starting line. We walked about into the sunshine. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and sunny, perfect for photographs but perhaps not so much for marathon running. Marathoners are like tuna salad: we go bad in the heat. The starting corrals were nuts. With the added mazes of fencing and security—our bibs were checked three times before we found our way to the actual roadway—we couldn’t even get up to our assigned corral, and so we settled for the one behind it.

  But that was a stroke of luck, as we found ourselves next to Dan and Ron and their assigned runner, Corvin Bazgan, a thirty-nine-year-old living with Usher syndrome, which is essentially retinitis pigmentosa combined with hearing loss. He had Erich’s limited field of vision, and without his hearing aids (sweat wasn’t good for them) he couldn’t hear much, so I remember him seeming blissed out, above it all, grinning in the general direction of his two guides and us.

  With all of us wearing our bright red Team With A Vision shirts, we felt, well, like a team, if one with variable levels of vision. It was 11 AM on April 21, 2014. There was a horn. We started to shuffle forward. I held tightly to the loop in the tether—Erich had doubled it, so as to keep me closer in the jostling crowd of the start. I looked up at him. His eyes darted around. He took in the scene around him in tiny sips, as if he were trying to drink a cocktail through the little plastic stirrer. He was grinning.

  After a few moments of shuffling, I once again reached the starting line of the Boston Marathon. I had lived a year filled with catastrophes, only one of which was a bombing. But, for the next four hours or so, I would not be a father bereft, a tragic hero living out my own private opera. I would just be a guide. I would never finish the race if I dragged all that with me. So I dropped all of it on the pavement and ran.

  • • •

  The first seven miles flew by. Quickly realizing we could and should join forces, the five of us—three guides, two runners—formed a kind of flying wedge. Dan took the point, using his West Point–bred authority to quietly but firmly issue commands to runners in front of us to make way. I noted, enviously, that there was something about his tone that caused people to almost jump out of his way, without even a look back. I told him I wanted to hire him to precede me through life. He laughed without losing focus.

  I had let go of the tether, as Erich felt comfortable running free in his protective cordon. We all felt great. We fed off one another’s energy. We talked. Ron had also gone through a divorce and remarried. He expressed condolences for the death of my marriage. This time, I didn’t go on about it. Why bring up anything sad on a day such as this, with such a group, in such a place? Ron and I took turns relaying cups of Gatorade from the aid stations back to the runners under our watch. We waved to the crowds. People cheered us on. We nodded to express that variety of gratitude that indicates complete agreement with the praise offered. All of us were smiling as much as Erich was. Heavy metal played from a speaker at a water station. “It’s Dio!” said Erich. “I love Dio!”

  “So,” I said, “you’re deaf, too?”

  Everybody laughed, and we ran on.

  Nothing good can last forever, and so it was with our impromptu group. Erich wanted to run at a faster pace than Corvin, so we said (and shouted) our farewells and everybody wished everybody else good luck. Erich unfolded his tether, which he’d been carrying in his hand, and put his fingers through the loop on one end. I held on to the other, and I led him on toward the halfway mark. The sun reached its peak at noon, blazing down on us. I cried out, “Blind runner coming through!” trying to emulate Dan’s tone of unquestionable command. It was immediately questioned. “Could you, uh, not do that?” asked Erich, as gently as he could. “I just don’t like taking advantage of my condition.” He would have mentioned that to Dan, he said, but everybody was having so much fun with the Flying Wedge of Blindness that he didn’t want to kill the mood.

  Fair enough. I held on to the tether and kept going, trying to lead him clear of other runners. Whenever Erich got into a tight group of runners, he started to feel uneasy—again, understandable, if you imagine running surrounded by people you can hear but can’t see. The same situational anxiety meant we ran well to the left and away from the shouting women of the Wellesley Scream Tunnel. I shrugged an apology at them: “Get you girls next time!” The sun continued to beat down. Erich fell silent, and so did I. This day was going to be a lot tougher than my run with William, for a number of reasons. Which is why I started to panic when the drugs began to kick in.

  • • •

  I wonder, sometimes, how and why none of the therapists I consulted over the years, from college to just before my marriage exploded, diagnosed me with depression. Perhaps my symptoms did not present as treatable via medication, even after the advent of Prozac. Perhaps I masked it by being clever and funny, which is how I had masked a lot of things. But in the fall of 2012, around the time I found myself having to wait until I stopped sobbing before leaving my car (a BMW 3 Series, the number one car for middle-aged men to sob in, alone) and entering the house, I realized I quite literally couldn’t survive without medical intervention. I contacted one of the shrinks I had seen and more or less demanded chemical help. He was willing, and I ended up entering the growing population of the psychoactively medicated.

  My medication—Cymbalta—was helpful. Very much so. There were many, many times during the year and a half since I had started taking it when I was dealing with some extraordinary interaction with my children or their mother, or some setback in the expanding legal fight, where I was able to both comprehend how bad things really were and yet stay on my feet, dealing with it, while knowing that my unmedicated self would have been driven to wailing, crumpled misery. I was often depressed or upset or sad or angry, but with good reason, and within reason. The world no longer presented itself to me only in varying shades of black. And because of that, I chose, every day, to remain in it.

  That important benefit aside, I didn’t like the side effects. I had gained weight and experienced an intermittent dizziness. The good news is that it only happened on rare occasions, and then only when I was engaged in intense physical exercise. Like, you know, running.

  The sun was at its apogee and the heat was starting to matter, but still, I shouldn’t have felt this woozy, fuzzy, and dizzy. This was a common experience in the last year, something that had affected my training significantly. Worse, I had left my pill bottle in Chicago when I flew to Boston, so I might have been dealing with withdrawal, which seemed to manifest as an intense increase in the drug’s side effects. I tried to focus. I ran. I wobbled, and straightened, and ran some more. If it had been just me, I would have stopped running and gotten off the course and sat down and had a cold drink and maybe a cigarette, who knows. This running thing was not working out, maybe time to try another vice.

  “Hey, Erich!” cried someone to our right, looking back over his shoulder. It was a runner with a Team With A Vision bib that read GUIDE, but there was no blind runner to be seen around him. His name was Monte Harvill, and his guidee had “blown up,” as we once said in more innocent times, just a few miles in, so once Monte delivered his runner to a medical tent, which would tend to him and transport him to the finish line, he continued running the race. W
hy not? It was the 2014 Boston Marathon. Who wouldn’t want to run the whole thing?

  I knew somebody. As soon as I saw Monte, and he fell in with us, forming another, albeit smaller flying wedge for Erich, I realized I had been given an out. For the last mile or more, I’d been hanging on for Erich’s sake, and now I was being released from that burden . . . maybe. There was an aid station coming up. I maneuvered around so I was running next to Monte and said, “Look, I’m having a real hard time. Do you think you could take over for me?”

  “Sure,” he said, seemingly glad to be occupied again.

  I dropped back a step and ran next to Erich.

  “Erich, I’m sorry, man, but this heat, or something, is getting to me. I have to stop for a while.”

  Erich told me later that he knew I was having trouble because I had stopped talking.

  “Don’t worry about it, man. If you have to stop, let’s stop, it’s fine.”

  “No!” I said. “Monte’s got you. I’m sorry, but I’m just falling apart.”

  We said our goodbyes, and thanks and apologies, and I edged to the side of the road, stopped running, and walked up to the aid station. A volunteer handed me a cup of Gatorade. I thanked her, and stepped off the course to drink it, and to watch Erich and Monte vanish down the road.

  I stood there, my heart pounding, my head still spinning. I drained another cup of Gatorade. This was worse than death; this was failure. In the end, just as I had feared would happen when I guided William the year before, I had promised somebody I’d be there for him and I couldn’t do it. I cheesed out. I hadn’t been strong or dedicated enough. I’d blown it. Well, add the 2014 Boston Marathon to a long list of things attempted but not conquered: marriage, fatherhood, lawn maintenance, baseball . . .

  I got another cup of Gatorade, and as the runners streamed by, I thought about Jacob Seilheimer.

  • • •

  I ran the 2007 Boston Marathon as a qualified, registered entrant, into the teeth of a freezing rainstorm, in about three hours and thirty minutes. I was forty-one, had trained hard and well, and was in the best shape of my life. Jacob Seilheimer was twenty-six years old, 6'2" and 360 pounds, and he had started out so far behind the last registered entrant he hardly counted as a bandit. His final time? Somewhere north of eight hours, he’s not exactly sure.

  I had never met Jacob, nor talked to him, but I knew about him. While I was training for Boston 2007, somebody had pointed me to his website, “What Would Jacob Do?” Pictured there was this indolent obese man, who had decided to “run the Boston Marathon” on a whim, without adequate training, physical capacity, or, of course, qualifying or registering for the race. And reader: I hated him.

  Not personally, of course, although my disapproval of everything about him took on an emotional heat. I had trained my guts out to qualify for Boston, and then again to run it decently, and this guy, who gave his weight as 450 pounds at the start of his training, just decides he’s going to “run” the Boston Marathon by shuffling down the course long after the rest of us? Not only was it an affront to our—my!—achievement, it was a terrible idea. Anybody with any ounce of sense knows that deciding to go from “couch to marathon” is exactly the wrong way to start running. Decide to do something impossible! Make yourself miserable attempting it! Maybe die from a coronary! Good idea, pal.

  I ran the 2007 race and flew back to Chicago and checked in on Jacob’s website. There were pictures of him “running” the “Boston Marathon” by shuffling down a sidewalk in Framingham. Hah. And then, with a last smug sniff, I forgot about Jacob Seilheimer.

  Except I didn’t. I thought about him from time to time, usually as the Dumbest Runner I Had Ever Heard Of. I might have mentioned him in that capacity once or twice, over the years. Maybe it was just a lingering affront from his stealing our glory. Maybe it was a weird side effect of my fixation with weight—there, but for the grace of obsessive running, go I.

  Years later, I decided to make some use of this odd but persistent memory and write about him for Runner’s World, as an illustration of What Not to Do, the Goofus to my Gallant. But if I was going to do that, fairness required I actually talk to him. Thanks to Facebook, it was easy to find him in Andover, Massachusetts, where he works as a tax consultant, and thanks to NPR, he recognized my name and was happy to talk to me.

  Jacob had always been a big guy, but also an athlete; he played football as a lineman at Colby College. But after his graduation, his father died, and he had to go to Texas to help dispose of his family’s beekeeping business, and, well, “I was stressed, depressed, unsure, and was eating and drinking way too much . . . and by the time I went to law school in New Hampshire, I weighed 450 pounds.”

  He had some friends there who regularly joined the crowds of bandits who ran the Boston course after the official entrants every year—this of course was before the post-2013 crackdown—and in January 2007 one of those friends, Mike Moran, urged Jacob to do it with them. That very year. Three months later. “He was trying to find a way to help me to not be so fat,” Jacob told me. “So he said, ‘You can do it! You just have to get in decent shape!’ And I said, okay, and then he put up a website and sent a press release to all our friends! So I figured I had to do it.”

  Driven almost entirely by a desire not to quit in front of his friends and the world, and also by a glimmer of hope that the Boston Marathon could help him get out of the pit he was in, Jacob turned himself over to the effort. Mike had told him he could lose one hundred pounds in just three months of training for a marathon, so Jacob bought a stationary bike and started pedaling. I should say here, if only for legal reasons, that attempting to lose one hundred pounds in three months is a terrible idea. Most experts say that a healthy rate of weight loss should be no more than one or two pounds a week.

  “I knew it was a bad idea,” Jacob told me on the phone, laughing. “I’ve made a life of bad ideas.”

  He hauled himself on top of a stationary bike for thirty minutes a day, then worked his way up to eight hours a day, sitting on that bike. Then running. The longest Jacob ran prior to the marathon was ten miles, which took him about three hours. And the weight dropped off. By the time he got to Hopkinton on Monday, April 16, 2007, he was down to 360 pounds, an astounding loss, just ten pounds short of his goal. (But, Jacob points out now, he lost ten pounds during the race, so he made it!) The crowd of qualified and then charity runners (myself somewhere in it) had long vanished down East Main Street out of Hopkinton, and Jacob and his three friends, Mike, Luke Webster, and Andrew Fleming, started out after them, into the cold, driving rain. (A fourth pal never appeared, until he showed up drunk in Kendall Square many, many miles later.)

  “For the first few miles, I’d be running, and I’d see the water station ahead,” Jacob remembers. “And then from a half mile away I could see them tearing it down.” There were no crowds, no Wellesley Scream Tunnel, no support. Instead, when he needed hydration or nutrition, Mike or Luke or Andrew would jump into a 7-Eleven and grab some bottles and bars. As I talked to Jacob, I began to realize that whether or not my marathon that day was more legitimate, his was a hell of a lot harder.

  He got to the ten-mile marker—thankfully painted onto the asphalt, because all the signs had been removed—“on pace,” at about three hours, but his race “fell apart” around mile 17. (In this, it turns out, Jacob and I did have something in common.) In his case, although his strength and breath were holding up, his feet were wrecked.

  “I could barely walk,” Jacob told me. “My feet weren’t trained to endure the bone-crushing weight for that many hours. The last eight miles, I could either sprint or sit down. Sprinting seemed to take the weight off my feet. So I would sit a little, then I’d sprint, then I would have to sit down again. It took twice as long to do the last ten miles as it had the first ten. And we got lost in Brookline, and we ran an extra half mile or so.”

  But nonetheless, Jacob persisted. He and his friends slowly made their way down the sidewalks of
Brookline and Boston, and then, just like every other Boston Marathoner, he sprinted down Boylston to the finish line—albeit hours after the race was over, and in the dark. Some guy in a bar yelled at him: “You think you’re running the marathon?” And Jacob responded, “FUCK YEAH!”

  And then he celebrated by hurrying back to law school in New Hampshire, where he had to perform the next morning in a mock court exam . . . on his feet, in quickly purchased shoes two sizes larger than his normal size, because his feet were so swollen.

  Eight hours in the cold, wet, and dark—the weather had been so miserable that the organizers actually considered canceling the race—to end up with nothing to show for it but swollen feet. Did Jacob regret his run?

  Absolutely not. “It was one of the best senses of accomplishment I’ve ever had.”

  Since that day in 2007, Jacob has managed, fitfully, to keep the weight off—he’s at 350 pounds now—and has also kept running, but never again in a marathon. “Maybe I’ll work my way down, the opposite way most people do it,” he mused, laughing. “Start with a marathon, then a half, then a 10K, then a 5K, then I’ll quit.”

  But he has had plenty to endure nonetheless. First Lyme disease, and then, practically the same day he got engaged, he got a call from his doctor saying, that headache that was bothering him? In fact, it was glioblastoma, the most virulent kind of brain tumor, the kind that killed Ted Kennedy a year later. Surprise! In the last few years, Jacob has been in and out of surgery, radiation, and chemo, gotten married, gotten his degree, gone to work—and then the cancer has recurred.

  So Jacob has carried with him more burdens, handicaps, and bad luck than I—even poor pitiful I—could imagine. And, Jacob is certain, his remarkable, improbable run helps him get through his trials. “I can always look back on the most physically miserable day of my life and put things in perspective. If I’m feeling like shit, I can say I won’t feel as shitty as I did at the end of that race.” He’s known around the chemotherapy infusion center as one of the more upbeat patients, he says, and after talking to him for an hour, I completely believe him.