The Incomplete Book of Running
by Peter Sagal
Simon and Schuster
2018
183 pages
review by George Brose
Peter Sagal was best known to me, when I was living in the States ten years ago, as the co-host of "Wait Wait ...Don't Tell Me", the most popular show on National Public Radio. He has in 2018 written a book on his experience in running from a mostly humorous vein. He mentions that he also is a fairly regular columnist in Runners' World which I did not know as I have not read that magazine religiously since about 1980 when we moved to Canada then Zimbabwe and eventually China before turning back to North America. I broke the habit of RW because we rarely had enough money in the bank to write a check for a subscription that would not bounce or from a place where the mail would catch up to us in two month's time.
In Africa we did have access to the overseas edition of The Economist. We called it 'the bathroom edition' as it was printed on a very thin paper which served us well in the bathroom. Spoiler Alert, the paper on which Sagal's book is printed cannot be used in same manner as the 'bathroom edition' of The Economist.
Last week I stumbled on Sagal's book in our Vancouver Island Regional Library and was struck immediately by the cover of the book made to look like a rather satirical impression of the old Jim Fixx book The Complete Runner. Skeptic that I am, I overcame my reluctance and checked out the book and read it in two sittings (and without the overseas edition of The Economist nearby). Peter Sagal as many have told us in documenting how their lives have been affected by running has done much the same. But we are all unique individuals, and each one of us has some one-of-a-kind experiences and perspectives on the sport and can relate those experiences in a variety of ways depending on how often we were injured, how we hated the game, how it made us a better person, how it replaced our therapist, even how it replaced our spouse. Sagal does share bits of his unhappy and failing marriage with us, and ties those events into his running career. Being a long time divorce mediator I could understood where he was coming from. If you're not into that aspect of life, Sagal touches on other aspects, some of which are very unique when one considers how many millions of people now call themselves runners. He writes of recovery from two broken vertebrae after being hit by a car while riding his bike and getting his PR after that event. He writes too about some amazing experiences of other runners, including one who started off training at a weight of 475 pounds, and completing a marathon at 360 pounds.
In his personal history, Sagal as a child fell into the somatype of 'chubby'. He relates how he hated when his mother took him to the 'husky' section of children's clothing when they went shopping for school clothes. He was referred to by his classmates based on that weighty factor. Finally by the time he went to high school he decided on his own to lose weight and began a self ordinated running program and made his high school team. But alas he was not moonstruck by the running bug, quit the sport after one year and returned to his chubbiness until in his forties. Since getting back in the game, he has completed seven or eight marathons at the time of publication (2018) and admitted he has reached his peak performance, a 3 hrs. 9 minutes race, dropping about an hour off his initial try. He has come to the conclusion that it won't get any better. Of late he has found a new gig and it gets him into Boston as a guide for blind runners. That experience is something that is not as easy as just running on your own.
Some of you older readers may remember Harry Cordellos who was probably the only blind runner back in the day. He raced in 47 straight Bay to Breakers starting in 1968 and broke three hours at Boston. One of Harry's great quips was, "Hey, we must be winning." "Why's that, Harry?" "Because I can't see anyone ahead of us."
Now there are a fleet of those guys who show up and compete as the "Team With a Vision". Peter Sagal has become a running guide for the team and describes beautifully the ups and downs of being a guide to unsighted runners. Sometimes the guide can't keep up, sometimes the unsighted runner can't maintain their pacing goal and guides are traded mid race with other teams having matching problems. But the big one that Peter Sagal describes is his team effort at Boston in 2013 running with William Greer. Near the end of the trail in the 22nd-24th miles William was starting to break down and had to walk at times but coming close to the finish line just over 4 hours he began speeding up in the last mile and jubilantly crossed together with Peter, and just after crossing the line, they embraced and the two bombs went off only a hundred yards behind them. If Greer had not picked up the pace in the last mile they would very possibly have been right in front of one of the bombs when they detonated 17 seconds apart. Sagal doesn't explain this right away, but mentions only the hugging and then hearing an explosion. He goes another chapter or two before coming back to the significance of that event. I don't know what the literary term for doing this is but maybe writers call it a time lapse or a jump or whatever. It made me wonder during those next two chapters about when he was going to get back to this horrific tale to tell the reader about that run. Anyway it kept my focus going forward in the book. Peter Sagal covers some of the better aspects of running and provides us with a pleasurable read. It's a good book to read after a long, difficult book. In my case the long one was Timothy Snyder's grueling book Black Earth, The Holocaust as History and Warning. The Incomplete Runner got to me at just the right time.
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