In “Nixon Agonistes” (1970), his matchless book of reportage and analysis, Garry Wills explored why Richard Nixon succeeded while smarter and more charismatic politicians did not. Among Wills’ conclusions: Nixon had what peers called an “iron butt,” a willingness to sit and study harder than everyone else.
As a book critic, I’ve sometimes been inordinately proud of my own iron butt. I may not be able to read faster than you can, I have thought to myself, observing others in public libraries and coffee shops, but I’ll bet I can read longer.
Five months ago I was shopping for trousers in the Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue when I caught sight of my backside in one of those 360-degree mirrors. “Iron” was hardly the word that came to mind. I decided to start exercising.
This is prelude to saying that Peter Sagal’s “The Incomplete Book of Running” fell onto my doorstep at almost exactly the moment I began to go for painful, mist-sucking, aesthetically disastrous but oddly satisfying runs along the Hudson River.
“The Incomplete Book of Running” has been a loyal companion. It’s funny, well written (mostly), filled with humility and perpetually on the scan for moments of stray grace.
It’s odd to be writing these things. If Sagal’s book had arrived even a month earlier, I would surely have put it into the circular file while thinking: Oh look, here’s a book about a subject I hate, written by someone I don’t like.
I’m not among the fans of Sagal’s popular news-based show, “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” on NPR, though I like most of the people on it, especially Roy Blount Jr., who is in my pantheon for writing “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load” (1974), a stupendously great book about the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“Wait Wait” resembles the place I fear I may go when I die, where vitriolic and overly entertained cherubs attempt to tickle each other with feather dusters in quip fights to the death. On the other hand, I would go for a run with Sagal anytime.
The title of his book refers, of course, to Jim Fixx’s best-selling “The Complete Book of Running” (1977). Fixx’s book is the reason your parents or grandparents scuttled down the streets of your youth wearing headbands, like Mark Knopfler in Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life” video.
“For a slow, unathletic kid like me, it was a kind of porn,” Sagal says about Fixx’s book. It didn’t hurt that its black-ink drawings were, he writes, “strangely and uncomfortably like the ones in ‘The Joy of Sex.'”
Fixx died, infamously, at 52 while on his daily 10-mile run. Sagal reminds us that Fixx had a congenital heart defect and never saw a doctor.
Sagal retains an essential bit of wisdom from “The Complete Book of Running.” He writes: “Do not buy anything first. Jim Fixx was right: You have everything you need right now. Someday you might buy better shoes, or specialized clothing, but you do not need them now. You do not need a gym membership or a treadmill or special shoes with rockers built into the soles.”
He adds: “If anybody judges you for wearing ratty clothes, one of the privileges and benefits of running is leaving people behind.”
Sagal’s book is not the one to read if you crave advice about the best cushion-heeled socks to buy, the correct earbuds (he advises against listening to music while running) or the finest anti-chafing creams. If you want that sort of information, you can turn to a magazine like Runner’s World, where Sagal has a column.
He’s funny and perceptive about running magazines, by the way. These magazines often put generic fitness models on their covers instead of elite runners, he notes, because elite runners tend to have “the gaunt, haunted look of a hunted elk.”
This is the place to say that Sagal is indeed a fairly elite runner. He’s run 14 marathons, many of them at an eye-popping pace. He guided a blind runner during the 2013 Boston Marathon. They passed the finish line only a few minutes before the two pressure-cooker bombs detonated, killing three people and injuring several hundred others.
Sagal began running as a kid because he wanted to escape his portly body. He ran on the cross-country team in high school, then let himself go a bit while at Harvard, where some students were “legitimate track and cross-country stars” who “passed me as if the hedge funds they’d soon be managing were just across the next bridge.”
He started running again in earnest, “fueled by Gatorade and dissatisfaction,” at 40. The activity became “my refuge, my pride and my natural antidepressant.” He’s kept running, in part, to escape a painful divorce.
When you hear a novelist being interviewed on the radio in the morning, Jonathan Lethem has written, chances are — because they were rousted from bed at an unnatural hour — they are holding in a bowel movement. Sagal’s book contains a fair amount of writing about similar problems runners face while seeking what he calls “egress.” The body has many orifices. “If you do not occasionally involuntarily expel something from your body while running,” he writes, “you’re doing it wrong.”
How’s my running coming? Thank you for asking. It’s going well enough that for Christmas I would like a T-shirt that reads, “I am only doing this so I can eat an entire rack of ribs later.”
Running, at minimum, gets you out and looking around. In a line that will perhaps be chiseled on his gravestone, Sagal writes, “I have seen remarkable things, and passed them at moderate speed.”
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Publication Notes:
“The Incomplete Book of Running”
By Peter Sagal
185 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.