The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

  The story ends with me standing on the same patch of ground I’m standing on when it begins, but everything that could be changed had been changed.

  * * *

  I. In 2017 it was Eliud Kipchoge and Leonard Korir, respectively, which I had to look up just now.

  One

  William Greer was seventeen years old when he was riding his bike down the middle of a street in San Antonio, Texas, and was struck by a car. His helmet-less head struck the pavement hard enough to fracture the rear of his skull. His visual cortex was smashed, and although his recovery was miraculous—his father was solemnly told by doctors that William would be institutionalized for the rest of his life—he would never see properly again. His eyes work fine, but his brain can’t process the things he sees. Even his wife, Ellen, isn’t always sure what he’s seeing. I met William on a Sunday, the day before Marathon Monday in Boston, and he and I walked about four city blocks as he narrated his perception: “I see something ahead. It’s long, could be a tree. No, it’s a pole. A light pole. Okay, we’re on the sidewalk . . . up ahead, there’s something brown. Is it . . . ? Okay, a wall.”

  I asked him about things twenty, thirty feet away. “Do you see the other side of the street? Do you see the doorway to the hotel?”

  “No . . . no I don’t. Okay, now I think I do. Okay, yes, there’s the door, there.”

  It’s easy to think of William’s vision as a kind of camera with a very shallow depth of field, so that things float in a blur toward him until they resolve into focus, but that’s too mechanical a metaphor for his visual cognition. For William, seeing is often an act of conscious deciphering. For those of us who did not have our skulls slammed into the street at the age of seventeen, this is an automatic act—we see a tree as a tree as easily and unconsciously as blood is pumped from our hearts to our lungs. But William often has to exert conscious effort to constantly piece together an unfamiliar world he is moving through, and he has to do it fast enough to prevent some part of it from leaping up and hurting him.

  For William Greer, life is a puzzle he has to figure out every second of his waking life. And standing next to him early the next morning in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, twenty-six point two miles from the intersection of Boylston and Exeter Street in downtown Boston, I knew how he felt.

  We had each gotten to Hopkinton by different means and methods. Both of us were in our forties, and both of us had decided to take up serious long-distance running about a decade before. I had run nine previous marathons; William had run six. I was a little faster than he was, but today the plan was to finish at exactly the same time.

  William had set his sights on Boston a few years before as many runners do—as his personal Olympics, the one prestigious athletic event that is both selective and attainable. To qualify for Boston, or “run a BQ,” as runners often refer to it, is almost every serious marathoner’s dream. The qualifying times are graduated by age, making them accessible to, roughly speaking, the top 10 percent of amateur runners of any age group. William, with his disability, needed to run a five-hour marathon to qualify, and he smashed the standard at the prior year’s San Francisco Marathon, running it in three hours and fifty-five minutes. Now he had come to Boston to both run the race and to set a new PR, or personal record, with a hoped-for time of three hours and forty-five minutes, which translates to an average pace of eight minutes and thirty-four seconds per mile. Most moderately fit adults would be hard-pressed to run a single mile in that time. William was heading out to do it twenty-six times, and then a few extra hundred yards, for fun. Despite whatever problems he had with his sight, William had boarded the plane to Boston with a clear vision of where he wanted to go, and why, and how quickly.

  And me?

  On the morning of the marathon, I had arrived in Hopkinton with little planning and less confidence. I didn’t exactly know what I was doing there, or what I would do next once I (hopefully) crossed the finish line.

  Like William, I had trained and strived and managed to qualify for Boston. But I had done it in the fall of 2006, at my second marathon ever, in Chicago, and I showed up in Boston the next spring only to be nearly drowned as the race was run into the teeth of a freezing rainstorm. When I finished I was so dazed and hypothermic it took as much effort to stagger into the medical tent as it had to run the race. So I requalified in Chicago in 2010 and ran Boston again in 2011, on a perfect day on which an (unofficial) marathon world record was set. Even with blue skies and a following breeze it’s still a tough race, and as I stumbled through the finishing chute on Boylston Street, with a satisfying if not record-setting time of 3:27, I said to myself, and to anyone who would listen, that I had no reason to run Boston ever again.

  Yet here I was.

  I came back to run Boston in 2013 because, like Lolita, you see, I had absolutely nowhere else to go. My strained, trembling marriage of nineteen years had finally shaken itself to pieces. Since our agreement to divorce three months earlier, my wife and I had settled into a cold war that occasionally flashed hot as it became clear that it would not be and could never have been the amicable split I had hoped for, for our sake and for that of our three daughters. Instead of a “conscious uncoupling,” it was turning into a brush war, fought out in our hundred-year-old Victorian house west of Chicago, a four-story maze of minefields and trip wires.

  I started accepting many of the invitations that came my way, anything to get me out of the house and removed from the battlefield. I hosted a few fund-raisers, spoke at a few events. And when a contagiously enthusiastic young man named Josh Warren called and offered me the chance to run Boston a third time, this time as a guide for a blind runner, I said, “Sure.” What the hell, I told myself, at least somebody wanted to see me. Even if he was blind. Maybe because he was blind.

  My future was uncertain to the point of being a blank. I didn’t know where I would live, or whom I might live with. I didn’t know if I’d be alone for the rest of my life. At the age of forty-eight, everything I had accomplished in my personal life—my marriage, my three children, my home—was slipping away from me. What was left? Well, I had trained myself to run marathons. That’s a thing! So I volunteered to run a marathon for someone else, just because Josh asked me. It had never occurred to me before then that this solipsistic activity could be of use to someone else, beyond, say, pulling his sled across the tundra.

  • • •

  Race day: at 5 AM I met Josh, William, and the other runners and guides of Team With A Vision at a downtown Boston hotel, where we got into the rented bus and headed out to Hopkinton. Boston is unlike most other modern urban marathons, which tend to start and finish at the same place. The Boston Marathon, born in a simpler and more honest age, starts twenty-six miles due west of where it ends. You begin your day in downtown Boston near the finish line, then you get on a bus that drives you every foot of the distance of the course, and then the bastards expect you to run back.

  After forty minutes on the road the bus stopped a block away from the marathon start line at the Hopkinton Vision Center, an optician’s office which had been donated to Team With A Vision as a staging base. It was filled with runners and their guides eating energy bars and bagels, drinking coffee and Gatorade, and using and reusing the two bathrooms. We arrived more than three hours before our third-wave start of 10:15 AM, so some of us napped. I caught a few winks in an optician’s exam chair, snoring into the phoropter.

  Before our start, William and I posed for a photo with Josh Warren and his wife, Lisa, outside the vision center. Lisa is a petite woman, about five feet tall, the same height as my oldest daughter, who was fifteen at the time. As I looked at her, I was struck by a pang of loneliness and loss, a stark reminder that I was here looking after William because at the moment I wasn’t able to look after anybody else. Before I allowed myself to think about how weird it would be to actually do this—I’d met her that very morning!—I asked Lisa if I could pick her up. She laughed and said yes. I picked up Lisa, and then we
all held her across our line of men, like she was a bathing beauty on the Atlantic City boardwalk, or maybe like a giant fish we had all just caught.

  I stood there smiling for the camera and thought about my daughters, who, when they were very young, I used to pick up, put on my shoulders, and loudly ask, “Where did she GO?” And my girls would shriek and laugh and say, “I’m up HERE, Papa!” and I would say, “I can hear her voice, but where is she?” and there would be more laughter, and I would run around the room looking just everywhere until finally I came to a mirror and discovered the amazing truth.

  After the photo was taken—it ended up going around on Twitter, and my quadriceps came in for some admiration—and the Gatorade was drunk, the energy bars were eaten, the Body Glide was applied, bibs were carefully pinned and repinned, and the bathrooms were again used and reused, William and I walked toward the starting line. We were in the third of three start waves; each of them contained more than ten thousand runners. Our wave was primarily charity runners—runners who had pledged to raise a certain amount for one of the approved marathon charities, and thus hadn’t had to run a certain time to qualify for the race. At my prior Bostons, I had started in the first and second waves, and as I looked around I noticed a much more eclectic group than the mostly male, mostly skinny, mostly jackal-eyed runners I usually began with. Here in the third wave, there were people of all shapes and all ages, and instead of the predatory demeanor of my usual crowd, they all looked a little happy and a little nervous, like they were about to go on a particularly scary roller coaster. Many of them had written their names in large letters on their shirts to attract personalized cheers, and many of them had written their purposes as well, or had them preprinted: FOR MARY . . . NO MORE HUNGER . . . RUN FOR A CURE. During the course of the race, those runners would be engaged in an alphanumeric conversation with the amusing signs held aloft by spectators: ONLY TEN MILES TILL BEER . . . DON’T TRUST A FART FROM HERE ON OUT.

  William was nervous, I think; it’s hard to tell someone is anxious if he never looks you in the eye to begin with. All marathons are a little intimidating, but few of them begin so mysteriously as Boston. The Chicago Marathon starts on the city’s front porch in Grant Park, and you know you will return to that point; the Philadelphia Marathon similarly starts and finishes in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Rocky ran the steps. From the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where the New York City Marathon begins, you can see Manhattan, where the race ends. But the Boston Marathon starts in a small town on a road that leads downhill into the woods and then vanishes. There is no view, no hint of what is to come. For Boston rookies—for me, back in 2007—the sheer anxiety of it can approach the terror of stepping off a ladder into darkness. There is no inkling of where you will land, or how much it will hurt.

  We were the last segment in the elongated body of runners, the abdomen in the tripartite multilegged beast. A major marathon is the only sporting event in which an amateur who pays the fee (and, in Boston’s case, qualifies or gets a charity bib) can compete against the best athletes in the world. You can’t pay a hundred and fifty bucks and enter Wimbledon. But you can stand behind the same starting line as the finest marathoners in the world: skinny, compact men and women, (mostly) with ebony skin and a loose loping pace that looks relaxed even when churning out 4:30 miles. It’s scientifically possible you could beat them, in exactly the same way it’s scientifically possible that all the atoms in your body could align perfectly with the gaps between the atoms in the wall in front of you and you could run right through it.

  Of course, it almost never happens that any amateur actually beats an elite professional runner. In 2008, an amateur entrant named Arien O’Connell ran a 2:55:11 at the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco, beating out all three of the top elite runners, but the race organizers refused to honor her win. They claimed her time didn’t count, because while her elapsed time beat theirs, they had finished first. Of course they had—the elite runners were given a twenty-minute head start on the rest of the field. The real reason, everyone presumed, is that the elite runners are paid to appear, and paid to win. She was not. After a public outcry in the running community, O’Connell was awarded a co–first place medal. And more recently, in a repeat of the cold and wet conditions that I endured in 2007, a nurse anesthetist named Sarah Sellers took second place at the 2018 Boston Marathon, passing dozens of elites who probably thought they weren’t being paid enough to feel that miserable.

  If William and I were going to perform that kind of miracle, we’d best be quick about it. The leaders were at that moment more than halfway down the course, sprint-loping toward winning times in two hours and a fraction. Catching them would be, shall we say, unlikely, but one of the great and terrifying things about marathon running is that there really is no predicting the future. Nobody dares to call their shot if that shot is supposed to land twenty-six miles away. Marathoning is probably closer to mountain climbing than to any other sport. You prepare for months, you practice and train, but then comes the day with the challenge before you, and you realize that the result will depend on the wind, the temperature, what you chose to eat the night before, what you chose not to eat, not to mention the cooperation of your gut, lungs, heart, and legs. You can train all you want, but twenty-six miles is too great a length to allow for any confidence in the outcome. Sometimes, as with Boston in 2018, miracles occur, as one did for Sellers. Or disaster strikes, as it did with hometown hero Shalane Flanagan in the same race. Flanagan had won the New York City Marathon just six months earlier, but in Boston she ended up stumbling into a porta-potty as the rest of the field streamed ahead of her.

  Ten thirty AM. For the third time that morning, the PA system played the national anthem, and for the third time that morning, nine thousand regimented runners removed their caps and placed their hands over the technical fabric covering their muscular hearts. For the third time that morning, the starter intoned “On your marks . . . set . . . go!” The lock and dam at Hopkinton Town Common swung open, and a wave of runners burst onto Route 135 heading east.

  The first mile of any marathon goes by in a painless blur. Anybody, no matter how out of shape, could run a mile if it was the first one in a mass urban marathon—it provides all the adrenaline of running with a mob, albeit without the heretics in front or giant monsters behind. People cheer and whoop and run much faster than they should, with some—okay, many—okay, me—immediately starting to dodge and dart around and ahead of other runners. Because at that moment, as your legs start to move after what seems like hours of jumping in place, you feel infinitely energetic, like you will own this day, and despite any lack of, say, appropriate training or nutrition or any right to be attempting this, you will easily compact the physical reality between you and the finish line, and via a kind of warp drive, sprint to the end. It doesn’t last long, this feeling of elation, but still there is no better feeling than starting a marathon. It beats finishing one with a hammer.

  William and I dodged around runners, with me trying to guard him from interference. Per his instructions, I was supposed to run slightly ahead of William and to his left, where his field of vision was clearest, but at the start of the race, I thought it was more important to stay straight in front of him like a shield. I was leading William as a herald, letting runners know that a blind runner was coming up behind them. I shouted “Excuse me!” and the runners turned in annoyance, and I got to enjoy watching their faces as they registered the GUIDE bib I was wearing and the BLIND RUNNER bib on William. “Oh!” they’d said as they bowed to my superior virtue and got out of the way.

  Whenever the crowds in front cleared, I shifted to lagging behind William to protect him from runners overtaking from the rear. That didn’t make a lot of sense, in that the runners overtaking us were not blind themselves and wouldn’t be madly charging into a runner in front of them, but it seemed noble in a kind of jumping-on-the-grenade way, so I did it.

  However, my principal responsibili
ty, as William had laid it out the day prior, was to warn him of turns in the course, as well as obstacles in the roadway. As a blind runner, William’s greatest fear was stepping into a pothole or tripping over a streetcar track embedded in the pavement. Unlike a sighted person, he couldn’t even prepare himself for the impact if he did trip—the first evidence he’d have of a mishap (as he knew from experience) would be the pain as he struck the pavement. So I was to shout out warnings.

  So I scanned the course, which had been cleared, repaired, checked, rechecked, and then polished just that morning by the thousands of runners in front of us, and since there were no holes to dodge, and two entire real turns on the whole course, both of them in the last mile, there wasn’t much to distract us, other than the fact that we were running a marathon. William and I just talked. We talked pace—to complete his marathon on time, he needed to maintain an even 8:34 pace per mile, but Boston’s course is anything but even. It begins with a steady, sometimes even steep descent, then is fairly flat through the towns of Ashland, Framingham, and Natick, then through Wellesley—the town and campus—and of course then come the famous Newton Hills, four of them, culminating with the famous Heartbreak Hill that crests at Boston College, with the first sight of downtown Boston in the distance. Those hills are not particularly steep, but they come at exactly the wrong time, starting in mile 17, when most marathoners start to flag and fail anyway. First-time Boston marathoners go out too fast at the beginning, whooping and leaping in the excitement of starting the Greatest Race in the World, and then they get to the tough part and they realize that they were completely unprepared and stupid to even attempt it. It’s a lot like marriage.