The Incomplete Book of Running

by Peter Sagal

  You will suffer, a bit. But as Paul Carrozza says, this time you are suffering for a concrete purpose—to arrive at the spring or fall or summer day when you will put on your shirt and shorts and tie your shoes and run a whole three miles without stopping. Instead of being Rocky Balboa going back and forth to his miserable job beating people up for a loan shark, you will be Rocky Balboa sprinting through the streets of Philadelphia on his way to his destiny. You will start when they fire a gun or sound a siren, you will run, you will finish when you step across a line and an announcer, with luck, says your name, rather than the name of the person right behind you or the one in right front of you. Then you’ll get a medal, perhaps, and you will drink sports drink and eat a stale bagel that will be perfectly delicious and you will note your time—Thirty minutes? Maybe forty?—and you will say to yourself, perhaps: “Maybe I can do that faster.”

  The last “G” stands for “Group,” and it’s been the hardest of the three Gs for me to get people to accept. A lot of people say that they like running because it is a solitary sport, and it gives them a chance to be meditative and away from pressures and other people and blah blah blah; yes, I know, you value your alone time. But I think that for many people, including myself, we are reacting out of fear and discomfort. We don’t want to go to classes because the perky trainer at the front makes us feel embarrassed, not to mention fat. We don’t want to run in front of anyone; if we were good at sports, then we wouldn’t be running, would we?

  Get over it, and find a running group.

  We humans, unless we are very strange humans, actually like other people; we enjoy talking to them, hanging out with them, and in some extreme cases, kissing them and making babies with them (which, not incidentally, provides more people to hang out with). Running with other humans is no different than any other pleasurable interaction, and in some ways it is much better, to wit: It is not an open-ended commitment. You are going for a run. It may last thirty minutes, it may last an hour or even two, but it will end. Even if the person you have chosen to run with was not a wise choice, you can rest easy in that the ordeal will be over relatively soon.

  You do not have to worry about being sweaty, smelly, farting, burping, vomiting, or the occasional gastrointestinal distress. This is a run. Everybody is smelly, sweaty, farting, or something even more extreme. If you do not occasionally involuntarily expel something from your body while running, you’re doing it wrong.

  You do not have to worry about how you look. Running is the sport equivalent of a nudist camp. We simply accept each other as we are, for in any other direction lies madness.

  You do not have to worry about being interesting. While running, anything becomes interesting, even the topic of running. Running is profoundly boring to talk about . . . except to other runners. Thus, don’t think of your social runs as yet another time when you are obligated to be charming or fun or impressive—accept them as a time when you can be, and will be, gloriously dull. My running friends and I have had lengthy, interesting conversations about such topics as porta-potties, chafing nipples, and various kinds of shoelaces. We talk about stomach, muscular, and uterine cramps; we talk races and pacing and shoes; we talk about all the minutiae of running and no one leaves, because we’re all constantly leaving together.

  You don’t even have to look anyone in the eye, if that causes stress. Everybody’s looking ahead.

  I should probably mention at this point that running sometimes sucks. There’s no point in hiding it from you, and later on we’ll speak more about it. There will be days on which the weather is awful, the footing terrible, the mood black, the stomach unhappy, the legs aching, and the head woozy. But misery, as is well known, loves company, and more to the point, like most burdens, sharing this one makes it lighter. Running thirteen miles in a rainstorm by yourself is miserable, stupid, pointless, and the sort of thing that will make you reconsider indolence, obesity, and an early death. The same experience with a band of friends is your very own St. Crispin’s Day, a shared misery, a story you will tell and retell again and again until you get bored of it, which will be never.

  Seven or eight years ago, my running friends and I went for a run on a sub-zero freezing day and decided, on the advice of one of them, to run a trail through a woods, including across a frozen snow-covered stream. My foot broke through the ice, and I soaked my running shoe and sock in the frigid water.

  We’ve told the story of that day four hundred times since then, and it gets better every time. I believe in the latest iteration I was submerged into the ice up to my waist and I remained frozen there, like Satan in the lowest level of Dante’s Inferno. If I had been alone, it would have been just a private misery, the memory of which would occasionally make me shudder for a few years after. Because I was with a group, it’s a glorious story of adversity defeated. Then again, if I had been alone, I wouldn’t have run into the goddamn stream.

  And, insofar as we are naturally social animals, we are also naturally competitive. I don’t mean we wish to triumph over our friends, although that can be a fun way to spend an afternoon if you’ve got time to kill and a set of Settlers of Catan. What I mean is that we tend to measure ourselves against other people, because measuring ourselves against other species or inanimate objects makes no sense. We will never be as adorable as that puppy, or as tall as that cell phone tower. But we might, if we try, be as fast as our friend Ken, who is roughly our age, height, and weight. We might even beat him someday.

  Your running friends should be roughly at your level of fitness, with similar goals. You get no benefit from running with people you can’t keep up with, or who can’t keep up with you. But the key word is “roughly”—ideally, you should be the second-slowest person in your group. Having a number of friends who are constantly just ahead of you at the track, just a little more comfortable and faster in the long runs, who can go just a little farther without a break, means you will be constantly pushing yourself to catch up, keep up, and keep going, and pressing your limits means you will be constantly improving. Any running is good; but running just on the edge of your ability, after comfort and before crisis, is the best. You will come to love your running friends, and you will express your affection for them by trying to kick their asses, or at least keeping them from kicking yours.

  Why the second slowest? Because it sucks to be last.

  Finally, of all the people we know, we are often the least kind to ourselves. We are the ones we disappoint, we are the ones we mistreat, we are the ones we betray by going back on promises to improve and to Never Make That Mistake Again. We are the ones we punish most. If you say to yourself, I am going to get up and run every other day because it’s Good For Me, then “Me” is going to be going without that run within a few weeks. But if you have agreed to be on the corner of Sixth and Main at 6 AM to meet the guys for your run, then before you turn over and go back to sleep you will have to grapple with the fact you are going to be Letting Those Guys Down. What you would do to yourself without a care of the cost, you’ll hesitate about doing to the guys. So you’ll get up and you will go. And there you will find the guys, who have shown up, despite the early hour, despite the darkness and the fatigue, because they didn’t want to let you down. They’re better to you than you are.

  It’s also possible that running friends might become your friends in real life. This can be odd, because it’s strange to see people you normally see sweaty and in short pants dry and in trousers, and so I don’t recommend it, but hey, it’s your life. Do what you want.

  But find a group. What is coming your way will be more easily handled with a show of force.

  Three

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon and 30 degrees out—warm for a day in mid-February, which was fortunate because I was standing on Market Street in St. Louis in my underwear, next to a guy dressed as Braveheart, without a shirt but with face paint (blue) and a sword (foam). I waved my arms around, trying to stay warm without hitting anybody with the Cupid’s bo
w and arrow I was holding. Then the starter, such as she was, cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled “Go!” and everybody started running, except for me, because Braveheart decided to rally the three hundred nearly naked people behind us by swinging his sword, which whacked me hard in the face. He took off. I grabbed at my nose, swore, hitched up my red boxer briefs, and chased after him.

  Welcome to the beta test of life as a divorced dad.

  This was an intentional test run. It was the winter of 2013, about two months before the Boston Marathon, a race that, on this cold day, I had no notion I would be running. My wife and I had agreed, in January, to separate and then divorce, and my soon-to-be ex had taken the kids to visit her parents in Minnesota. Under the circumstances, she suggested, it might be awkward for me to accompany them. Perhaps I should have argued, but they had taken such trips without me before, and this seemed like a strange time to insist on coming along. Besides, there was no time like the present to start getting used to the future as a part-time parent.

  At the same time, I didn’t want to mark this first Solo Divorced Dad Weekend by lying around the house eating takeout in my underwear and watching porn. That seemed to be a bad way to set the tone. Instead, I would do a road trip of my own. How about St. Louis? I had friends there, and it was also about a day’s drive away, and happily, psychologically, and geographically in the opposite direction. But I needed a better excuse. One of the habits I have been criticized for in the bosom of my family—justly—is constantly needing some sort of activity to amuse myself, rather than just, you know . . . being. So what could I do? A race? I liked to do races. One of my St. Louis friends told me about a race a friend of hers was doing. Something called the Fourth Annual Cupid’s Undie Run. Whatever. I’m in.

  • • •

  On New Year’s Eve 2009, a twentysomething in Washington, DC, named Bobby Gill was talking with his friends Chad Leathers and Brendan Hanrahan (who were also, I am sure, in their twenties) about doing something for Chad’s younger brother, who was afflicted with neurofibromatosis, or NF, an extremely unpleasant pediatric disease that causes chronic tumor growth. All three friends were runners, so they thought of a fund-raising race, but then said to one another, “Why do another 5K? Nobody remembers a 5K!” and came upon the idea of running in their underwear. (This is how I know they were in their twenties: they just assumed that their friends wouldn’t mind running in public in their underwear.) They decided they needed a holiday to link it to for marketing purposes, one that was coming up soon. . . . Martin Luther King Jr. Day? Not quite right. Valentine’s Day! Great. Then it will be red underwear.

  I called Bobby on my way down to St. Louis, and he told me they’d expected about fifty of their friends to show up that first time and strip to their skivvies before doing a guerrilla sprint on the sidewalks circling the Capitol, but word spread around the DC running community with the speed of a nearly naked young person trying to get out of the cold. On February 13, 2010, more than six hundred people swarmed Capitol Hill, a mass of jiggling, goose-pimpled bare flesh, raising $10,000 for the Children’s Tumor Foundation. Three Valentine’s Days later, in February 2013, the race was held in fourteen US cities, plus Sydney, Australia, with thousands of participants attempting to reach a $1 million goal.

  For me, there would be two very unusual things about the race, and that did not include the underwear. First, perhaps because of the cold weather, perhaps because they wanted to attract a wider pool of participants than the cadre of hard-core runners, Bobby and co had set the distance at one mile. And further, it would be informal, untimed, and not even accurately measured. Call it a “mile-ish.” You know, out thataway for about a half mile or so, then turn back. I made a note to myself: don’t try to set an international record for the mile distance, because it won’t count.

  Second, it was for charity. This may seem like a bonus, but for a “serious runner,” charity running can have a disreputable air. The Boston Marathon, as said, requires entrants to qualify by running a sufficiently fast time at a prior accredited marathon. To run Boston, you have to earn it. Or, if you don’t want to put in the work, sign up with some charity, promise to raise (or donate) a set amount of money, and they’ll give you a bib. Easy. Then there are the countless charitable organizations that promise to help you train up to run a marathon or half marathon, all for a large fee that mostly, probably, goes to the charity, rather than the coaches and T-shirts and other accoutrements of Very Public Do-Gooding. This sort of stuff made me narrow my eyes and sniff and think that if you really wanted to train for a marathon, you should grind out the miles in misery, unsupported, like God intended.

  But I needed some distraction on my first Divorced Weekend. Having run countless half marathons and 10Ks and ten-milers, a “mile-ish” run in my underwear on a cold winter day seemed like it would be, at least, a significant change of pace.

  But if I was going to raise money, even on a lark, then dammit, I would raise some money. I only had a week to fund-raise after deciding to run the race, but I went to it with a vengeance: I set up a donation page and then tweeted out appeals, offering to post a picture of myself running in my underwear when I met my $1,000 goal, and then, when that goal was quickly reached, I announced that if I hit $2,000, I wouldn’t post it.

  Over the course of my single week of fund-raising, I began tracking the thermometer-style money graph on my fund-raising site like it was an indicator of my value as a human being. In response to many lewd suggestions as to what underwear I should wear, I posted an offer: anybody who donated $500 could dictate my costume. I was amazed, and more than a little worried, when somebody took me up on it. But I put my qualms aside. I was raising money! Lots of it! Anything to make that needle move—and it was moving. As far as addictions involving needles went, I could do worse.

  Still, I was nervous when I walked into Syberg’s bar in St. Louis on the Saturday of the race, and not just because of what I was wearing (and not wearing) under my sweats. The place was packed with people, mostly young, mostly drinking, and mostly naked. Very few of them—by my informal survey, which I conducted by asking them—had ever run a race before. Most of them had no knowledge or interest in NF or the Children’s Tumor Foundation but had shown up, it seemed, because drinking beer and gallivanting around in their underwear in public on a Saturday afternoon “sounded like fun.” So, as it turns out, there are hobbies stranger than running.

  There were some older folk mixed into the crowd, and although they seemed to be grinning as much as anyone else, they were there for a more serious purpose. Every person I spoke to over the age of thirty-five, including Amanda, the race director, was there because of a direct connection to a child suffering from NF. A group of older runners had brought one such child, the daughter of one of their coworkers. Lexi seemed shy and frail but delighted to be surrounded by so much determined love. One of Lexi’s supporters told me their employer, the St. Louis area water utility, was suspicious and worried about this “undie” thing and insisted they run clothed, which is why the entire group was wearing extra-large unmentionables over tights and T-shirts. She seemed regretful.

  And me? Having stripped off my sweats, I was talking to this perfectly nice complete stranger in the outfit decreed by my $500 donor: a pair of red boxer briefs with the words KNICKERS OF GLORY written on the butt, red feathered wings on my back, a Cupid’s bow and arrow in my hands, and a heart shaved into my chest hair. I envied the utility worker in her tights. At that point, I would have preferred a burka.

  I ordered a beer from the bar. I would have had another, but naked and shivering and shaved and drunk seemed one adjective too far. So I shuffled outside and waited with the crowd, most of them much younger and much more attractive than me, although few of them were more naked. The race started. I got hit in the face with a foam sword. Then I whooped and ran.

  At first I gave in to my usual instinct and tried to keep up with the leaders, a few skinny guys who hadn’t laden themselves with props.
But after about a hundred yards I actually said out loud, “What am I doing?” and slowed down, circled back, and joined the vast unclothed masses. This was supposed to be fun. And today, there was no fun in me being out in front . . . especially for the people right behind me.

  The turnaround point was a half mile up a slight hill, and before we were very far up it, a lot of the cuties in their undies were walking, either due to too little training or too much alcohol. They were all still laughing, and so was I. I had never been in an event like this; hardly dressed, hardly running, in what was hardly a race. Then I decided I wanted to get to the finish line to watch people as they came in, so I sprinted the last few hundred yards. Somebody shouted out, “Not fair! He’s got wings!” I jumped to make them flap.

  At the finish, people laughed and hollered and cheered as they completed their mile run as if they had just won the Olympic marathon. They hugged their friends, an act more sweaty and intimate than usual, and everybody immediately retired into the bar for more beer. There, the organizers quieted the DJ and took over the bar’s PA system. They announced best costume—some twenty-year-old in something revealing—and then they announced the event’s big winner, the top individual fund-raiser.

  It was me.

  My wheedling, my begging, my bargaining, my offers to wear whatever ridiculous thing my big donors suggested, had brought in $4,000 for the Children’s Tumor Foundation, and I accepted my medal (in the shape of underwear, of course) with a huge grin. It was the first time I’d ever won a race of any kind, by any measure. And it struck me, as I grinned and grinned, standing in my underwear in front of a crowd, that I had picked a great one to win. I have run thousands of miles for myself, and one, just one lousy mile up a hill and back, for some sick kids I had never met, and at that moment, it seemed to me the only mile I’d ever run that mattered.