by Peter Sagal
If you keep it up, running will help you become not the person you see on the magazine covers but yourself, or at least a version of you closer to what evolution designed you to be. Chances are, you weren’t designed to be a fitness model. But evolution certainly didn’t mean for you to sit on a couch. You were designed over millions of years to chase your food across the veldt, or at least to flee from something trying to do the same to you, and by returning to that initial purpose, you can restore your own primordial form. Our premodern ancestors were in excellent shape, Fred Flintstone notwithstanding.
One thing that will help of course is diet, and that too, is something your running will affect, and something that will affect your running. By diet, I mean what you actually eat, not what some magazine or author or murdered doctor or celebrity or wife of Jerry Seinfeld recommends you should eat. That kind of diet doesn’t work, and never has, and never will. The secret of every single diet is calorie restriction, imposed by various kinds of gimmicks, be it all carbs or all fats or all things we assume our ancient ancestors would have eaten in their healthy natural lifestyles, right up until the moment they themselves were eaten by a bear at the age of thirty.
The reason my lunchtime sojourns to the library worked—if making me skinny yet miserable can be called “working”—is that, like all diets ever invented, they restricted my calories. If you consume fewer calories than you expend, like, say, via obsessive running, you will lose weight as the body makes up the difference by breaking down stored fat. Here: I just invented the Second File Cabinet Diet, in which you eat only foods starting with the letters M–Z. Marshmallows, but no apples. Try it and you’ll lose weight, for a while, until you go mad and gorge yourself on figs.
In 2010, Professor Mark Haub of Kansas State University decided to prove this point by putting himself on a diet of only Twinkies and other processed snack foods. His intent was to see if only restricting calories (in his case, down to 1,800 calories a day) was sufficient to lose weight, without any regard for the kinds of foods those calories came in. His results were impressive, and would be the kind of thing that could have made him into a diet guru were he a minor celebrity: he lost twenty-seven pounds in two months, with no negative effects on his health at all. Unfortunately for his future career as the Twinkie Diet Millionaire, he’s a scientist, so he was actually kind of glum about his findings: “I wish I could say it’s healthy. I’m not confident enough in doing that.”
So what is a weight-obsessed runner to do in order to lose weight and keep it off, if not diet? It’s simple. Make sure as much of your diet as possible is “clean” food—nonprocessed, and raw when you buy it. Buy what you need when you need it, the way Europeans do, so your food won’t sit long enough in your house to need preservatives or stabilizers. Avoid things with colorful packaging and lists of ingredients in tiny type, especially if they’re words you can’t pronounce.
Carbs are fine, as long as they come in the form of vegetables and fruits and natural starches. Protein is fine, as long as it comes in beans, legumes, and leaner, nonprocessed meats. Even fat is fine, as long as it comes in natural oils and in the fruits and meats that contain them. Food is processed so as to maximize the things we like about food—sugars, fats—and eliminate things like bitter flavors and fiber, which normally serve to keep us from eating too much. We have evolved over millions of years to be natural omnivores, but it will take another million to adapt to eating Cheetos.
And, of course, if you can, cook your own food. And everybody can.
Most of the things people tend to buy premade, be they hamburger patties or pancake mix, are ridiculously easy to prepare yourself, and taste much better when you do. A hamburger? Buy fresh ground beef, sprinkle with salt and pepper, shape it loosely into a patty, and fry it in its own fat in a hot cast iron pan. Pancake? Flour, salt, baking powder, sugar, milk, eggs, butter. The food you make at home will generally be fresher, less processed, and thus less caloric than what you buy premade at a store or in a restaurant. Plus, if you bake your own bread, you’ll know for a fact you didn’t slip in any high-fructose corn syrup, unless you have a split personality and your other self is trying to kill you.
One of the great mental obstacles to home cooking is current food culture, which revolves around TV shows depicting tense protogeniuses trying to whip alchemical cuisine out of things like old rutabagas and shredded tires. They apply sous vide cookers and pastry bags and nitrogen injectors to create foams and curls and reclaimed reductions, so we begin to think of cooking as something impossibly complicated, something best watched rather than attempted. As writer Michael Pollan noted in 2009, the rise of cooking shows—or more aptly, food shows—coincided with a decline of home cooking.
But if you think of the things you actually like to eat, rather than watch being prepared—be it a burger, or vegetarian chili, or a grilled cheese sandwich—they are all simple. And as such, they are not guilty pleasures—they are merely pleasures, and easily recreated at will.
During most of my deceased marriage, my wife had stayed home to take care of the children, and thus had done almost all of the cooking. She had been raised by a mother and aunts who had learned to cook from their mothers and aunts, and she knew all these alchemical tricks, like how to make a white sauce or how to cut onions so that they flavored a dish rather than interrupted it with rubbery chunks, as when I cooked with them. She proudly never followed a recipe exactly—always adding or subtracting something—and while it’s hard to say whether her results were better than the exact recipe might have been, they were always good. She was showing off, and justifiably so.
As for me, I was in charge of the Dad Foods. I did all the grilling and specialized in anything that required cool equipment, like the electric crepe maker. But my approach to cooking was algorithmic. A recipe (or the instructions on the electric crepe maker) was a series of steps to be followed, and if the result didn’t come out well, it was probably because I didn’t follow the steps correctly. When making food for the kids, I didn’t dare second-guess the instructions as their mother could. I didn’t know how to do anything but follow directions. If there were no directions, I was at a loss. Which, come to think of it, might be part of the reason I ended up alone in this town house.
But even if I had taken an unexpected off-ramp into Divorceland, I didn’t have to do everything this particular script required. I wasn’t going to become one of those divorced men whose refrigerators were filled with nothing but half-empty takeout containers, with a pile of soy sauce packets in the butter compartment. I was going to learn to cook. From scratch. Raw ingredients, to be used by a raw cook.
In the years since those first nights, I’ve learned to make decent home-cooked food. I did it through practice, and tasting what I was cooking while I was cooking it, and using recipes not just as instructions but as lessons. If a recipe told me to add something, I tried to figure out why. When I could, I’d taste something before adding an additional ingredient and then after to see what improvement it had made. I can now make a good white sauce of my own, and a wine reduction, and I can (finally) do wonders with an onion and a sharp knife. But mostly, I learned this: The secret to eating well is simply to eat well, meaning ingredients you can identify prepared in a way replicable by you in your own kitchen. The secret to not eating too much is to stop eating when you’re not hungry anymore. The secret of a good diet is to cook and the secret of cooking is to care, about the food you’re making, about the ingredients you’re using, and mostly about the person you’re cooking for, especially if that person is yourself. Back in high school, I waged war on my own body and my own desires, and to hate your desires is to hate yourself. These days, me and I get along much better. Sure, I could stand to lose a little weight, but I’m healthy for my age, I can still reel off a fast ten miles if I need do, and afterward I can cook you a pretty good meal.
Here’s the other thing I’ve learned, which is something everyone used to know, something I knew even while manning t
he hamburger grill: food is love. To cook for yourself, rather than merely feed yourself, is to show yourself love, especially important when there is a sudden and marked lack of others willing to do that. To cook for others is not only a form of caring, it’s a form of connection. The transformation of raw ingredients into cuisine is often called alchemy, but the true alchemy is what happens to you, the people you cook for, and the relationship between all of you.
But all of that was in front of me on that May evening in 2013. I looked in my refrigerator. I took out some freshly purchased onions, peppers, mushrooms, and jarred garlic. I sautéed them in oil while I boiled Asian noodles in a pot. Once the vegetables were cooked, I doused them with soy sauce (way too much this time; I eventually learned to use less soy, which is mostly salt, and combine it with ginger and chili oil and a little fish sauce for umami). Then the noodles were drained and mixed in with the vegetables. I put the whole thing in a bowl and set it down on my table.
This particular table was an old, worn IKEA laminated pine kitchen table from my former home, one that got stored rather than thrown out when it was replaced because our family had once spent an evening decorating it with painted pictures of our place settings, surrounded by our names. Five places, each with a tempera paint illustration of a favorite meal, done in styles that befit our ages and talent, “Mama” and “Papa” and the names of our three children, all frozen in a moment of greater happiness, some six years before. It was one of the old pieces of furniture I was delighted to claim. So, on my first night living alone, I sat at my place, marked “Papa,” and ate my meal, on the souvenir of my family.
Six
Sometimes running sucks.
This is not something most runners talk about in public, though it is something runners talk to one another about all the time, usually during another, different run, to pass the time pleasantly so this run won’t suck as much as the one they’re talking about. No evangelical warns converts about boring sermons; no Mormon missionary loosens his narrow black tie and says, “Truth be told, there are days I would murder someone for a cup of coffee.” We’re trying to persuade you to buy into a lifestyle, and the secret to sales is to let the customer discover the defects in your product on her own, once it’s too late.
But I wasn’t cut out to be a salesman. I am terrible at being cheerful, and at denying obvious flaws. I am a bipedal Eeyore. Were I unfortunate enough to have ended up selling cars for a living, every American would be reaching every destination on foot, and this book would be unnecessary.
So let me be honest: sometimes there is no “runner’s high,” no being one with the environment, no fellowship with fellow fellows, no leisurely loping through the lea. Sometimes there are aches and pains and headaches and light-headedness, sometimes your feet hurt, and sometimes your feet are the only things that don’t hurt. Many, many people tell me that they tried running once and hated it. And I say, “Well, give it a little more time,” and then they do and come back and say, “Now I hate it for a longer period of time.”
In my running career I have aggravated my piriformis nerve and ended up spending six weeks with a physical therapist. I have slipped on a sheet of ice and landed so hard on my back I saw stars on a clear winter day. I’ve twisted ankles, pulled muscles in my hips, back, and somehow even my neck. During the New York City Marathon in 2009, my calves were cramping so badly during the last five miles that I made a deal with myself: I would keep running until I actually screamed, and only then would I take a break, which turned out to be, on average, once every quarter mile. Earlier the same year, after qualifying to run the Boston Marathon (again) and training up to run it, I was also coaching my daughter’s T-ball team. One day during practice I turned to point out the location of third base (these little girls were unclear on the concept) and felt what I thought was a softball ricocheting off my lower leg, resulting in an audible “pop.” I turned around and looked to see who had thrown the ball. There was no ball. I had ruptured a tendon. Instead of going to Boston, I went back to the physical therapist, who greeted me with a warm smile. She had missed me.
As I aggressively trained to be a serious runner, for the roughly five years that began with my training for the 2006 Chicago Marathon, I decided that I must embrace the pain. “What does not kill us makes us stronger,” I muttered as I tried to get a footing on the ice during a 5-degree winter run. “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” I said to myself, as a mantra, as I tried to keep up with my friends on a 4 x 800-meter track workout. And as for races, I ran them according to the rule laid out by a famous miler decades ago: “The perfect mile race is one in which you lose consciousness just on the other side of the finish line.” If that was true, then the 2007 Rock ’n’ Roll Chicago Half Marathon was as close to perfect as I was going to attain in this fallen world, because I pushed myself, gasping air through gritted teeth, ignoring the protests of every muscle in my body, to set a PR of 1:28, and then I collapsed to the ground. If there had been a coffin available, I would have gratefully laid down inside it.
Because, although we don’t like to admit it, pain is enjoyable, especially in a world in which physical pain—even the mild burn one feels during physical exertion—is, for most people and for the most part, completely avoidable. There is no real need to push oneself to the point of discomfort in a world of cars and helpful machines, and even if you do choose to exercise, there is no reason to endure the elements with year-round climate control and twenty-four-hour gyms, with their elliptical machines so you don’t put any stress on your joints and built-in TVs so you won’t be bored. And, of course, almost any physical pain can be managed by a wide array of medications, often to our detriment. Thus, many of us weekend warriors are out there looking to suffer, probably to prove to ourselves we can. After a particularly tough Chicago Marathon one year, I stumbled up the steps of my home, carefully navigating each riser, and my then wife asked, “Why do you do it if it hurts so much?” I responded, “That’s kind of the point.”
Among the most popular kinds of races these days are the Tough Mudder or Spartan Races, a dozen different variants on the same test-your-mettle theme: get yourself out of your office, and out of your luxury gym with its fresh juice bar, and get down into the mud and run through the flames, and make yourself wet and miserable and possibly even injured, and pay money to do it, because when you’re done, and you’ve experienced something really uncomfortable, well, then, at least you’ll know you’re alive. It’s the mantra of CrossFit and boot camps and ultra-long-distance bike racing, like the Race Across America, where competitors say they look forward to the hallucinations because at least they’re entertaining. Get out there! Punish yourself! Feel something! Sometimes pain seems like the only solution to a general numbing.
This obsession became mine in those early years, and I prided myself on how much I could take. To be fast and good meant to be tough and strong, and to be tough and strong meant to be able to endure pain. So, yes, of course running sucked. The trick is, as Lawrence of Arabia put it, not to mind. Which worked fine, for me, until one day—as movie villains like to say—I learned the true meaning of pain.
• • •
I have always secretly hoped that if I someday found myself lying on the ground gasping for breath, gravely injured, perhaps fatally, I would come up with something really great to say. Some declaration of immortal love, perhaps, or wisdom for my children, or at least something witty. As it happened, when it happened, the best I could do was a whimper, and when the first witness to my accident came running up, I grunted “Could you call 911, please?” I was proud of the “please.” Not memorable but at least polite.
It was a beautiful summer day, a Wednesday, August 11, 2010, and as it was an off day from running I had to decide between a swim and a bike ride, either useful for my upcoming triathlon. Wednesdays were usually swimming days during that summer, but it had been a while since I’d been out on the bike. I had missed the 6 AM departure of the group ride, but what the hell—I
had just begun two weeks off from work, so I decided to go out by myself, with the same cheery nonchalance with which Archduke Franz Ferdinand once decided to take a trip around Sarajevo in an open car.
I approached the intersection at a decent clip, noting the car arriving from the right, an orange hatchback, slowing at the stop sign, certain that—as had happened every single time before in my biking career—the driver would see me and let me pass before pulling into the intersection. But she did not, and we arrived at the same spot in the center of the intersection at the same moment. Time did not, as the cliché has it, slow down as the car accelerated into my path. It all happened at normal speed, giving me enough time to shout “Stop! Stop!” but not enough for either of us to do so. The impacts—first with the car, then with the car again as I descended from my short trip upward, and then with the ground—hurt, as expectations and the laws of physics would predict. My head slammed into the pavement, cracking my helmet, which thus saved my skull and perhaps my life. I lay on the ground, curled fetally on my side, struggling to breathe, thinking, “Oh my God, I was just hit by a car,” just the way Woody whispers “I’m a lost toy!” in Toy Story: that is, an awful event that I had always heard about happening to the unluckiest and unwisest of people had now happened to me, making me one of them.
By the time the ambulance arrived at the scene I was beginning to think I might have escaped with no serious injuries. My breath was coming easier and I could wiggle my toes and move my arms, although I hadn’t yet dared to try to get up. The paramedics checked me thoroughly—for injuries to my extremities, for bleeding, for signs of a concussion—and found nothing. One of them said, in a rather formal way, “It seems as if you have just had the breath knocked out of you. We could take you to the hospital, if you request that, or perhaps . . . you would just like to go home.” I immediately started to feel bad for wasting everybody’s time. “Let me get up and see if I can shake this off,” I said, and for the first time since the impact, tried to sit up. Just then, an invisible angry dwarf stabbed me in the back with a spear made of molten lava, the worst pain I have ever felt in my life, and I screamed, and froze, too terrified to continue getting up, or to lay back down, or do anything, ever again.