Courtesy of the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival and the author
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Each week, 3 million people listen to Peter Sagal’s voice on the popular NPR program Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me! This weekend, the host and author of the recently released The Incomplete Book of Running comes to St. Louis as part of the Jewish Book Festival (catch him at the Staenberg Family Complex on Sunday, November 4 at 7 p.m.). Why this book now? When Sagal thought of the idea in 2012, “the notion was I was just going to do a breezy book about being a successful midlife runner,” he says. “I had just run a 03:09:00 marathon at a relatively advanced age with relatively little talent. And I thought maybe I could write a cheerful little book about how you might do that, too.”
And then two things happened. As the show host puts it: “In 2013, a whole bunch of things blew up. The first being my marriage and thus my family. And the second thing was the Boston Marathon.” Sagal, who had completed the marathon with a blind runner, acting as a guide, was 100 yards away from the bombing. That event was a catalyst for thinking about changing the book. “It became a book about getting through that year,” Sagal says. “I hate to call it a book about running through a midlife crisis. In the end, it’s as much about how to deal with other things as it is about how to be a decent runner.” Below, Sagal talked to St. Louis Magazine about the hardest thing to write about, and what he hopes readers take away from the book.
What was most challenging about writing The Incomplete Book of Running? Was it the marathon bombing?
I am a storyteller by profession and inclination. I used to be a playwright. [The marathon bombing is] a great story. It was a narrow escape. I feel like that’s a great story and easy to tell. The hardest thing was to talk about my family in a way that was truthful but not in any way a betrayal of my family’s privacy, especially my children. … To be able to write about that without either writing too much detail or engaging in too much self-pity, to present that in a way that would make sense to the reader without tripping those landmines is something I struggled with an awful lot.
In the end, I took out a lot of material. No matter how righteous my position, I couldn’t do that to my kids, to talk about stuff that privately affected them.
You’re a good dad.
Sometimes it takes a little effort, but eventually you hope to get there.
Tell me what it was like to write about the bombing.
What’s weird about it is the first thing I wrote about it, I wrote six hours later. I had been for some years a columnist for Runner’s World, and they knew I was there, so I got a note saying “Can you write about what you saw today?” I reported from the scene for NPR. I wrote about it then, but it’s something I’ve returned to a number of times since then.
I want to say, and I’ve always made sure to stress this, I am in no way a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing. I was a witness, I saw it, I did not suffer in any way—at least in any way at all comparable to the people who died or the people who were close enough to be traumatized by what they saw.
A little less than a year later, I told that story for the Moth. Telling the story that way, it brought a bunch of scenes together for me in terms of various things I had learned, various things I had been going through. And I realized that would be the first chapter in my book, and then the rest of the book—at least metaphorically—would be about getting back to Boston and running the marathon successfully without a bombing.
How did you get involved with being a guide for runners with impaired vision?
I got a call one day from a guy named Josh Warren, who was the coordinator for something called Team with Vision, the fundraising arm for the Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. And he said, “Hey, you wanna guide for the Boston Marathon this year? What are you doing?” And because my marriage was falling apart, I needed to kind of get out of the house, or nobody was around who wanted me to be around, so I took up the opportunity. I had no idea what was going to happen. I had never done it before, and I didn’t know how to guide a blind runner. Thankfully, I was paired with a runner who was very patient and very forgiving and also a fan of my radio show, so he didn’t mind that I was new at it. As he put it later, “It was a pretty great race except for the bombs. But then everything blew up.”
What’s harder: writing or running?
Oh, writing is much harder. I set a personal record by running a marathon of 03:09:00, and I did it by hard work, discipline, and sticking to the schedule, and getting in the miles and doing what I was required to do and minding the details and keeping my eyes on the prize. And it occurred to me if I had been able to apply the same discipline to my writing career, I’d have the Nobel Prize by now. It’s much easier to go outside and run 26 miles than it is to write a chapter of a book. Trust me, I’ve done both.
What’s the one thing you hope readers take away from the book?
Two things.
[Laughs.] OK.
I hope they take away an urge to go outside. I mean that literally, and I mean it figuratively. I mean yes, you should go outside—you shouldn’t run on a treadmill—you should go outside and run around, fresh air, it’s good for you, yes. But I also mean to get out of their heads. … When I was a kid, I was very bookish. I used my body just as a device to move my head from a book to a screen to a table and back. And that’s way more true now. … We are all staring at screens. And you need to stop. You need to get out, you need to move, and you need to think. You need to get away from everything that is distracting you and drowning out your own thoughts. And I think that running is among many other things a good meditative practice. Part of the reason is that you’re shutting off the input but you’re activating your body in a way that is essential. To quote somebody, we were born to run. We were not born to sit around and stare at glowy things. If you start running, which is the most basic exercise, then you start to recover something that is essential to human nature that has been lost due to the conditions in which we live.
