If a book is titled “The Incomplete Book of Running”, you know there is more to the author than just the book. Peter Sagal, the author and an avid runner, is also host of a popular show on the radio.
Sagal says, “I remember once. I think it was after my second or third marathon… I came home, as if coming back from the war, limping and miserable. And my then-wife said to me, why do you do this when it hurts so much? And I said, I think that’s kind of the point. And certainly there was a time when, like a lot of people, I thought that suffering was the point because our lives are pretty comfortable compared to, well, to any other time in human history. We don’t even have to walk anyplace if we don’t want to.
So I think that for a lot of people, to actually do something difficult, to physically suffer is in a weird way to feel alive, to rise to some challenge that you might feel is missing. But I have actually I think grown away from that perspective that suffering is the point.
Running long distances is not an opportunity to see how much you can suffer but to see how much you can prepare, to see how much you can apply discipline and practice and mindset. I've come to think of it as a much more meditative endeavour with the rewards of meditation, of mindfulness, of being in the moment you're in rather than gritting your teeth and seeing how long you can stand it.”
Sagal therefore does not listen to music or podcasts while running,” …it's also part of the whole mindfulness thing. A lot of people say, they can run, but only do it on a treadmill while watching movies 'cause it's so boring. And nobody else talks about any other kind of activity as if this is something I love to do, but it's so terrible I can't think about the fact that I'm doing it; I have to distract myself…I honestly believe that to the extent that we can, we should be mindful of what we're doing, including something that seems mindless like running.”
Why run then? Sagal answers, “Time and age are not walls but fences, and fences can be jumped. I started seriously running at age 40, which is when according to all the studies your athletic performance begins to decline no matter what else you do. And it became very important to me to see if in fact I could at least delay that. And I did it. And it remains inspirational to me. But now that I'm some years older, I know that kind of time is behind me. So my emphasis these days is different. I'm not running as fast as I used to or as long as I used to, but I'm still doing it almost every day.
In the future, those reasons will have more to do with getting out of my head, where I spend way too much time, and getting outside, where I don't spend enough time, and trying to unplug maybe…
