Key Word: Almost

Being a big fan of NPR in general and the news quiz show Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! in particular, I was delighted to learn that host Peter Sagal had written The Incomplete Book of Running. The only thing that sounded remotely negative about it was . . . um . . . the fact that I don't run.

In fact, I have a rule about that. It goes like this: I don't run.

Perhaps you remember the last time I tried running and the highly unsatisfactory results. I've been babying my knees ever since.

So why read a book on running? Peter Sagal is uniformly witty and good-humored on the radio show, riding herd on a sometimes rambunctious bunch of panelists while they skewer news of all sorts from high politics to lowly but unusual crimes and general weirdness. He geeks out while talking to William Shatner. He deftly handles the most incredible interview and quiz ever with Animal Planet veterinarian and former Rolling Stones bouncer Kevin Fitzgerald. He referees a classic segment featuring Microsoft's Clippy. And he clearly demonstrated his stellar hosting talents when then-Senator Barack Obama guested on the show. 

I like Sagal, so I figured I'd like the book. Although his subject is running, Sagal includes enough personal details that the effect is more memoir than training manual. We learn about his reasons for running, his various accomplishments (14 marathons!), his struggles to be a good father and husband, and beyond that, his approach to seeking the good life, with running as a mainstay of the search. I thoroughly enjoyed every page.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much, it almost made me want to try running again.   

Excerpt:

. . . and then I was there, through the finish line, my watch reading 3:09. I had done it, definitively, smashing my PR of five years earlier by more than eleven minutes. I felt flush with achievement . . . .

I had accomplished something that Dr. Fair's statistics had predicted would be highly unlikely, if not impossible. But I did not feel as if I had pulled off some kind of miracle on asphalt. I felt -- I knew --that I had put in four long, difficult, painful, rewarding, exciting, revelatory months, my finest as a runner, transforming the impossible, mile by mile, into the possible. I had not reversed time, or gotten any younger. But I had shown, at least to myself, that time and age are not walls but fences, and fences can be jumped.

Note: I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.