“I’m a secret runner. Maybe not “secret, secret,” but it’s not something I like to talk about much. Because I think it’s boring. Not just for other people, but for me.
I’ve had my personal successes in running that I’m happy with. And I do think it’s been a life-changing thing for me. But I don’t know how to talk about it in such a way that I find it interesting.
This book had some definite highs. Mostly when Peter Sagal wasn’t talking a ton about times, splits, training, etc. A lifetime of running will definitely equip a person with a good number of running stories. It’s when the book gets very inside baseball (inside RACEball? because running? no?) that it lost me. I understood it, and I could identify with the excitement and the feelings of achievement. But it didn’t make me super interested, to be honest.
What I did appreciate is that Sagal doesn’t come off as a superhero. In two ways. He doesn’t come off as a spectacular runner (although as amateur runners go, he’s doing a damn fine job), and he doesn’t come off as a spectacular person either. He’s going through a divorce during the book’s events, and he has weird mixed feelings. Which I appreciate. When you write a book about yourself, you can tell the world how you felt, or you can tell the world that you felt the way you wish you’d felt. Sagal goes the honesty route, and I think that’s awesome. Lots of books like this present the writer as perfect. They’ve learned from their mistakes, and they’re presenting the polished version of themselves. Sagal presents the work in progress, which is my preference every time. He’s a middle-aged man who doesn’t completely have his shit together and has some things to figure out. Cool. “