About the Book
Peter Sagal, the host of NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! and a popular columnist for Runner's World, shares lessons, stories, advice, and warnings gleaned from running the equivalent of once around the earth. At the verge of turning forty, Peter Sagal--brainiac Harvard grad, short bald Jew with a disposition towards heft, and a sedentary star of public radio--started running seriously. And much to his own surprise, he kept going, faster and further, running fourteen marathons and logging tens of thousands of miles on roads, sidewalks, paths, and trails all over the United States and the world, including the 2013 Boston Marathon, where he crossed the finish line moments before the bombings.
In this new book, Sagal reflects on the trails, tracks, and routes he's traveled, from the humorous absurdity of running charity races in his underwear--in St. Louis, in February--or attempting to "quiet his colon" on runs around his neighborhood--to the experience of running as a guide to visually impaired runners, and the triumphant post-bombing running of the Boston Marathon in 2014. With humor and humanity, Sagal also writes about the emotional experience of running, body image, the similarities between endurance sports and sadomasochism, the legacy of running as passed down from parent to child, and the odd but extraordinary bonds created between strangers and friends. The result is a funny, wise, and powerful meditation about running and life that will appeal to readers everywhere.
Review :
Praise for The Incomplete Book of Running "Sagal has created a new genre--the five-minute-mile memoir. Combining commentary and reflection about running with a deeply felt personal story, this book is winning, smart, honest, and affecting. Whether you are a runner or not, it will move you."
--Susan Orlean
"This is a brilliant book about running, and it's brilliant even if you never have--and never want to--move faster than a shuffle. Ostensibly, Peter's subject is the physical activity itself. (Feh, as far as I'm concerned.) In fact the book is a manifesto on the redemption of escape. And, even more so, a meditation on the direction of flight. Whatever you're running from, you're running to something else. What Peter runs toward is strength, understanding, endurance, acceptance, faith, hope, and charity."
--P. J. O'Rourke
"Peter Sagal is the funniest person on radio (quick reminder, I am on television). I enjoy listening to Peter on Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! on the weekend while chopping vegetables for soup. It will be nearly impossible to do that while reading this book, so if someone could bring me some carrots and onions in half-inch dice, that'd be great."
--Stephen Colbert
"Peter Sagal's insightful and open-hearted book about running will make you wish he was your long run buddy. This book not only demonstrates the ways in which running shapes a life, but also how life, in all its beauty and pain, shapes the run. I loved it."
--Lauren Fleshman
"Look, everything Peter Sagal says he knows is written on an index card supplied to him by a member of his staff. If he, himself, wrote any kind of guide to running, it'd be incomplete."
--Tom Hanks
Praise for The Book of Vice: "In this investigation of our human frailty, Peter Sagal combines intellect, sympathy, moral perspective, and common sense to produce--of all things--laughter. [In] the English morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries . . . 'Vice' was the devil's comic sidekick. Peter Sagal is ours." --P.J. O'Rourke
"Sagal . . . charms readers with the same wit, humility, and observational prowess he uses to win over the dipso-, nympho-, and assorted other maniacs he encounters." --Radar
