Peter Sagal
Peter Sagal is the host of NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! and author of the new book, The Incomplete Book Of Running. From the transcript of his Q&A with NPR's Ari Shapiro:
SHAPIRO: Your personal record for a marathon was three hours and nine minutes.--Marshal Zeringue
SAGAL: Yes, it was. I'm so glad you brought that up because otherwise I would have had to.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) You did it at age 46.
SAGAL: I did.
SHAPIRO: And you write in the book, I had shown at least to myself that time and age are not walls but fences, and fences can be jumped. That was 2011.
SAGAL: Yes.
SHAPIRO: It's now 2018.
SAGAL: It sure is.
SHAPIRO: Do you still believe that time and age are fences that can be jumped?
SAGAL: What I was trying to do with that race is I had 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 emphases these days are 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.
And I think that in the future, although I will run until somebody or something stops me, I'll be doing it for different reasons. And those reasons will have more to do with...[read on]
