Peter Sagal, the sponsor of NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! and a popular columnist for Runner’s Globe, stocks “commentary and reflection about running with a deeply felt personal story, this book is winning, intelligent, honest, and impacting. Whether you are a runner or not, it will move you” (Susan Orlean).

Over 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 about The Imperfect Book of Operating own surprise, he kept heading, faster and further, operating fourteen marathons and logging tens of thousands of mls on highways, sidewalks, paths, and trails all around the United States and the world, like the 2013 Boston Marathon, where he crossed the final line moments before the bombings.

In The Incomplete Book of Operating, Sagal reflects around the trails, tracks, and routes he’s traveled, through the humorous absurdity of jogging charity races in his underwear—in St. Louis, in February—or attempting to “silent his colon” on runs around his neighborhood—to the knowledge of operating as a guide to visually impaired runners, as well as the triumphant post-bombing operating of the Boston Marathon in 2014. With laughter and humanity, Sagal also writes about the psychological experience of working, body image, the similarities between endurance sports activities and sadomasochism, the legacy of working as passed on from parent to child, as well as the unusual but incredible bonds produced between strangers and friends. The result is certainly “a brilliant book about running…What Peter runs toward is power, understanding, endurance, acceptance, faith, wish, and charity” (P.J. O’Rourke).