The political economist Albert O. Hirschman’s “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” begins with the same premise. Hirschman was interested in the way consumers cope with the decline of institutions—comparing the strategy of “exit” (if your local public school is lousy, you send your child to a private school) with that of “voice” (if your local public school is lousy, you show up at school-board meetings and complain). Classical economists and libertarians, he observes, understand exit but are contemptuous of voice. Politics, by contrast, is overwhelmingly (sometimes to its detriment) focussed on voice, and regards exit as akin to “desertion, defection and treason.” The book is one of the masterpieces of contemporary political thought. But Hirschman, like Cowen, spends little time saying why there’s a gap between how good institutions are and how good they could be. The book, as he writes in the opening chapter,

assumes not only that slack has somehow come into the world and exists in given amounts, but that it is continuously being generated as a result of some sort of entropy characteristic of human, surplus-producing societies. “There’s a slacker born every minute” could be its motto. Firms and other organizations are conceived to be permanently and randomly subject to decline and decay, that is, to a gradual loss of rationality, efficiency, and surplus-producing energy, no matter how well the institutional framework within which they function is designed.

This notion of slack is part of what we take as normal and natural about the world. Of the last generation of great Washington restaurants, Cowen writes, “The Source, Zengo, Sei, Palena, Oyamel, Hook, Equinox and Central Michel Richard . . . all had their moments of glory.” Peaking at the moment, he says, are Little Serow, Rasika West, and Mintwood Place. A dedicated foodie like him, who thrives on the innovation and novelty of the restaurant scene, needs the Source, Zengo, and Sei to stop trying so hard, in order to give Little Serow, Rasika West, and Mintwood Place a chance to shine. Social and economic mobility, in any system, is essentially slack arbitrage: hard work is a successful strategy for those at the bottom because those at the top no longer work so hard. By custom, we disparage the idleness of the idle rich. We should encourage it. It is our best chance of taking their place.

I slacked off after that traumatic race in the county championships. How could I not? The memory of what absolute effort meant loomed over every subsequent performance. In my second year of running, I was in the lead group at the provincial cross-country championships with a mile to go, and faded to forty-fifth—not because I was tired but because I knew precisely what trying to win would take. The next year, in the same championships, I was running third and faded to thirty-fifth, because there was a hill near the end and I remembered how a hill near the end would feel, and I could come up with no reason that I—a healthy and normal teen-ager from a well-adjusted family—should have to go through that kind of pain again. By the end of high school, I was finished as a competitive runner: my fear of the experience grew too overwhelming. Salazar faced the same fear and drew the opposite conclusion.

At Falmouth, Salazar rose, like Lazarus, and decided that the race had been a miracle. “I felt exhilarated, and not merely by the fact that I’d narrowly escaped a brush with death,” he writes, and goes on:

My thrill ran deeper; I had learned something from death. I had learned, through the agency of my lifelong prayer, that I wasn’t afraid of death. I realized that this made me different from the people walking by me in the street. More important—at least to me in the midst of my obsession—it made me different from other runners. I no longer doubted my toughness.

Alberto Salazar’s father, Jose, was a member of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary middle class. He met Fidel Castro when Castro was in law school and he was an engineering student at the University of Havana. Once, when government agents came looking for Castro, Jose hid him in his office in the student-union building. “I don’t care about Castro,” the guard at the building’s entrance reportedly told the government agents. “But Jose Salazar is President of the Engineering Students’ Department, and I cannot let you pass.”

After the revolution, Jose designed dozens of projects for the fledgling regime, and was stunned when his plans for a church were rejected. “There is no room for God in the revolution,” Che Guevara wrote, in response to the plans. Jose appealed to Castro. Castro backed Che. In October of 1960, when Alberto was a toddler, Jose denounced Castro in an open letter and then, as Castro’s agents came to arrest him, escaped to Miami. Shortly thereafter, Jose left for six months to train in the Florida Everglades for the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Salazar describes his father as a man of absolutes: loyalty was paramount, betrayal unforgivable, and the Catholic Church inviolate. He would come to Salazar’s races, when Alberto was a boy, and scream from the sidelines, “A Salazar never quits.”

“14 Minutes” is reminiscent, at times, of Andre Agassi’s brilliant memoir, “Open” (2009), in which he, too, locates the source of his development in a driven and angry immigrant father. But “Open” is a story of rebellion: Agassi wrestles throughout with his discomfort and shame over who he is and where he came from. Salazar, on the contrary, accepts that athletic prowess may have its roots in the psychological extremity of his family life, and dedicates his book to his father. He shares his father’s commitment to Catholicism. He understands that there are heroic possibilities to sanctifying grace. At the midpoint of the Comrades ultramarathon, as his body moved into crisis, Salazar began to recite the mysteries of the Rosary: the Annunciation, the glorification, the sorrow. “Lord, there is no way for me to do this unless you want me to,” he prayed. “It’s in your hands.” At Falmouth, as he lay near death in a bath of ice water, his father stood over him. “He had found two wooden sticks, tongue depressors,” Salazar writes. “He crossed the sticks over me in the shape of a crucifix. ‘Concentrate on this, Alberto,’ my father said. ‘Just focus on this, and you’ll be okay.’ ”

I went to see Salazar this summer, in Utah, where he was leading the group of Nike Team runners he coaches through several weeks of high-altitude training. He is slightly stooped, with close-cropped hair, an unlined face, and a gracious and gentle manner. He had visited his father a few weeks earlier. They had argued, as they often did. Salazar had gone to his niece’s and his nephew’s weddings, and his father reprimanded him, because neither married within the Church. “In the end, he didn’t let me stay at his house,” Salazar said, with a mixture of resignation and affection. “I just went and visited my sister.”

Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, he said, he ran an average of a hundred and five miles a week—through snowstorms and heat waves, illnesses and injuries. In those seven years, he missed just eleven days of running. He was frank about the toll it took. “I pushed,” he said. “I never thought you could ruin your career by doing this. I remember thinking, Well, I’ve been doing this for years. Now I have a world record, so I’m just going to keep going. In hindsight, it was foolishness.” Élite distance runners typically maintain their form into their early thirties. Salazar was all but finished by his mid-twenties. He struggled with asthma. His body broke down.

Salazar could have had a longer career had he pushed himself less. But what kind of career would that have been? It was obviously a question that he had thought about a lot in the intervening years. A moderate Salazar never would have come so close to death at Falmouth. But it was the miracle of Falmouth that freed Salazar to run with such abandon. (“I no longer doubted my toughness.”) A moderate Salazar might have run happily and successfully into his thirties. But a moderate Salazar might never have won the New York City Marathon three times. “The pain of running is like the pain of drowning,” he went on. “A kind of weariness sets in and you lose the will to fight. What I could do is simply push myself through that exhaustion.”

The “could” in that sentence, though, is not quite right. Salazar should have said that he had to push himself through that exhaustion. He had no other option. That’s also what he would have told me on that day, long ago, when I lay in agony on the ground. He would have said that the pain was necessary. There was no other way for someone like me to beat Lloyd Schmidt. We pretend that meritocracies—our favored word for modern competitions—are contests of equals. They aren’t. Some people can stay close only by making painful choices, and, as the standards of competition rise, those choices grow more painful still. There was a candle on the table where Salazar was sitting, and he held his hand over the flame for a moment. “I feel that as much as anyone else,” he said.

Salazar now coaches some of America’s top distance runners, and he had spent that day in Utah working with Matt Centrowitz, who, at the age of twenty-one, astonished the track world last year by finishing third in the fifteen hundred metres in the world championships. Centrowitz was recovering from a minor knee injury. It hurt only when he ran slowly, so he was doing alternating repetitions of two-hundred-metre and one-hundred-metre sprints. Centrowitz is sleek and olive-skinned, and as playful and uninhibited as a teen-ager. When he ran, his face was utterly composed, his back straight, his hips forward, his upper body so relaxed that it looked as if he would fall over if you gave him a push. As he ran by, he barely made any noise: if you closed your eyes, all you would hear was the light, rhythmic tapping of the balls of his feet.