Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness Read Online Free PDF Page A

a few exceptions, notably canned corn, raw carrots, and potatoes.)
    I insisted. Really, I would study up, I could beat this thing. I pleaded for them to give me a chance. Of course they said no.
    The next night after dinner, I saw the big white bag from the pharmacy with my name on it. It was sitting in the bathroom cabinet with all my mom’s pills, and when my dad reached up for the bag and handed it to my mom, I started crying.
    “Scottie,” my mom said, “you have to take these. It’s for your own good.”
    Sometimes you just do things! But why? I kept bawling and then I started screaming. She took the pills out of the bag and looked at me, then sighed and put them back.
    “We’ll try to figure something out, Scottie, but you have to cooperate a little bit.”
    The next week, my dad took me to another specialist. This doctor turned off the lights in his office and told me I should imagine somewhere where I was happy. I thought of the woods in the summer, the great green hush. He told me to close my eyes and to stay where I was—in the woods—and then after a while he turned on the lights and called my dad in.
    “Your son can get his blood pressure down by himself,” the specialist said. “If he can do it again, at his pediatrician’s office, we can wait on the medication.”
    That night my dad told me I didn’t need to be so “wound up.” He told me I should relax more, that I was just a kid, that I couldn’t save the world. My dad, Mr. Sometimes you just do things!, was a complicated guy. He also told me that he had confidence in me, that I’d always been a good worker, and that he knew I could get my blood pressure down when we visited the pediatrician’s office. I wasn’t so sure. He promised that afterward he would buy me my own skis.
    The next afternoon, at my pediatrician’s office, I walked back into the woods, toward the green trees and the dirt and the quiet. Afterward, the doctor told my dad that he should hold on to the medicine but that I didn’t need to start taking it. Not yet. He didn’t say anything about stress or meditation or controlling your body with your mind, but I figured it out. Every week my parents would take out the inflatable blood pressure monitor they had bought and wrap it around my arm, and every week I would close my eyes and imagine trees and quiet. I learned that I could control my blood pressure with my brain. I remember thinking that talent might come in handy some day for something other than avoiding pills and getting to eat what I wanted.
    I knew downhill skis were for rich kids, the kids who went to Duluth East, the ones whose parents were doctors and lawyers and who boarded planes to go on ski vacations. In my school, we called the people from that side of town “cake eaters.” But my dad bought me those skis—used red, white, and blue K2s, used boots, and new poles—and even then I knew what a sacrifice it was.
    That summer, my dad announced one night at dinner that the next week we were all going up to northern Minnesota to stay in a lodge. A lodge! He might as well have said we’d be going to Chicago to have a steak dinner. And not only that, but we would be at a lake and we could swim—in the lake next to the lodge or in the swimming pool—and fish and ride our bikes. There would be pontoon boat rides, too, and we could go by ourselves and paddle boat wherever we wanted on the lake. Angela and Greg and I felt as though we had won the lottery.
    What my dad didn’t tell us is that there would be other families there, and other kids, and professionals who would talk to all the kids while the adults met somewhere else.
    The grownups brought the kids all together and asked us a series of questions. Questions like “How do you feel about your mom having MS?” And “What’s it like at home? How do you feel about your friends and schoolmates visiting?” And “Do you feel different?” I was already reading a lot then—about blood pressure and