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

football or basketball on the middle school team, the thought of getting on the late bus with a whole lot of older, athletic kids scared me. I was shy and I was skinny, and other kids called me “Pee-Wee.” Kids pushed and shoved me and challenged me to fights on the school bus. I think it was because my mom always made me wear a button-down shirt to school. Probably because word got around that I did well in class, too. Studying hard at a northern Minnesota redneck school was not cool. If they had known how much I hunted and fished, it might have been different. But they didn’t, and it wasn’t.
    Once a guy on the bus spit in my face. But I didn’t fight. I knew no matter what happened—whether I won or, much more likely, got beat up—I would get it worse from my dad when I got home.
    I played basketball in our church league when I was in seventh and eighth grades because the travel and uniforms were taken care of (and church league teammates aren’t exactly known for stealing anyone’s lunch money), and even though I knew all about trapping zone defenses and backdoor picks, I wasn’t anything special. What I remember most about those basketball games is how my mom needed help getting to the bleachers. I hated seeing that. It sounds awful to say, but I hated how slow she moved. I felt as if we were a really odd family and I was a really odd kid because of that. At church, we all sat up front. My dad would drop us off and say, “You kids go up and get seats and I’ll bring Mom in.” So everyone in the church got to watch our mom shuffle to the front of the church.
    By the time I was a sophomore, I had good grades, a part-time job at the Dry Dock Bar & Grill (where I had been promoted from dishwasher to short-order cook), and not a lot of friends. I could cook shrimp and French silk pie, chili, burgers, clam chowder, and a kick-ass Philly cheesesteak. Something was burning in me, but I don’t think I’d call it ambition. It was too vague, too shapeless. I still wanted to know why things were happening the way they were. I wanted to know what I would become. Concentration had helped me in every activity of my life, but it didn’t help me find those answers. I wasn’t sure what would.
    It was the skis. My high school formed a boys cross-country ski team when I was a sophomore, and because I liked being outside and figured I wasn’t going to be a star point guard or tailback, I joined. The coach, a tough Norwegian named Glen Sorenson, showed us some fundamentals, took us to meets where we piled up losses, and ordered us to spend the summer before our junior year building our endurance. He said that he didn’t care how we did it as long as we did it. I didn’t own a road bike or inline skates, so I ran.
    If my shift at the Dry Dock started early, I’d run in the afternoon. If I had to help my mom in the afternoon, I’d run at night. I’d go a little farther each day. One day I made it 4 miles out and 4 back, and my dad said, “You ran out to Adolph Store!” He and my mom were both blown away.
    I didn’t run because it always felt good. My muscles ached, I had blisters, and I was having to go to the bathroom on the run—that was the summer I learned about the runner’s trots (cramps, gastrointestinal distress, and the urgent need to move your bowels). That was the summer I got honked at and run off the roads of northern Minnesota. I enjoyed the sense of movement and progress, discovering that I could reach places on my own without anyone driving me. But that’s not why I kept running. I ran because I wanted to ski.
     
    Coach Sorenson told us stories about how he and his brother would go up to the Arctic Circle and fish from canoes for weeks. He also told stories of chasing deer on foot until they (the deer) collapsed from exhaustion. Coach Sorenson was one of the only people I had ever met who asked why as relentlessly as I had and then explained the answers. Why alternate sprints with distance