Life at These Speeds by Jeremy Jackson

Author:Jeremy Jackson [Jackson, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2003-07-01T05:00:00+00:00

seventeen

But my feet fell heavily. My feet were stones. My bones ached dully, as if the winter’s ice remained within them. I became overly aware of that flashing moment, mid-stride, when neither of my feet were touching the ground, when I was indeed detached from earth, airborne. I became aware of this moment because it now seemed so brief, so ill-fated and cruel. It was the moment before impact, the moment before I fell. It was false flight. It was folly—to defy gravity, defy the inevitable.

As I sat by myself at track meets, I chewed on my hangnails. The muscles around my eyes spasmed, ached. And for the first time ever I fell prey regularly to the awful curse known as runner’s trots.

After a race on a cold night, Gregory came at me with a large towel to drape about my shoulders. I met his kind eyes and decided to tell him of the iron weight of my legs, the jackhammer force of my footfalls, the flesh-gnawing worm in my gut, the slivers of steel that impaled my eyes. I would tell him all this. I would tell him that my speed was caused by fear. The fear had caught my body.

He pulled the towel around me and said the thing he always said after I won a race, “You did this for you? Did you win this for you, Kevin?”

That was the thing: I was still winning each race. I set a state 1600-meter record at our first outdoor meet of the year. I anchored the new 3200-meter relay team of Bobolink Crustacean, Young Stan, and Ezekiel Bly—a team which won no race by less than fifteen seconds in March and by mid-April had closed in on one of the oldest records in the state. I appeared lighter than ever on the track. Andanda, in a small newspaper piece about the team’s victory at the pivotal early-season Grace Invitational, wrote this: “If Kevin’s increased speed training, transfer to Zame Smith, and civic mascot duties have impacted his racing in any way, they have sharpened it, taught him to focus more precisely, made him an even smoother runner than before. His legs turn over like a sprinter’s; he no longer cocks his chin slightly to the left as he races; he glides like a puck on ice. As I heard one PAC 10 college scout say last week while Kevin accelerated down the final meters of the 800: ‘I would marry that stride.’”

So instead of telling Gregory about my pains or even implying their existence, I pointed to my race time on the digital scoreboard and said, “Evidence of well-being.”

How could I complain when my races continued to improve?

* * *

In the winter I had run in snowstorms and on afternoons when the temperature never topped five degrees. In the spring I ran through storms, through hail, through ninety-degree days. I won races, broke records, let myself go further into a territory that promised more speed, and yet I had

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