Read Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness for Free Online

training? Why move your arms one way and not another? Why lag back rather than take the lead early? Coach was usually asking the questions and providing the answers, but if one of us asked something he didn’t know, he seemed even happier. Knowing pleased him not nearly as much as wondering. Finally, a place where—and a man who—I could ask why.
    To call our team motley would have been a lavish compliment. Duluth had three school districts. There were the cake eaters on the East Side, and in the middle were the greasers, the city kids, the ones who hung out on street corners and who we were sure carried switchblades and pulled stickups. Then there was us, the poor kids, so far out of town that we weren’t even technically part of the Duluth school district. The tough redneck kids.
    There was Jon Obrecht, whose parents thought sports built character, and the Szybnski brothers, Mark and Matt, who were both around 6-foot, 225. They wore tights and long baggy shorts over them. They looked like a cross between linebackers and ballerinas. And there was lanky me. Before Coach Sorenson, not one of us had ever been on cross-country skis before.
     
    We might not have been as experienced as the other teams, and we definitely weren’t as well equipped, but we were focused. Coach had only three commandments: Be in shape. Work hard. Have fun. They were the perfect fundamentals for a bunch of poor redneck Minnesotans. His motto was, “Pain only hurts.”
    Other teams had bigger squads and nicer uniforms, but we’d show up in our blue jeans and flannel shirts, and by the time I was a junior we’d kick their asses. Or at least some of their asses. The cake eaters at Duluth East were in a different class than everyone else. They wore red Lycra uniforms, and each one of them carried two or three pairs of skis. They were our version of the Evil Empire, or the New York Yankees, or whatever group was rich and powerful and had everything they ever wanted but wanted more. They showed up at meets in privately hired buses. Of course we hated them.
    I was probably the best skier on our team then, and a lot of it was because of all the endurance and fitness base I had built up running. We did interval training on the skis—racing up hills—and Coach Sorenson told me it was the first time anyone younger than him had ever beaten him. He seemed happy about it.
    It wasn’t just our team that was winning. I started collecting individual prizes that season. My parents would come to the meets, and because they took place in the woods, my dad built a sled. He’d put my mom in it and wrap her up in a sleeping bag and put big mittens on her hands, and he’d pull her so she could watch me. That felt good.
    I was ranked fifteenth best cross-country skier in the state, and my dad had found steady work as a boiler operator at the University of Minnesota–Duluth. Even though my mom needed a wheelchair now, and even though I still had to stack wood and do the laundry and cook and clean, I had learned that if sometimes you just do things, well, sometimes things worked out.
    The trouble was, sometimes they didn’t. One day in March, I drove my brother and sister over to our great-grandmother’s to take her out for lunch and shopping. When we got home, my mom was lying on the floor. She had fallen when she was trying to get up from the toilet, and she had broken her hip. We called my dad, and we called for an ambulance. My mom never walked after that. My dad changed, too. First he gave us—especially me—hell. He said he counted on me to take care of things at home when he was working and I had let him down. I tried to explain that Mom had insisted we go to Grandma’s. She said she’d be fine. But he was not having any part of it. He was pissed.
    Soon, a new physical therapist came to help my mom; the help she needed now was much more intensive. His name was Steve Carlin, and twice a week he worked with my mom on some pretty involved exercises. He saw