Indoor track was in the winter; outdoor was in the spring. Andy did both. By the end of freshman year he held the statewide record for the 1600 meters, for Catholic and secular schools, and was named to his first all-regional team. He kept his paper route in the mornings, eventually applying for a longer route that paid better. He started a lifelong habit of meticulously recording his workouts—every lunge, every squat, every turn around the track. After school, he would go to the Central Library at Nineteenth and Vine, check out every book about running that he could find, and read and reread them until he could recite passages from memory. He learned about Roger Bannister, who’d done what scientists said was impossible and run a mile in less than four minutes, and Jim Ryun, who in 1964 became the first schoolboy to duplicate that feat; about Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, who’d gone undefeated for 121 races. He read about Bill Rodgers, who won four Boston Marathons, and Frank Shorter, whose 1972 gold in the Olympic marathon had started the running boom in the United States, and Alberto Salazar, who’d run so hard as a twenty-year-old in the Falmouth Road Race that his body’s temperature soared to 107 degrees, and a priest was called to the finish line to read him his last rites. Salazar was his favorite, Salazar and Steve Prefontaine, a front-runner, like Andy, who’d been a schoolboy star and once held the American record in seven different distance track events, from the 2000 meters to the 10,000 meters, and never lost a collegiate race in his distances.
By the time he was sixteen Andy had set three goals for himself: He would go to the University of Oregon, like Steve Prefontaine. He would run in the Olympics. He would make money, enough for anything he and his mother ever wanted, so that they’d never have to worry again.
Rachel
1993
This is going to be amazing,” I said to my best friend, Marissa Feldman. I capped my bubblegum-flavored Bonne Bell Lip Smacker, put it back in my Bermuda bag, and snapped the wooden handles shut. We were riding in a tricked-out bus that was taking us and twenty other members of Beth Am synagogue’s youth group to Atlanta for the first week of our summer vacation, where we’d sleep in dorms, eat in a dining hall, and build houses in a low-income neighborhood for an organization called Home Free.
This was the first time my parents had let me leave home for longer than a single night’s sleepover, and it had taken months of pleading, plus a phone call from Rabbi Silver and a special check-in with my cardiologist.
“Good to go,” said Dr. Karen, whose hair had started to show strands of silver in the years she’d been treating me. My parents and I were sitting in her office, and Dr. Karen was behind her antique desk, piled high with charts, and her binoculars and birding journal. Most doctors play golf, she’d told me once. I collect birds. Much less stressful.
“She’ll need to be careful,” she’d told my parents, who’d sat side by side, holding hands. “As you know, this is a chronic condition, and she’ll be managing it all her life, just like diabetes. But the surgeries worked as well as we hoped they would. For all intents and purposes, she’s got a normal heart now.” She leaned forward, looking at them with a smile. “Let her be a normal teenager,” she said. “I know that’s not easy for any parents to do, but try to let her spread her wings.”
Of course, me spreading my wings was the last thing my mother wanted, but I’d cajoled and bullied and finally threatened to stow away on the bus if they didn’t sign the permission slip, and now here I was, watching the scenery through the window get greener as we headed east, up through Georgia.
I adjusted the angle of the reclining seat and touched my hair, making sure my hairband was still in place and that the face-framing waves were still framing my face, not curling up in revolt. After the disaster of my bat mitzvah, I’d been convinced that unless I did some serious damage control, my social life was over and my friends would abandon me. I’d spent the whole party, and the whole rest of the month, not exactly saying that my mother was crazy, but strongly hinting that she was prone to exaggeration; that I really hadn’t been that sick, and now, of course, I was completely fine. “She just feels bad that she gave up her job, I think,” I’d said, and Marissa and Kelsey and Kara and Britt had nodded, maybe thinking of their own mothers. Marissa’s mom was a lawyer who was never home. Kelsey’s mom was an art teacher who did that job only because she hadn’t found a gallery to sell the wire sculptures she made in the spare bedroom she called her studio, and Britt’s mom, like mine, had once worked but was now home full-time, overmanaging her children’s lives.