Rejoice, slick the sweat from your brow, spread your arms and legs out into an X to feel the gentle breeze contrast with the hot sun, eat so many sweet cherries your hands and lips glow red—do this until September or November, until you can’t anymore, until you have to tuck your chin under a scarf. It’s the time for languishing on the closest thing to a chaise longue in your vicinity and gulping orange wine.
I’m trying my best, I’ll meet you there.
Summer Running
Outside, the Brooklyn sidewalks squeal and squirm under the thumb of the heatwave. My training schedule shows a 3-mile run today. Usually, I can picture the final steps of the run: wheezing and stomping petering out, the blurry impressionist periphery whirring into hyperrealism, the creaks and aches screaming their piece now that they’ve stopped moving, the final wave of goosebumps celebrating accomplishment. Today, all I see is crawling on my hands and knees on the pavement, a melting chocolate figurine seeking refrigerated salvation. 95 degrees used to feel like nothing when I was fifteen, swimming—drowning—in the sweat-filled air in the late summer in South Texas. The hottest point of this heatwave was just a Tuesday then. No matter what, how you’re taught to survive never leaves you.
At fifteen, naivety ruled me. I’d conceded to sign up for my second and final year as a cross-country runner. 5 AM wake-up calls: Seize the coolest part of the day (only 85!) and run 5 miles with fellow torture-curious teens. Our coach had a voice deep and hoarse, either from years of dosing bodybuilding juice or years of yelling at kids to push harder, run faster, and know discomfort from pain. Coach surveilled us from the driver’s seat of her white minivan, a modern pumpkin carriage. Her tanned and toned arm hung out of the driver’s side window, doling out chastisements or praises like spells. Our very own Fairy Godmother of Teenage Mental Toughness, just waiting for the race where a beat-up Asics sneaker would lead to a charming college scholarship and happily ever after.
We started the same each time, lined up by pace in the school drop-off zone, the orange overnight lamps illuminating the concrete against the navy sky. The blip of a whistle, and our herd of shaky-legged sheep transformed into a pack of adolescent endurance wolves. Within 10 minutes of running, the pack leaders distinguished themselves from those of us with shin splints and snowflake inner monologues, those of us who couldn’t push harder or run faster without deteriorating our brain cell membranes. No headphones, Coach’s voice above all, only the sounds of soles smacking streets and occasional gossip when Coach was gone. On particularly stratified mornings when the pack leaders ran miles ahead, the pumpkin carriage would stop in front of me, and a grainy boom from the car window promised jagged salvation, “Get in. You’re too slow. I’ll drive you to the next block. Pick up the pace.” Humiliation hives should have broken out all over my body, but when the easy way out was air-conditioned, I folded like paper in water.
And how couldn’t I? I barely slept, I barely ate more than a fourth cup of rice and beans for school lunches, and even after months of running, I barely had a concept of what a mile felt like. Our routes were lower-middle-class and flat. Every morning we re-traced the previous day’s run on a sidewalk so caked in bird shit that the smell mingled with that of pancakes from nearby McDonald’s and we had to pull our shirts over our noses to keep from gagging, and after that we’d run along a drainage ditch behind the Walmart loading docks, and then we’d wind through neighborhods where families slept soundly under thick duvets and I’d think about how nice it would be to run up to the front door and step inside and be home, and then maybe we’d run by a cabbage field overdue for harvest, or maybe if we were training hills that day Coach would route us to a landfill because it was our best chance at an elevation gain, or maybe we’d take the long-run route by the Hinojosa Gas Company billboard, dubbed the HinoGas route for lack of other memorable landmarks. But when the sun rose to meet the moon and indigo melted into pale coral into blistering orange, we lived in the heavens, every joke was the funniest we’d ever heard, and nothing but admiration for our pack leaders remained.
When I crawled into the backseat of the pumpkin carriage, I knew it was a shortcut, a wormhole that would eventually bring me back to the start. Whatever was lost in the morning run would be regained in the second training block: The afternoon run. With a feels-like temperature over 100 and the grass melted cheese, the pack came together again for 3 more miles. By that time, the bird shit mixed with french fries mixed with now open Panda Express, the ditch behind Walmart lay exposed in full sun, and soon we’d be home with exhaustion seeping through our track shorts and racerback tan lines so deep they’d last all school year.
I was never going to meet my Scholarship Charming, and in truth, I hated running. It would be many years before I learned to push harder, run faster, and know discomfort from pain. No, 95 degrees in Brooklyn should feel like nothing. 3 miles should feel like nothing. Still, I fold into the couch in my air-conditioned apartment, seeking salvation in the ways I know how.
I’ll be in France for the next few weeks. I hope to return with some travel writing for y’all and another Crit in July. In the meantime, if you see me writing something unintelligible in Notes, it’s the wine and good company.
Loved this entire Spicy Tostada! The running days here at home were hilarious and I sure needed a good laugh. So funny since we know all of the places you are running. Pumpkin carriage - too funny. Have fun in France. Will talk to you when you get back. Love you both.
texas heat vivid in our brains 🥵