the doctor: “If you take the pills, you’ll feel better.”
Then his coach: “Just try a little harder. No pain, no gain.”
Even his mom: “Just take it one day at a time, and don’t try to do everything at once.”
So he’d taken the pills, and tried harder, but also tried not to do too much. And for a while last week things actually seemed to improve. Although smog had settled over the city so heavily that most of his friends had cut out of school early and headed for the beach, where an offshore wind might bring fresh air in from the ocean, he’d gone to all his classes. After the last bell he’d stripped out of his clothes in the locker room and donned his gym shorts before jogging out to the track to do the four warm-up laps that always preceded the more serious work of the high hurdles.
The event that just might, with a little more work, make him a State Champion on his eighteenth birthday.
One day last week, when he was alone on the field, the pills had at last seemed to kick in. He’d been expecting to lose his wind halfway around the first lap, but even as he rounded the final turn, he felt his body surging with energy, his lungs pumping air easily, his heartbeat barely above normal. On the second and third laps he’d kicked his pace up a notch, but still felt good—really good. So on the fourth lap he’d gone all out, and it was like a few months ago, when he’d still felt great all the time. That day last week, he felt greater than ever: his lungs had been sucking huge volumes of air, and his whole body had responded. Instead of the slow burn of pain he usually felt toward the end of the warm-up mile, his muscles had merely tingled pleasurably, his chest expanding and contracting in an easy rhythm that synched perfectly with his steady heartbeat. His whole body had been functioning in harmony. He’d even taken a couple of extra laps that day, exulting in the strength of his body, euphoric that finally the pills and the exercise were working. He’d set up the hurdles then, spacing them precisely, but setting them a little higher than usual.
He’d soared over them one after the other, clearing the crossbars easily, feeling utterly weightless as his body floated over one barricade after another.
When he’d started back to the locker room two hours after he began, he was barely out of breath, his heart beating easily and his legs feeling as if he’d only been strolling for half an hour instead of running and jumping full-out for two.
The next day it had all crashed in on him.
A quarter of the way around the first lap, he’d felt the familiar constrictions around his lungs, and his heart began pounding as if he were in the last stretch of a 10K run. He kept going, telling himself it was nothing more than a reaction from the day before, when he’d worked far harder than he should have. But by the time he finished the first lap, he knew it wasn’t going to work. Swerving off the hard-packed earth of the track, he flopped down onto the grass, rolling over to stare up into the blue of the sky, squinting against the glare of the afternoon sun. What the hell was wrong? Yesterday he’d felt great! Today he felt like an old man.
He’d refused to give in to the pain in his lungs, the pounding of his heart, the agony in his legs. When his coach had come over to find out if he was all right, he’d tossed it off, claiming he’d just gotten a cramp, then rubbing the muscles of his right calf as if to prove the lie. The coach had bought it—or at least pretended to, which was just as good—and he’d gotten up and gone back to the track.
He made it through the four laps, but by the last one he’d only been able to maintain a pace that was little more than a fast walk.
The coach had told him to try harder or go home.
He’d tried harder, but in the end he’d gone home.
And each day since then it had grown worse.
Each day he’d struggled a little harder against the pain.
The day before yesterday, he’d gone to the doctor for the fourth time since New Year’s, and once again the doctor hadn’t been able to find