I LOVE TO RUN IN THE HEAT. Long, slow distances are good for the cold months, but come July and August, I want to sprint. I head to a local park. It’s the off-season, so the baseball and soccer fields are empty. I run a slow mile down a wooded trail to warm up and then stop at the treeline, which puts me at the bottom of a long, steep grassy hill. I can’t see anything past that hill, other than the sky and the sun. It feels enormous. Impossible.
If you run the same hill regularly enough, you get a sense of how to pace yourself, how to read the incline, how to pump your knees and arms and to save some breath for the end. But the exhaustion always comes. When I reach the top of the hill, it sometimes feels like I’m about to collapse. My mind entertains impossibilities: Maybe my flesh will fall from my bones. Perhaps I’ll spontaneously combust. I could vanish.
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