Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness Read Free Page A

were nuts. I didn’t know it, but I was learning a lot about food and its connection to love. When we cooked together, she told me stories about when she was in college, and said she knew I would go to college, too. When my dad wasn’t around, she would ask me to grab my baseball bat, and she’d take me into the backyard, next to the garden, and she’d pitch underhand to me. She told me she was proud of what a hard worker I was and not to let Dad’s grouchiness bother me. He just worried a lot.
    My father wasn’t the only disciplinarian in the family. When I misbehaved, my mom would spank me—with the same wooden spoon with which we stirred batter. She was the one who limited my television watching to 5 hours a week. If I wanted to watch a football game, she made me choose between the first or second half. I always chose the second half.
    I can’t remember the first time I saw her drop a jar. I must have been about nine. After a while, it was hard to remember when she didn’t drop things. Knives trembled in her once-sure fingers. Sometimes, just standing by the counter, she would wince. If she saw me watching, she’d wink and smile.
    Here’s another memory: When I was six, stacking firewood outside, a car pulled up to our house. I knew it wasn’t a neighbor; we lived on a dead-end road at the edge of a woods, 5 miles from Proctor, Minnesota, which was another 150 miles from Minneapolis. I knew all the cars on our road, who was driving, and which brothers and sisters were probably sitting in the back seat punching one another. This car belonged to a friend from Proctor. His mom had driven him out to play with me. I yelped and ran toward the car, but a stern voice stopped me.
    “You can play when we’re finished stacking wood. From the looks of it, we’ve got two more hours to go.”
    It was Dad, and I knew better than to argue. So I whispered the news to my friend and he told his mom. She gave me a look, then gave my dad a look, and then they drove off. I went back to stacking wood.
    When I was done with chores, on rare occasions my dad would take me for a walk in the woods. Once, when I was seven and my mom was taking a nap—she had been getting tired a lot—he picked up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his thick fingers. He told me about the day that two of the smartest scientists in the world were walking in the woods—maybe woods just like these, right here in Minnesota—and God strolled up, right out of the trees. And God said, “If you guys are so smart, can you make dirt out of thin air, like I can?” I remember my dad smiling when he told me that story, but it was a sad smile. I think he was trying to tell me that no matter how hard a man thought or worked, some things in life would remain unknowable, and we had to accept that.
    By the time I was eight, there were fewer walks in the woods with my dad. I was helping around the house a lot. I was pulling weeds from the big garden we had out back, or picking out rocks, or stacking wood, or helping in the kitchen, or making sure my sister, Angela, who was five, had a snack, or that my brother, Greg, who was three, wasn’t getting into mischief. By the time I was ten, I could cook a pot roast in the oven by myself. Whenever I complained that I didn’t want to pick rocks or stack wood, I just wanted to go play, my dad would growl, “Sometimes you just do things!” After a while, I stopped complaining.
    He tempered his discipline with compassion and a sense of fun. He would challenge me to see how much wood I could haul into our “wood room” in 10 minutes or how many rocks I could pick out of the garden in the same time. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but he was teaching me that competition could turn the most mundane task into a thrill, and that successfully completing a job—no matter how onerous—made me feel unaccountably happy.
    When I was ten my dad bought me a .22-caliber rifle with a polished walnut handle and a