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

barrel made from burnished steel. He told me to kill any animal I wounded, to skin and gut it, to always eat whatever I brought home. I already knew how to catch a walleye and gut it and clean it.
    I was a great blueberry picker, too. It was a rite of passage in my family that when you turned six, you got to go blueberry and cherry picking with Grandma Jurek. My older cousins had told me stories about the great adventure and I couldn’t wait. My cousins had forgotten to mention the clouds of mosquitoes, or stinky bogs, or the beating sun, or the ladder, which I fell off. I cried and said I wanted to go home, but that didn’t happen. Grandma Jurek had raised my dad. When you went cherry picking with her, you were picking for hours. And when you went fishing with Grandpa Jurek, if you got bored, too bad, you were gonna stay and fish. I learned patience while doing the tedious tasks, but more important, I learned to find joy in repetitive and physically demanding work.
    I didn’t always feel happy or patient, of course. I was a kid. But those were the times I kept going. Why?
    Sometimes you just do things!
    My dad was working two jobs then—during the day as a pipefitter and during the night in maintenance at the local hospital. I knew that the coupons Mom was using when I went with her to the grocery store were really food stamps, that we were getting government cheese, and that Dad was having trouble making ends meet. When our television broke, we didn’t replace it for a year. We had two cars, but one was usually not working at all, and sometimes both. I knew that Mom was tired more and more and our garden next to the house was getting smaller while the list of chores my dad put on the fridge for us—a piece of paper with grids and the names and duties for me, my brother, and my sister—was getting bigger and bigger. I knew that none of my friends had to weed the garden and cut grass when it was 90 degrees and humid or haul and stack wood for 2 hours before they could play. My mom stopped pitching to me behind the house. I learned not to ask her.
    The worse my mom got, the more I had to help. The more I helped, the more I wondered why things were the way they were. Why was my mom sick? When would she get better? Why couldn’t my dad be less grumpy? Why did the school nurse always single me out for a second look at our regular head lice inspections? Was it because we lived in the country? Or because she thought we were poor?
    Things got much worse the summer after third grade. It was a hot, clear Minnesota day. My dad had gotten off his shift, and he and my mom were coming to see me play baseball. I was in left field, and I had just caught a fly ball. I flung the ball toward the infield, and that’s when I saw the Oldsmobile station wagon pull up and my father get out. The passenger door opened and my mother got out too, but something was wrong. The door was opening in slow motion. Then I saw her stumble and my father rush around the car to help her. He had to help her walk the 30 yards to the bleachers, and I watched each slow step. I missed two batters, and when the inning was over, I was still in left field, watching.
    The chore list got bigger. We knew Mom was sick, and she took more and more naps. One day when I was in sixth grade my dad told us Mom was seeing some specialists. Maybe he said “multiple sclerosis,” but if he did, they were just words. It didn’t change who my mom was or what was happening to her. If I thought about it at all, it was along the lines of “Multiple what?” She would stay in Minneapolis for treatment from time to time. Dad said there was always hope.
    One day, a physical therapist came to help Mom. It was an acknowledgment that her condition wasn’t going to go away or be cured. She didn’t see specialists after that.
    I was cooking meatloaf and potatoes by then and chopping wood before I stacked it. I made lunches for my brother and sister and helped Mom get around the house.