Run or Die Read Free Page B

you have to decide which train to take, and once you are aboard, there is no point in thinking what might have happened if you had caught a different one. You have to make the most of what you find on your route. We can never know what the other trains have to offer, even though we lie awake many a night dreaming that they are better. In truth, perfection only exists within us, in what we think is perfect. Each track leads us to a different place, but it is our choices that lead us to find moments of happiness on any particular track.
    At age 18 we all reach a decision point: You must choose a career, a car, an apartment to live in, a bank account; whether you want to have a family, pets, kitchen furniture, cutlery, and napkins; must decide on a television channel you want to watch, a contract for a cell phone, what to eat for lunch, how to kill time on a Sunday afternoon. Choose your future; choose a life. However, I decided to choose none of that. I chose a different kind of life.
    I lived in a 194-square-foot studio in the Grand Hotel in Font-Romeu. I lived with a friend, although there were usually five or six people sleeping on our floor. It was on the ground floor of a huge building that dated from the beginning of the last century and that looked down on the back of Font-Romeu. The room was on the right of a large hall with winding stairs and marble banisters that showed they had once belonged to the glories of the French bourgeoisie, although it was now dark, uninhabited, and more like an imitation of the hotel in The Shining . The door was made from sturdy wood and was painted a nondescript color, paint that was beginning to flake. The small gilt plate on the door, inscribed with the number 18 and redone with a marker, was the only feature to distinguish my room from the more than 50 doors on that wing of the building.
    Once inside, on the left was a toilet separated off by a sliding door and on the right a bathroom with a sink, mirror, and small bath in which there was only enough space to stand up. The room was square, with a single window that made up the whole northern side and that was often left ajar in anticipation of days when we returned home and the doors were locked and we’d mislaid our keys—something that happened often. A thick blue carpet covered the floor, and the only piece of furniture was a bunk bed fixed to the left wall. On the right were a small freezer (rarely full) and the stove, with three burners and an oven in which we kept twosaucepans, a frying pan, and an iron. Next to the burners you could usually find a box of chocolate cereal, packages of cookies, some boxes of spaghetti and macaroni, a salt cellar, a pot of oregano, a bottle of olive oil, two jars of tomato paste, and a packet of grated cheese. These were the ingredients that made up our diet. In fact, what we usually cooked was a saucepan of pasta with tomato sauce that we reheated whenever we got back from training and felt our strength was fading. It was vital to consume as many calories as possible in order to keep running as long as possible.
    Facing the bunk beds, on a chair, was a small television set that always carried the same DVD, The Technique of Champions , featuring footage and technical sequences of the greatest ski mountaineers of the moment. Before we went out to train, a video session motivated us to give 200 percent and try to imitate the turns of Stéphane Brosse or the audacious skiing of Guido Giacomelli.
    Our clothes were piled on the floor, lined up in two rows. At the back, pants, T-shirts, and sweaters for normal wear, and in front our training gear, skiing overalls, thermal shirts, pants, leggings, gloves, caps. Next to our clothes were our tool kit, the iron, wax for the skis, scissors, cutters, bits from all kinds of televisions, and cord and string, with which we built and destroyed, made and unmade all the equipment we had. The rest of the room was taken up by what we called “our first