The Front Runner Read Free Page A

I wasn't much of a student. But I worked at it, because if I got poor grades, my father scolded me and asked what I was doing with the school taxes he paid so painfully.
    I loved competition, and pitting myself against the other boys. But running was also good for its own sake—the discipline and the joy of motion. And physically, running made me different from boys (especially the fat, pampered ones, whom I despised) who didn't engage in high-stress sports. Very early, I got to thinking of myself, and of all runners, as a separate and superior species of human being.
    In the summers, we always vacationed in the Po-conos. My mother had asthma and said the city air was bad for her, and my father loved to fish. So we had a tiny cabin in a remote area of the mountains. My father would drive up to be with us on weekends. I was alone there all week long with my mother, and missed him very much. So I hunted up any boys I could find in the area, and spent the days roaming with them.
    The summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I met a boy whom I'll call Chris Shel-bourne. His family had just bought a summer cabin nearby. He was blond, with calm, blue eyes, very quiet, lean and sun-browned. It turned out he was a runner. We were delighted to discover this common passion, and we quickly became close friends.
    In fact, my feelings for him became so strong that I wonder now why I didn't understand them correctly. Perhaps it was because I was so poorly educated about these things. My father had told me what he thought I needed to know about girls. But he had never told me such feelings could exist between two males. As far as I knew, there was no name for what I felt. But instinctively I realized that these feelings were something to
    be hidden from everyone, even from Chris, even from myself.
    Chris, possibly, felt the same confusion. He feverishly sought every opportunity to be with me that summer, but he never discussed his feelings.
    An hour passed without Chris was an eternal loss. We fished, hiked, or just lay in the sun and talked about track. We daydreamed out loud to each other about being top college runners, then of going to the Olympic Games.
    Every day we took long runs together through the woods, following the many lonely trails for eight or ten miles. We jumped the streams and ran brushing through the mountain laurel. The laurel was all in bloom shortly after we met, heavy and fragrant with pink and white blossoms. We tore up hills and ran sliding down them, running free like two deer. We dashed through the dappled sunlight under the great trees. We were hyper-oxidated and deliriously happy. The act of running was all tied up in my mind with the feelings I had when he was near me.
    Miles off in the woods, there was a small, lonely, clear lake. We would always strip there and go swimming. I had seen hundreds of boys naked in the locker rooms at school. But when I saw this adored friend of mine naked, my feelings turned to sexual desire. In confusion and distress, trying to be casual, I always smothered this feeling. Chris apparently did the same.
    So we squandered the summer of '52 that way.
    At the end of our last run, as we were nearing the edge of the woods but still out of sight from our cabins, Chris suddenly stopped and said, "I want to say goodbye here."
    He put his arms around me. But panic equaled affection, so we did no more than embrace each other awkwardly with our panting sweaty bodies brushing together. He touched his lips to my cheek, near my mouth, and after a moment's shaky hesitation I did the same to him. We swore that we would write to each other, and that we'd see each other next summer.
    The next day his family closed up their cabin and returned to New Jersey. I ran alone in the woods that
    day. I would have cried bitterly, but my father had taught me that real men don't cry.
    I didn't have the courage or the verbal ability to put my feelings on paper, so I never wrote to Chris. He