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I can’t be her. Not at all. Not one bit. Out of nowhere I think of my mother. Fat at a hundred. Me too. ” I remember looking at her when he says it. Summer and the birds that stop singing, smothered by cotton and everything else I can’t hear. It’s hot, and it seems like the air conditioner never runs for thrift, so we don’t wear a whole lot of clothes. I look at her, draw myself up, curl my lip. My father is right. I look and think, you’re the most disgusting thing I can imagine when she is sitting down, warm flesh puffing under a halter top she has made herself.

Muscular fatigue, cramping, and depletion, though, no matter how drastic, are just part of the game. Proper training and adjustments in the diet can help alleviate these flaws in our makeup, but can the same be said of regurgitation? To correct my problems with muscular exhaustion, I went into my next marathon after a full program of carbohydrate depletion and loading. I felt confident of having stored plenty of glycogen for the final miles of the race, convinced that I wouldn’t be frustrated by a lack of energy.

After my third cup, the spectators began to chuckle. Embarrassed, I hobbled off toward the finish line. A friend of mine was once in a similar wasted condition in the last few miles of a marathon, and he convinced himself that he was making progress down the road by sighting objects up ahead, then monitoring his progress toward them. At one point he spotted a pedestrian several hundred yards ahead and made that person his immediate goal. Staring down at his feet, he ran for a while, then looked up.