Date: Sunday, 10/5/69

Alex is the best running partner. In a way he is slow. I don’t mean that he can’t move quickly but that when he runs, he isn’t working out so many things in his head at once that he feels speeded up like so many of us do.

He and I never compete. Though sometimes I want to challenge him. But as I speed up my pace, he tells me to slow it down. No sense getting hurt. For me, this team work is going to be for fun. I haven’t had the heart to tell him yet that I can’t join the team but I decided today to tell him. I didn’t like having that indecision weigh so heavily on me.

I signed up to run with him today and it turned out to be just the two of us. No one else wanted to run in the rain. I never mind running in the rain or the snow. It is always a great challenge and it makes me aware of things I never would know if I didn’t run.

Alex has also become this wonderful resource. Running with him can be like a way to map what is happening in my mind by popping up a word between us as we follow the paths and see where it leads.

Another cool thing about Alex is his sensitivity to women runners. He has coached so many women that he understands better than we do at times how our menstrual cycle affects our performance. He’s never embarrassed to talk about anything that pertains to running. He knows how that strange weight in the center of a woman’s body can alter how we are. He knows that has to be dealt with. No matter how lean we are, we have that womb and our hormones. Our bodies work different from mens. He is very helpful. I never knew how breathing could help me overcome menstrual cramps during a run. With the amount of pain I occasionally have, I have always stopped running. Now I know what stretches will relieve the pressure in my lower back.

I have come to depend on him too to help me with some of my problems because he seems so capable of understanding what I am going through.

First he helped me with the food problems. There is so much food served to us every day that I feared blowing up like a blimp. He taught me how to dish out servings to myself that I needed rather than just eating because it was fun or tasted good.

Then there was the menstrual problem and now it is needing to be able to run with the team without any expectation that I will compete.

I didn’t want to let him know that something bothered me. Though he’s quite intuitive.

“Isn’t sex a funny word?” he asked me before I could pop up the courage to explain to him why I couldn’t be part of the team. We were running uphill, past the faculty housing and then into the woods.

“The way it sounds or what it means?” I asked.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

I had to think through why he began our run with that question. I hadn’t thought of anything other than what I needed to talk to him about so his question threw me off guard. I remained silent.

We ran side by side on the trail. This section is that wide. It made talking much easier.

He said, “I used to think that having sex was what it meant to be in love with someone. If you fucked, that was it. That was what anyone wanted and that was enough.”

Wow, I thought to myself, has he been reading my mind?

“I really didn’t know what it meant to be in love until I really fell in love. That changed everything.”

We kept running. Neither of us spoke. I wanted to tell him that I was in love.

“Are you in love?” he asked me.

I told him I was. I told him about Charles.

He shook his head and turned to look at me. “You sure know how to pick ‘em.”

I asked him what he meant by that. I realized that he was about to tell me things about Charles I didn’t want to hear. I wanted to stop the conversation at that point but in the rhythm of our run it was difficult to change the topic as difficult as it was to change our course.

“I don’t want to make you unhappy. You are a great kid and you are so smart. How the hell did you fall for that guy?”

I didn’t expect to hear him say these things. Tears weren’t going to dissuade him from continuing this talk.

“I love him Alex.” That was all I could say.

“Yep. love,” he said. “It’s a killer. Not at all what you think it is going to be. Sure as hell not like in the movies, is it?”

“Even though we want it to be.”

“You got that right.”

I finally got Alex to tell me why he didn’t like Charles. The damn drugs issue came up again. I swore to him that Charles wasn’t like that anymore. Yes, he smoked some pot and dropped some acid from time to time but he was basically clean.

Alex looked at me as if he couldn’t possibly explain to me what he was thinking. He made me feel like I didn’t know what I was talking about. I did know. I practically live with Charles. I would know if he was really that involved in drugs again.

When we ended the run, I walked away without saying another word to him. He waited for me to say something but I refused. On the one hand, I didn’t want to defend Charles and on the other hand I was worried that I might be wrong.