What I did work at, harder than I have worked at anything since, was soccer.

I didn’t care about running, and I never trained. This was no gene of theirs, surely, but it also didn’t seem to be hard work.

At twelve, the last year I raced, I ran what was then the sixth-fastest time ever recorded by a twelve-year-old girl in the race’s three decades of results. Three years in a row, I finished first out of some four hundred girls my age, and fifth or sixth out of a similar number of boys. I first ran the ten-kilometre course when I was six, not an unusual age of initiation for locals, and discovered that I was a bizarrely good runner. Every year, the town hosts the BOLDERBoulder, one of the largest road races in the country and a sort of festival day in honor of the local god of exercise. Septuagenarians go skiing before work, high-school delinquents hang out at the climbing gym, and people do not so much hike as trail run. Boulder, Colorado, where I was born and raised, is sometimes called the fittest city in America.

Baby boy dream catcher