11
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I stood in the stands inside the field house at the University of Maryland, watching Jannie, my sixteen-year-old, jog and loosen up on the track. I clapped as she came by. She gave me the thumbs-up and smiled, but I could see something troubled in her expression, as well as something that I’d never seen on her face before a race: the fear of the unknown.
That wasn’t good. I supposed it was understandable for the first race back after a long layoff due to an injury, but it wasn’t good. In the past Jannie had always gone to the starting line confident, loose, and ready for battle.
But she’d broken one of the two sesamoid bones in the ball of her right foot during a race, and it had healed excruciatingly slowly. The sesamoids act like the kneecap of the foot, only much smaller; they protect the major tendons and ligaments coming off the big toe. Without the sesamoids, the only way you can run is in burning pain.
Jannie’s coaches and doctors had cautioned her not to run until it healed. That was like asking a cheetah to sit still, and it had depressed and frustrated her no end. But she’d endured and built her strength, and now the X-rays showed the sesamoid had solidly fused.
That was ten weeks ago. Since then her coaches had been taking her workouts up slowly, trying to get her in shape before—
“Alex?”
I turned to my right and saw a fit man in his fifties with graying hair coming at me in silver warm-up pants, a blue hoodie, and white Asics running shoes. A small pair of binoculars and a stopwatch dangled around his neck.
“Nice of you to come, Coach,” I said, shaking Ted McDonald’s hand.
“Couldn’t miss wonder girl’s return,” McDonald said. “How’s she looking?”
“A little stiff and a little scared, frankly,” I said.
The coach’s face fell. “That’s not good.”
“I know,” I said. “But let’s see how it plays out.”
“Only thing we can do. In the end, it’s up to her.”
McDonald was a private coach from Texas who’d started working with Jannie the year before the injury. At the time, he’d been talking about her track-and-field potential in Olympic-level terms. I wondered if that would be the case an hour from now, or ever again.
“This is a good test for her,” McDonald said, as if he could read my mind. “Good surface. Short track. And tight curves. No matter how Jannie runs, her sesamoid will be stressed.”
“How’s that a good thing?”
McDonald had always been straight with me, so I expected candor, and I got it.
“We’ll know quick if we’re beyond this setback,” the coach said. “And if we are, we can turn our attention to something other than the bottom of her foot.”
No wonder Jannie was feeling uncertain, I thought. No wonder she was afraid. This was like a verdict coming down.
I tried not to let my mind wander to my own upcoming trial, and I kept up an easy conversation with McDonald before the four-hundred-meter competitors were called to the line. Jannie stepped up in lane three of the stagger, as ready as she’d ever be for two laps around the indoor track.
She’d gained ten pounds of muscle since she’d last raced, but she was still built like a gazelle, with long springy legs and arms, and still fairly thin compared to the other, older competitors moving to their starting blocks.
McDonald pointed at the young lady in lane five. “That’s Claire Mason, Maryland high-school indoor record holder in this event. She just signed a national letter of intent to run at Stanford.”
“Our girl know that?”
“Nope,” McDonald said. “She’s just down there to work her plan.”
The starter called the runners to their marks. My stomach was doing flip-flops. In her last race, Jannie fell coming out of the blocks, which may have contributed to the fracture.
“Set,” the starter said, his pistol raised in the air.
Jannie coiled.
At the crack, she broke clean and I heaved a sigh of relief at the way she came out attacking, her legs churning, her torso fighting to get upright, and her arms pumping toward the first curve and the first real test of the injured bone.
She blazed through the tight turn with relative ease in no evident pain and accelerated down the backstretch. The staggering of the runners began to evaporate as they came through the second turn, Jannie in fourth.