On April 19, 2020 Neil Martin ran a marathon. It was the weekend the Boston Marathon was supposed to have taken place and attempting the 26.2-mile distance that day felt like the right thing to do in a world that had gone wrong.

The first time I had my breasts removed was hard. The second time less so.

Every runner is a clock in motion, marking the miles in minutes and seconds. And elite marathoners are a special kind of timepiece. They're the Swiss watches of the running world: exquisitely accurate metronomes who have spent years calibrating their footfalls and heartbeats to the steady tick of a clock.

If you were born and raised in Ethiopia, you would know the ring of a track race’s bell lap the way an American child recognizes the crack of a baseball hitting a wooden bat. It’s a sound full of possibility.

When your country has won 54 Olympic distance running medals and someone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, oftentimes the answer isn’t much of a surprise.

If you’re an athlete or a sports fan, Boston is your town. I mean, c’mon, name another city in which six college-age men would brave a brisk April morning half-naked so they could paint in large red letters on their chests J-O-A-N-I-E, a tribute to the most iconic figure in all of US women’s distance running (and beyond, I would argue). And if you don’t know of whom I’m writing, I suggest you stop and take a moment to brush up on your sporting history. You can start by Googling “arthroscopic knee surgery,” “1984 Olympic Trials winner,” “gold medalist” and “2:21 marathon.”

"Why can't she stand up, Mama? She needs to stand up!"

In his hands my six-year old son holds a shrunken version of my childhood idol: Wonder Woman. He's trying to get her to stand on her own two iconic winged feet. But it's an ergonomic impossibility: her legs are too skinny, her posterior and bust too ample, her plastic boots misshapen. She is neither sturdy nor balanced. Definitely not powerful. Less Linda Carter. More Barbie at a Fourth of July picnic. 

Once upon a time there was a door.

Once upon a time there was an unassuming metal door.

Tucked away as it was in the underside of Baker Rink, you had to be looking for this door to find it. Rare was the person who stumbled upon it by accident.

I have two stories I want to share with you in an effort to try to explain—with some degree of clarity—what it meant, and what it means, to have played on that 1994 National Championship Team.