PROFILE

Before the résumé and the repositories, I was a runner. I came up through high-school cross country and settled on the 800, two laps that hurt in a specific way, decided in the last 200 when everyone’s legs are gone. My best is a flat 2:00. Over 400 I ran 51 seconds, fast enough to matter on the 4×400, where I took the leg we needed closed.

None of that was a straight line. In eighth grade I broke my leg, a clean snap of both the tibia and fibula, and spent months off it before I could jog, let alone race. Coming back taught me a patience the track never had to.

The 800 is a strange distance: too long to sprint, too short to think, so you spend the whole thing arguing with the part of you that wants to slow down. You learn to sit on a shoulder, to keep one gear back for the final straight. I got more out of those two minutes than out of most things I did in school.

So it made a certain sense to eventually go the other way and run the LA Marathon. Twenty-six miles asks a different question. It cares less about how much you can hurt and more about how long you can hold a steady pace, and I found my answer around mile twenty. The track was just the start of a longer habit of not sitting still: triathlon training now, the gym most mornings, pickup volleyball, and a climbing wall whenever I can get to one.