Free Blood by Lawrence Hill Page B

secure my father’s everlasting admiration was to become the most successful runner in Canadian history. By the age of thirteen, I was training daily and keeping a detailed logbook of my workouts. By fourteen, I often trained twice daily, getting up to run five or ten kilometres before school and doing intervals on the track in the afternoon or evening. I undertook my first very long runs by the age of fifteen, twice running the entire thirty-two-mile Miles for Millions — a fundraiser for charities that was massively popular in Toronto in the 1970s. Thousands of Torontonians hit the streets once a year to walk the thirty-two-mile route. I chose to run it. The second time I ran it, I believe I was one of the first participants to finish. But I am not entirely sure how many people finished ahead of me. It was meant to be a walkathon, not a race, and the walkers were spread out along the streets of Toronto, many hours behind me. I arrived at City Hall so early that nobody was there to greet me. Thousands of people who had the good sense to walk the route crossed the finish line over the next twelve hours — long after I had taken the bus home, had a bath, bandaged my blisters, eaten a bowl of ice cream, and gone to bed.
    After Miles for Millions, I continued to dream of Olympic glory. Kipchoge Keino, the Kenyan superstar whose strength was said to derive partly from drinking cow’s blood, had won the gold medal in the 1,500-metre race and the 3,000-metre steeplechase at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. I thought about Keino and renewed my private vow to achieve my goal. I trained through sore shins and blood-filled toenails, and although I was getting faster as I aged, my competitors were progressing much more quickly. At fifteen, I was no closer to winning any significant races than I had been at the age of twelve. When I went for Sunday training runs on hilly country roads in southern Ontario with the other teenagers in my track club, I would soon be left far behind the others to ward off unleashed country dogs alone. What must have been patently obvious to my coach, friends, and parents, but which took time to dawn on me, was that I did not own the body of a person destined to be, or capable of becoming, a great or even a good athlete.
    Finally, when I was sixteen or so, my track coach — David Steen, a Toronto Star reporter who had twice won the gold medal in the shot put at the Commonwealth Games — suggested that I take an “oxygen uptake” test to determine how effectively my blood transferred oxygen to my muscles. It was an unpleasant stress test, carried out on a stationary bicycle at the Fitness Centre in Toronto. While pedalling to exhaustion, I had electrodes taped to my chest and a mask locked over my mouth. By measuring the air that I expelled, the test would reveal how well I processed oxygen. I was a skinny, ultra-fit teenager who was logging about seventy kilometres a week in training runs, but the test did not reveal the athletic profile of a runner.
    In writing this book, I asked Steen about his memory of this test. He said he thought it indicated that I had 75 percent of what would be considered normal cardio­respiratory capacity. I remember words a tad more blunt. I recall him saying, in a playful but concerned way, that the test suggested that I had the lung capacity of a forty-year-old smoker. Our memories coincide on one detail: the results were so pathetic that Steen, whom I loved and admired, encouraged me to give up running and specialize in English literature.
    The suggestion wounded me, although I now know that it blended love with insight. At the time, I understood that I would have to change the way I approached running. I would still train and compete. But I would no longer dream. I discovered that it was an absolute, utter lie to say that any person can accomplish any goal if only they set their mind to it. I had run into the limits of my own blood. It could carry