athletes – The News Desk

Boulder, Colorado, where I was born and raised, is sometimes called the fittest city in America. Septuagenarians go skiing before work, high-school delinquents hang out at the climbing gym, and people do not so much hike as trail run. 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. 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. 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. 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...

Even now, a month later, it has the quality of a dream. In the second game of a doubleheader, the pitcher from the day’s first game stands in the batter’s box. He is a right-handed hurler, perhaps the most unhittable pitcher in baseball. And he is a left-handed slugger, the league leader in home runs. He is tall, six feet four, but ideally proportioned—baseball’s Vitruvian Man. He is nearing thirty but seems ageless; his face is as smooth as his swing.In the day’s first game, his outing on the mound had ended early, after an inning and a third—his velocity was down, the shape of his pitches not quite right. He still struck out two and crushed a four-hundred-and-forty-two-foot home run, his forty-fourth of the season. Now, in the fifth inning of the nightcap, he settles into his stance. Th...

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