The Girl at the YMCA Pool

I was thirteen years old the first time I watched a stranger crawl toward a finish line.

It was one of the early Ironman races, on some sports show I couldn't name now if you paid me - I just remember the screen. A woman named Julie Moss, deep into the marathon at the end of the longest day a body can be asked to do, and then her body simply quit on her. She went down. And instead of staying down, she started to crawl. Hands and knees, toward a line she could see and couldn't quite reach. I had never seen anything like it. Her legs were finished and she went anyway. Whatever it is that lives in the space between the mind and the body - the thing that keeps a person moving after the body has filed its resignation - I watched it happen in real time, and I never forgot it.

The dream that started that day was really about running.

My parents were runners, and Runner's World came to the house every month. I was the kid who read it cover to cover. One issue explained what an Ironman triathlon actually was - 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 on the bike, and then a full marathon, all in one day - and on the cover was a woman. I can still see her. Lean, sunbaked, completely at home in her own body, with her race number written in marker up the side of her arm.

I wanted to be her.

I was a swimmer too, back then - a decent one. I swam until I was thirteen, and the pool was the one place my body always knew exactly what to do without my having to tell it anything. But the swimming was almost a bonus, a thing I happened to have in my pocket. The real pull was the running, and the impossible-sounding race at the end of that magazine.

I'd love to tell you I held onto that dream and carried it carefully through everything that came next. That isn't what happened.

My teenage years got hard. My parents divorced. My mother moved away. I got lost - the ordinary, quiet kind of lost, where you look up a few years later and realize you've stopped pointing yourself at anything. The girl who wanted that race number on her arm didn't keep the dream alive. She set it down somewhere and forgot she'd ever been holding it.

It stayed gone for a long time.

What finally brought it back wasn't the dream itself. It was just running. After my son was born, when we were living in Texas, I started running again - not training for anything, not chasing a finish line, just lacing up because it made the day feel like mine for an hour. Somewhere in there I saw a notice for a local sprint triathlon, and something turned over in me that I couldn't name yet. I didn't sign up. But I noticed that I wanted to.

It took having my daughter and moving back to Maine, before I actually started working toward it. And even then, the Ironman - the real one, the one from the magazine cover - was still fuzzy. I wasn't training for Kona. I wasn't telling a single soul I was going to be an Ironman someday. I was a mother with a full life trying to find out whether I could finish one short, ordinary race.

Training meant getting back in the pool, and I hadn't swum a real lap since I was thirteen. I expected it to feel like starting from scratch. Instead it felt like coming back. Whole afternoons surfaced that I hadn't thought about in thirty years - the smell of the chlorine, the particular quiet you only get underwater, the ten-year-old who counted laps and felt completely at home doing it. My body remembered before I did.

In 2011, I lined up for my first sprint triathlon - a little local event at the YMCA, nothing anyone would ever televise.

I don't remember much about the swim or the bike that day. What I remember is the run. About a half mile from the finish, somewhere in the back half of that last leg, the whole thing came back to me at once - Julie Moss on that grainy screen, the woman on the magazine cover, the kid who counted laps after school and dreamed about a race she could barely picture. And here I was: a grown woman, running toward a finish line, at a YMCA. A different building, a different state, a long way and a long time from the pool where I grew up - and none of it mattered. It was the same girl. On that last half mile, the distance between her and me closed to nothing.

I'm not a spiritual person. I want to be clear about that, because what I felt in that last half mile is about as close as I get. I knew - not thought, knew - that I was exactly where I was supposed to be in my life. It was overwhelming. I crossed that line already somewhere else in my head.

That's the part nobody tells you about a buried dream. You don't always get to decide when it comes back. Sometimes it just waits - quiet, patient, further down than you can see - until you've done the small brave thing in front of you. And then it stands up, in the last half mile, and looks you in the eye.

I left that YMCA knowing two things I hadn't known an hour earlier. The first was that the dream was still mine. The second was that I was going to chase it all the way down - 2.4 miles, 112 on the bike, and a marathon waiting at the end of it.

After thirty years, someday was finally now.

I raced all that summer. And here's the part I didn't tell anyone, because I didn't think it meant anything: I was tripping.

Not often - sporadically, here and there. A toe that caught on nothing. A stumble I'd laugh off. At one race that summer I went down hard on the pavement and banged up my knee, and I crossed the finish line with blood running down my leg. I have the picture. I'm grinning in it. I thought I was just clumsy.

I know now that it was one of the first quiet signs of what was happening in my spine. But I couldn't hear it yet, and I wouldn't be able to for years. Standing at that finish line - bloody, thrilled, finally chasing the thing I'd wanted since I was thirteen - I had no idea what my body was about to ask of me to get to the big one.

That's where this story really starts.

- Angela

Part 2 is coming: the bike, the training, and the crash that's still echoing through my body more than a decade later.