One of the first messages I saw was from my mom’s sister. Your mother would be so proud of you was all it said. I found my eyes welling up with tears. I was totally alone and exposed in the middle of a Virginia field, and a deep sadness gripped me in a matter of seconds. My emotional defenses must have melted down in the heat. I had begun to notice that same phenomenon in other, less dramatic moments. In the course of two and a half weeks of running, I felt like my physical senses were increasingly finely tuned; I was becoming an intuitive animal. At the same time, my emotional equilibrium was
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