The Front Street house, where I lived with my grandmother and the grammarian emeritus—Principal Punctuation Mark, as I thought of our silent family lunatic—was in easy walking distance of the academy athletic fields and the school gym. Best of all was the Thompson Cage. A 1929 brick edifice with skylights, the cage contained two indoor tracks. On the dirt floor of the cage was a running track; above it, a sloped wooden track circumscribed the dirt track below. I liked to run, but I loved the old cage.

Did I like running because my mother loathed it? Probably, in the beginning. When I began to run, I’m sure this was part of the same perverse psychology that persuaded me to dislike skiing. But the more I ran, the more I liked the aloneness of it. My mom didn’t run, but she understood solitary compulsions.

My mother was almost as obsessed with her off-season training for skiing as she was with skiing; she took those exercises very seriously. She did lunges and squats and wall sits, everywhere and all the time. Her lunges never failed to startle the bogus principal emeritus. They were single-leg lunges, which she held for forty-five seconds or a minute (each leg). The squats were deep ones—her butt hit her heels—and the wall sits, which she held for over a minute, were done at ninety-degree angles with her back against a wall and her knees perfectly aligned to her middle toes. “If you can’t see your big toes, you’re doing it wrong,” she would explain to me repeatedly.

The circuit-type training suited my mom’s eternal restlessness. She allowed herself no rest between these exercises. “You don’t want the lactic acid to clear—you want to increase your lactic acid threshold,” she was always saying to Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan, who often tried to do the exercises with her. They couldn’t match her pace.

Yet Little Ray hated to run, and she wouldn’t ride a bike. All winter, when the academy athletic fields were covered with snow, my uncles would stride over the playing fields on their cross-country skis, but my mother was strictly a downhill skier. She would, occasionally, put on her telemark skis and skin up a mountain, but that was because she liked skiing down.

When it wasn’t ski season, my uncles were cyclists. Not Little Ray. “I don’t want to be killed by a car,” my mom said. “I’m too small—bad drivers won’t see me, till they run over me.”

I liked running around the academy playing fields, and my uncles had shown me the cross-country running course through the woods. Most of all, I liked running on the wooden track in the Thompson Cage. I liked the sound of my feet on the boards. For the most part, you’re alone when you run—even when there are other runners around.