We Loved to Run

A Novel

About the Book

A fearless debut novel about a women’s cross country team and how far girls will push themselves to control their bodies, friendships, and futures

“This novel is a wild, brave run through the dark, and the ending might stir you to tears.”—Eric Puchner, New York Times bestselling author of Dream State

We loved running because it was who we were, who we’d been in high school, who we hoped to be in futures we couldn’t yet imagine. Strong and fast. Fast and strong.

At Frost, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the runners on the women’s cross country team have their sights set on the 1992 New England Division Three Championships and will push themselves through every punishing workout and skipped meal to achieve their goal. But Kristin, the team’s star, is hiding a secret about what happened over the summer, and her unpredictable behavior jeopardizes the girls’ chance to win. Team Captain Danielle is convinced she can restore Kristin’s confidence, even if it means burying her own past. As the final meet approaches, Kristin, Danielle, and the rest of the girls must transcend their individual circumstances and run the race as a team.

Told from the perspective of the six fastest team members, We Loved to Run deftly illuminates the intensity of female friendship and desire and the nearly impossible standards young women sometimes set for themselves. With startling honesty and boundless empathy, Stephanie Reents reveals how girls—even those in competition—find ways to love one another and turn feelings of powerlessness into shared strength and self-determination.
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Praise for We Loved to Run

“Reents has written a new kind of campus novel: a funny, inventive, warmhearted portrait of a college cross country team that begins as an insightful exploration of human competitiveness and becomes a moving ode to surviving trauma through female friendship and collective action. This novel is a wild, brave run through the dark, and the ending might stir you to tears.”—Eric Puchner, New York Times bestselling author of Dream State

“Pulled tense with all the beauty, strength, and desperation of youth, We Loved to Run is a stunner of a novel. It’s as gorgeous and ferocious as the sport at its center, covering miles in the lives of the star runners on a college cross-country team. This book is muscles in motion and hearts spilled out. It’s a tribute to what the body can do, what it suffers, and how it survives.”—Julia Phillips, bestselling author of Bear and Disappearing Earth

We Loved to Run is smart, funny, compelling, important, and, best of all maybe, different from other campus novels and other sports novels and other coming-of-age novels, though it is all of those. Stephanie Reents has written the rarest of debuts: one that ensures you’ll read everything else she ever writes. I really, really, really loved this novel.”—Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is

We Loved to Run jumps out of the gates and doesn’t let up, not even for a second—it’s blistering, it’s unputdownable. With razor-sharp wit, compassion, and knowing insight, Reents interrogates identity, sacrifice, friendship, the marriage between pleasure and pain, and the pressure cooker of college sports, of the desire for greatness, of the price we pay for our ambition.”—Marisa Crane, author of A Sharp Endless Need

“A propulsive read . . . The six teammates at the heart of this novel, and the torturous, rapturous experience of racing together, are made vivid through Stephanie Reents’s exquisite prose.”—Leah Hager Cohen, author of Strangers and Cousins

“I was moved and captivated by this elite crew of complicated, intense, altogether real college athletes. You will love We Loved to Run.—Daphne Kalotay, author of The Archivists

“I couldn’t stop reading We Loved to Run. A poet of speed, a chronicler of exhilaration, Stephanie Reents reminds us that why we run, and what we run from, ultimately matter less than what, or whom, we choose to run to.”—Andrew Altschul, author of The Gringa

“A cross-country veteran herself, Reents brings suspense and precision to the running scenes, putting the reader in the center of the action . . . the heroism of women with a common cause, in a world of men who think they know best, makes for a moving narrative.”—Kirkus Reviews
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Excerpt

We Loved to Run

Warm-­Up

We hated a lot of things. A gradual hill in the second mile of a cross country race. Two hard workouts in a row. The little packets of Lorna Doones in our brown-­bag lunches that Assistant Coach picked up from the college cafeteria: like vanilla chalk. Big toenails that were a tad too long. When our coach said, Here’s where you make your move. Inner-­thigh friction. Holes in our socks. Our mothers’ Shouldn’t you take off one day a week?

We hated our coaches. We hated them for encouraging us to have a love-­hate relationship with our bodies, for telling us on some days that we were strong, and on others that we were fat. Only they didn’t say it that way. They said, You’ve lost your lean, which meant a gain of a pound or two, a half-­percentage point of body fat. As punishment, we had to be the rabbit. We had to run as though something dangerous were chasing us. Though we hated being told what to do, we loved it, too, our emotions sometimes not much more evolved than those of sulky thirteen-year-­old girls who not-­so-­secretly longed to be loved the best in the whole wide world, who couldn’t take one bit of criticism without totally losing it.

There were six of us. Two seniors: Dan­ielle and Harriet. Three juniors: Liv, Chloe, and Kristin. And Patricia, an exceptionally talented sophomore who wanted to transfer. You’d find more runners in the 1992 Stanzas (the stupid name of our yearbook). But we were the core, the top six, not that you could tell from studying the photo. We looked just like everyone else—­healthy and young—­but we were the fast ones, even if this was invisible.

We hated our coaches but we also loved them, especially Coach, with his British accent by way of Uganda. He wore a heavy gold watch and made tracksuits look elegant. Who knows how he ended up at Frost, a tiny college in a tiny corner of New England. We loved Coach for loading us on a van and ferrying us to the running shop in a neighboring town to pick out shoes. We never knew when it was going to happen, which made it even better. Kristin and Patricia were always giddy with excitement because when they’d decided to come to Frost, they both thought they’d sacrificed the freebies that the Div 1 coaches had dangled in front of them. But it turned out that Coach had a slush fund from a generous alum, and he could buy us new shoes once a season. He played songs by a German band, Trio, whose most famous song “Da Da Da” was unknown to us but quickly became our favorite, the anthem of our parties: “I don’t know you, you don’t know me.”

We hated running, and we loved it. We spent so much time trying not to think about our bodies that we were always thinking about them. Thinking about how they were not hungry or not injured or not fatter or weaker than the body of some other girl. Running was the glue that kept us together, but it was also a truth serum, drawing out feelings we’d rather not have. Dan­ielle secretly envied Kristin for being so effortlessly beautiful: Princess Di in denim. You weren’t supposed to be fast with boobs as big as hers. Kristin was in awe of Harriet’s self-­control, the fact she’d never eaten a cafeteria dessert, not once in three years. Liv wished she could speak her mind as effortlessly as Dan­ielle did. Harriet wanted to trade places with Patricia, not forever, but maybe for a couple of months, just to see what it was like to be from rural New Mexico. Patricia didn’t want anything the girls on her team had, except for maybe Kristin’s black cowboy boots and Harriet’s nose ring, but her parents would lose it if she came home with a pierced nose. She was mostly happy with the way she was, even though a lot of things at Frost told her she shouldn’t be.

Chloe and Kristin were always hammering on easy days. Patricia took the intervals out too fast. The pack could have let her go but never did. We took the bait. There was no shame in running as hard as you could and then puking. There was no shame in grunting, spitting, farting, leaving skids of snot along your arms. Dan­ielle cried after New England Div 3 Championships, a year earlier, but there was no shame in that, or at least not too much. We’d run our hardest, but it wasn’t enough to carry us to Nationals. Emotions did not behave predictably under physical duress. We loved each other, too, the love as dark and sticky and intense as blackstrap molasses. We’d stand at bathroom doors, sentries, turn on the taps full-­tilt, sweep the hair off each other’s foreheads, stroke each other’s backs while a stomach clenched and released. Dan­ielle regularly threw up after she drank too much, sometimes preemptively. It was an effective way to head off a hangover. We shared tampons, the treats our moms sent us, clean socks, joy and shame and deodorant. We were friends like that.

We loved running because we loved repetition (breathe, stride, breathe, stride, breathe, stride), getting lost in thought, the endorphins that flooded our brains after several miles and swept away obsession and weariness, all that seemed dire and tragic in our college lives, and narrowed our focus to covering each kilometer of the 5K cross country race as swiftly as possible. We loved it because it was who we were, who we’d been in high school, who we hoped to be in futures we couldn’t yet imagine. Strong and fast. Fast and strong.

We loved winning, but we didn’t always love what was required: cross training, pool workouts, the flotation belts that we wore while running in place in the deep end, serious stretching, form drills, walking backward uphill, cool-­downs that were more than five minutes and warm-­ups that were more than ten. Chloe really hated lifting. Harriet did, too, though she put on a good show by doing high reps with almost no resistance. She wanted to like lifting because Professor Witt, an old-­school feminist who taught WAGs, swore by weight training. Women could be just as strong as men, Witt claimed; they just needed to get over the social stigma of muscles. Whatever, we thought. Witt had never run a mile in her life.

We also hated rest days and easy laps between 400-­meter repeats, not because we hated resting, but because it was never quite long enough to recover. Anticipating a workout was always worse than finishing one. Fartleks—­which the men pronounced fartlicks—­could make us puke. (We growled when the men urged, “Go tits out, ladies!”) We hated that word ladies more than we hated the word tits. Tits could be thrilling in the right context. We hated running on rainy days until the moment we were drenched, sucking water from the end of a hank of hair. On hot days, sunscreen stung our eyes, but we could skinny-­dip in Puffer’s Pond, and we did, especially if the men were doing a separate workout, and we expected an ambush. We liked the men’s team, though screwing them could feel like making out with your brother. It could be nicer than that, too. It depended on how you felt about someone else’s bruised toenails, bony hips, rock-­hard thighs.

We loved to run, and we hated it. To run, you had to be willing to accompany yourself on long lonely journeys. You might know the time (90 minutes, two hours, 45) but not the route. Maybe you knew the route—­through a shady residential neighborhood, through the park with a hill that looked like a camel’s hump, onto the trail just beyond the tennis courts, and then—­up, up, up—­the foothills opening in front of you like another world: the old military cemetery, the firing range, the corral where several weary horses shifted from hoof to hoof and ambled to the fence wondering whether you’d palm them an apple. Even if you knew where you were going and how long it usually took, you could never anticipate what you would see along the way. Back home in New Mexico, Patricia saw rattlesnakes in late May and early June when they were coming out of hibernation. They draped themselves across trails, seeking a sunny spot to warm their cold hearts, and Patricia hurdled right over them. Chloe saw a fox at the northern edge of Central Park that might have been just a skinny dog. Liv got lost in cornfields in southern Illinois, where her dad’s family was from. Dan­ielle was chased and bitten by bats, not once, but twice over the course of two weeks just before sophomore year. She was running along the soupy Seekonk River in Providence. It was not a joking matter, even though there was something inherently absurd about being bitten twice in a three-­week stretch and having to get all those rabies shots. Was she cursed? If you mentioned it, you were courting Dan­ielle’s wrath.

We sank to our ankles in mud, we slipped in snow. We got heat stroke in the summer, mild frostbite in the winter, but those were just minor hazards. The real obstacle—­underneath the sharp pain in a hip, the mechanical clicking of a knee, the weird way that teeth ached from huffing in winter air—­the real obstacle, unchanging and always there, was the desire to stop, and the knowledge that we couldn’t. We could never stop because if we did, then we would know we could. If you stopped once, you might stop a second time. You might never run again.

About the Author

Stephanie Reents
Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. More by Stephanie Reents
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