The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren Page B

sleeping with one or both of them.
    "Yeah, we are," he said. "You're a Leo, aren't you? I looked it up."
    "I think astrology is a lot of crap," I said, looking back down at my clipboard.
    He shrugged pleasantly, putting one spiked foot on the bleachers and toweling himself between the thighs. At that, I was practically getting a hard-on, and I turned away to look at the rest of the team, searching vainly for someone to yell at. One of them ran past carrying his arms too high, and I barked, "Get those arms down!"
    I felt drenched by his physicalness. I tried hard to remember if I had ever had this feeling with a woman. Perhaps in college with a girlfriend or two, perhaps with Mary Ellen. The gay feels this same total eroticization toward the body, only it's the male body. It wasn't merely the fullness in the crotch of his shorts that made me want him. It was even the littlest things. His damp wind-tossed curls. The moist, brown stubble that he still hadn't bothered to shave off. His shoulders and thighs steaming in the sunshine. His brown nipples and his navel showing through the wet shirt. The way his faded blue shorts were slit up the side a little, baring the hip (the manufacturers do this for more leg freedom, but it is also very sexy). To me his long, finely muscled legs, laced with veins, were as evocative as Raquel Welch's legs would be to a heterosexual. His light, spiked shoes were more fatal than Cinderella's slippers.
    I turned back to him as the poker-faced Marine, having crushed my rush of feeling successfully. Then I saw something that made me forget about sex. He had fine muscle tremors in those beautiful thighs of his. He was really tired.
    "You have trouble with cramps?" I asked.
    "Sometimes." He was bending, busy, not looking at me.
    "At night?"
    "Yeah, sometimes at night too."
    "You must not be getting enough calcium and magnesium," I said. I was liking less and less what I saw.
    That magnificent body of his was on the edge of exhaustion. "And you've had a lot of injuries."
    "Stress fractures," he said. "I was red-shirted all last year. One in the shin, one in the metatarsals. I try to drink a lot of milk, but I seem to have these brittle bones." He was shivering, standing straight now, looking at me with something like an appeal in his eyes.
    "Get those sweats on," I said.
    "Yeah, right," he said, and pulled them on.
    "Well," he said, "I don't know what you're going to think about my program. I was doing what Lindquist told me to. But obviously we were doing something wrong."
    "Why?"
    "Because I should be improving, and I'm not. I mean, I've been putting in a lot of work, and no results. My best events are the 5,000 and the 10,000. I know there's a sub-28-minute 10,000 inside of me there. But I can't get down to it."
    I stood looking at him thoughtfully, sex forgotten now. This was naked ambition. Breaking 28 in the 10,000 meter is a big deal, like breaking 4 in the mile, and only about 15 runners had ever done it.

"Well, we'll study your program carefully," I said slowly.
    "That's one major reason I came here. I feel I need a good coach. I suppose I could have tried to cut it alone, training myself. I could forget about collegiate running, I guess, and just go into open. But I don't know enough yet about training to find the right way. I feel totally confused and stymied. So maybe you can figure it out."
    He was zipping up the jacket of his sweats. Then he was polishing his glasses, which had a little moisture condensed on them. For a moment those spooky, clear eyes of his met mine without the glasses in between, and I noted his thick, chestnut eyelashes.
    "I'm thinking about the Olympics," he said.
    I was dubious. Vince and Jacques were clear Olympic prospects, but I didn't want to get Billy's hopes up.
    "Iwant to double in the 5,000 and 10,000 in Montreal," he said.
    The 5,000 meter and the 10,000 meter are the classic long-distance runs on the track and are equivalent to nearly three and six