Turn 124 of 233

Start running 30 miles on the concrete again with Kimo, I missed it. Its also easier than before the pregnancy.

The concrete is different from the grass. Lena has missed it. The grass was soft and forgiving and absorbed the impact and the absorption was the point — the doctor's orders, the baby's safety, the careful version. The concrete is not careful. The concrete sends the force up through her callused soles and into her ankles and calves and knees and hips and the force is information and the body reads it and the body is faster now. Faster than before the pregnancy. The body that carried eighteen pounds seven ounces of boy for nine months and pushed him out in seventeen hours of wall-shaped contractions is a body that has been recalibrated by load. The core bracing is instinctive. The hip rotation is fluid. The stride is longer than it has ever been.

Kimo is in the jogging stroller she bought from a second-hand store on Tenth Street — a heavy-duty rig with pneumatic tires and a canopy and a five-point harness. The boy is strapped in and the canopy is down and the morning is cool by Florida standards, which means seventy-eight degrees, and the sun is barely up and the concrete is pale and empty and Lena runs. Five miles out. Five miles back. Three times. Thirty miles.

The first ten miles are warmup. The feet are callused and thick and the concrete is smooth and the rhythm is there — the rhythm she lost on the grass, the specific percussion of bare skin on hard flat stone, the sound that is hers alone. Kimo sleeps. The stroller pushes easy — the pneumatic tires absorb the cracks and the boy doesn't bounce and the weight is nothing. She is pushing maybe thirty pounds of stroller and boy and she is five hundred sixty-three pounds and the math is simple. The legs are stronger. The lungs are deeper. The belly that carried him is the belly that pushes him and the belly knows the weight.

At twenty miles the feet are hot. Not bleeding — not yet — but hot, the calluses thinning against the friction, the concrete graining the skin raw in the spots where the old cracks healed and healed again. Lena runs through it. The body has a gear it didn't have before the pregnancy and the gear is not stubbornness — it is the gear that says the load is the point, the friction is the point, the surface is the point. The grass was comfort. The concrete is truth.

Kimo wakes at mile twenty-three. He doesn't cry. He makes the sound he makes — the low humming that is not distress but observation, the sound of a boy who is awake and looking at the world moving past him at eight miles an hour. Lena looks down at him in the stroller and his dark eyes are open and the sun is on the canopy and the humming is steady and she runs. The last seven miles are the best seven miles she has ever run. The feet are raw and the body is enormous and the boy is humming and the concrete is giving her everything she missed.

She stops at the truck at mile thirty and her feet are raw and pink and the old cracks are open and the blood is thin — not gushing, not dangerous, just the surface blood of skin that has been ground down to the fresh layer. She lifts Kimo out of the stroller and holds him against her chest and his face is against the tribal ink and his fist is curled around the barbell of her nipple piercing and he is humming and the humming is the sound of a boy who has just run thirty miles and doesn't know it. Lena stands in the parking lot of the park and her feet are bleeding and her body is humming and the boy is humming and January is warm and the concrete held and the structure holds.