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other girls in ponytails and sweats, warming up, getting nervous, and focusing Wercely as they got ready to compete, brought back a Xood of memories. That’s when I decided to coach. It was all there, the way I remembered it, when I Wrst returned to a high-school cross-country meet. Tough girls with French braids from small Wisconsin towns (whose numbers used to include Susie Favor) warming up together, striding side by side in intimidating packs, their nylon pants and jackets rasping as they moved in unison. The smell of Icy-Hot and nervousness. One new girl on my team wept in terror before her race, begged me not to make her do it. She did it. She threw up. She couldn’t believe she made it. At the end of the season I gave her the Team Spirit Award because she improved so dramatically, became a cross-country zealot—full of pride in herself and joy—and was her teammates’ biggest booster. That feeling of elation, of victory, comes over and over again from testing yourself and surviving the test—kids sprinting their hearts out and throwing themselves across the Wnish line. I knew a woman at Yale who posed as one of Playboy’s “Women of the Ivy League.” She also happened to be the girlfriend of a runner on the cross-country and track teams. I remember seeing her at a cross-country meet. A group of us were standing at the Wnish line, covered with mud from running, cheering as the men’s team came in. She came tripping across the grass, looking radically out of place in a fur coat and high heels, sinking into the soft ground, and waited on the sidelines for her boyfriend. I remember feeling sad when I saw her, outside the circle of happy track people, hugging and laughing, Wlled with shared, post-race euphoria. She could hardly walk, much less run, and she seemed inWnitely far away from taking part in that event. I felt grateful for my muddy shoes and sweat clothes, grateful that I could be there fully and freely participating, not as a kind of crippled ornament standing on the sidelines. So that’s why I’m busy covering the wall with sports pictures and recruiting girls to run track. If I have anything to do with it, when I’m an old woman I’ll be running road races with a crowd of other women, young and old, and every single one of us will be awesome. —Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive, where she has worked since 1991. What Shall I Wear? Elizabeth Karlin october 1994 A good friend sent me a baby-blue bulletproof vest after Michael Griªn killed Dr. David Gunn, so that I would have something to wear to work at the clinic where I do abortions. It came in a bag stamped female, and it Wts quite well. I rarely wear it, 90 p a r t 4 campaigning for women’s equality though—not because it is hot and constricting, which it is, but because when I put it on, I am keenly aware of the parts of me that aren’t covered. When friends ask how come I don’t wear the vest, I answer, “What’s the use? They’ll just shoot me in the head.” And so it happened. Dr. John Britton, sixty-nine, wearing his bulletproof vest, and his bodyguard, James Barrett, seventy-four, vest status unknown, were shot in the head and killed. June Barrett, sixty-eight, a nurse, was shot in the arm. Paul Hill, a dedicated Christian terrorist who belonged to a group advocating murder of us abortion providers, shot them while they were sitting in their truck. Since then, I have been practicing crouching on the passenger-side Xoor of the car. My sti¤ hips get in the way of a quick disappearance, but after Xicking the rearview mirror, I can drive backwards . They never taught me this in medical school. At the oªce, things are much the same, but on the Monday after the killings the phone is busier than it has been in months. Women are trying to make appointments before I, the doctor, am oiled. Some of our patients make an appointment without even being able to say the word “abortion.” That is how I know we’re losing. Here it is, 1994, twenty-one years after the Roe v. Wade...

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