She agreed, all but wincing, that the situation was dire, but insisted that hormonal causes like polycystic ovary syndrome, or P.C.O.S., first be ruled out. I wanted another round of Accutane, liver be damned. In the fall of 2022, I moved to Mexico City and saw a dermatologist there. It looked like I had picked a fight with a wasp’s nest and lost.

Then the acne came back, worse than ever. At the end of college, I finally got on Accutane, which left me with a toxified liver and-for two glorious years-the skin of a baby. From puberty on, it wavered between demoralizing and disfiguring. The other dream of my youth, which I did not then see as bearing any relation to athleticism, was to be rid of my acne.

I didn’t dream at night of love but of wide green spaces, well-timed tackles, and chipped shots. If you had asked me at fifteen if I would rather be a little better at soccer or one day find true love, I wouldn’t have paused to think. I made my high school’s varsity team as a sophomore but didn’t start a game until I was a senior. I failed, year after year, to make the local club’s first team. Colorado’s Front Range produces many excellent soccer players-all of the United States’ goals in last summer’s Women’s World Cup were scored by players who grew up within an hour’s drive of Boulder-and the great disappointment of my cushy childhood was realizing that I was not to be one of them. What I did work at, harder than I have worked at anything since, was soccer. I didn’t care about running, and I never trained. This was no gene of theirs, surely, but it also didn’t seem to be hard work. At twelve, the last year I raced, I ran what was then the sixth-fastest time ever recorded by a twelve-year-old girl in the race’s three decades of results.

Three years in a row, I finished first out of some four hundred girls my age, and fifth or sixth out of a similar number of boys. I first ran the ten-kilometre course when I was six, not an unusual age of initiation for locals, and discovered that I was a bizarrely good runner. Every year, the town hosts the BOLDERBoulder, one of the largest road races in the country and a sort of festival day in honor of the local god of exercise. Septuagenarians go skiing before work, high-school delinquents hang out at the climbing gym, and people do not so much hike as trail run. Boulder, Colorado, where I was born and raised, is sometimes called the fittest city in America.

Dream catcher for baby room