The Runners
by
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Recently my girlfriend left me because she felt I loved her body too much and and her mind not enough.
I saw it differently, thinking I paid the right amount of attention to each. Could I help it that her body was more attractive than her mind?
I am a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington. Sometimes my research suffers because of my other pursuits, including the pursuit of women. It would be wrong to think that I spend all my leisure hours running after women; I spend several hours a week just running.
On the first day of spring I was lifting weights in the gym, when I saw an almost beautiful girl in shorts and a T-shirt smoothly working one of the machines. At first, it was only her face and figure that attracted me, but after she got up I was able to read the words on her T-shirt: 'We put out on Wednesday.'
Her message provided an excuse for me to walk up to her and say, "I'll bet you don't wear that T-shirt on Wednesdays."
"I work for a weekly newspaper, the Revealer, which we put out on Wednesday. It comes out on Thursday."
"I used to belong to a long-distance running club that had T-shirts with the motto, 'We keep it up longer.'\ "
I extended my hand. "I'm Dave Pace."
She took my hand without hesitation. "Sarah Golden here.
Now, tit for tat, it's my turn to ask you when you wear your keep-it-up T-shirt. You're not wearing it now."
"It's in a drawer."
She smiled mischievously. "Have you become more modest lately, or is it that you can no longer perform?"
"The T-shirt is all worn out---not me."
"Why don't you buy another one?"
"The club went defunct. It couldn't get by on just a motto.
Do you work out here regularly?"
"Twice a week."
"Then why haven't I seen you before?
I would have noticed you even without the T-shirt."
"You mean especially without the T-shirt."
"Saucy Sarah. Do you mind being called that?"
"Not at all, Dreamy Dave."
"Just Sarah, then?"
"Fine, just Dave."
"But you didn't say why we haven't met before."
"I'm a little late today."
"And I'm a little early. What a lucky break."
"For whom?" she asked.
"For both of us." Then I asked, "Are you a runner?"
"Yes, I run. How did you guess?"
"Your legs. You have the legs of a runner."
When we parted I was almost deliriously happy. At last I had a woman who was intelligent, beautiful, and uninhibited.
But my love for Sarah went deeper. I had known her just over six weeks but was beginning to feel I could spend my life with her. Little did I know our lives would soon be complicated not only by other lovers but by murder.
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About the Book
In August, 2002, a survey by the {\it Princeton Review} found that Indiana University, Bloomington, was the number one partying school in the United States.
In his novel, The Runners, Don Light has imagined a small part of the student scene at Indiana University. But there is more to the university and to the novel than partying, drinking, drugs, and sex. The novel does not neglect those themes but also focuses on running, music, science, love...and murder.
Dave Pace, a graduate student in physics at Indiana University, meets Sarah Golden, an undergraduate majoring in biology and music. They go running together, go to bed together, and, after several weeks, start living together. Sarah meets a math professor and carries on an affair
with him while still living with Dave. Dave starts running with another student, who is murdered in the woods. Dave tries to help the police solve the crime, and he enlists Sarah's help. The tangles and puzzles are eventually sorted out, some of them in surprising ways.
The author, a retired professor, has lived most of his adult life in Bloomington. When asked what made him retire, he said, ''For many years I taught a first-year physics survey course at Indiana University. Whenever I taught the course, at least one of my female students would come to my office near the end of the term, cry, and say, 'I will do anything [anything in italics] for a good grade.' When they stopped saying that, I knew it was time to retire.''
About the Author
Don Light is the pen name of a retired professor of physics who taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, for thirty years. In addition to teaching, he published three books in physics, edited another, and contributed to several more. He also published more than one hundred research articles in scientific journals and gave more than three hundred talks at conferences and universities around the world. He spent leaves of absence at the Universities of Oxford, Turin, Tel Aviv, and Washington, among others.
His area of specialization is the theory of elementary particles. He is married and has two grown daughters. The Runners is his first novel.
During his leisure hours (of which there are too few), he reads, writes, or runs. He runs several miles a day for pleasure, and has participated in well over fifty road races, including eight marathons. He typically attends a concert once or twice a week, most of them free, courtesy of the Indiana University School of Music.