She's got a couple of hundred yards ind a staircase to navigate, so she is going to be waiting for the next one. No chance she's making this one. But still, she's going for it. He had to admire her spunk, if not her ability to solve hor time by estimating her speed and the distance to the train. But that's not his fault. Wasn't the physics teacher. So he watched this charming girl make a go of it, all flailing arms and seemingly oblivious to her certain impending failure. And he turns to his paper as the train started to lurch and pull away. Then something plops onto the seat beside him, a biology text book. He looks up, and there, smiling, hardly winded, is, of course, betty. He is dumbfounded. He is also the track coach. Betty robinson stands in an empty hallway after the last bell, behind a line written on the tile in white chalk. Her biology teacher stands behind another chalk line, a precisely measured 50 yards away. Behind her, a boy, acute, one senior from the track team, sighs, looking at her all wrong shoes, at the awkward way she crouches at the starting line. She hadn't even known you crouched the starting line. Mister price holds up his stop watch and blows a whish, and theny runs, ising pretty her form is rediculout, but it is fast. She crosses the line six point two seconds after she started, which is one tenth of a second faster than the women's indoor world record at the time they talk, he asks her if he can sign her up for an amateur race. It's just a few weeks away, just a quick l ride into the city. She sas sure he doesn't tell her that it is one of the most prestigious competitions in america and that the current world recor holder will be there. And so for the next weeks, he and the cute senior, betty found the cute senior to be a real sweetener in the whole deal, taught her everything they could about how to run, how to rein in those flailing arms, how to anticipate the starting gun, how to push off the blocks, how most racers are won and lost in those first few seconds. Taught her about track conditions, about wind, but anything they thought they could cram into what little time they had. And then she lined up at soldier field in chicago, a few steps away from the fastest woman in the world.