These Legs Will Carry You

I remember a hot summer day when I was seven years old and my family piled into the Subaru to drive to the beach. I was in my purple one-piece swimsuit because why would I wear anything else and as our car rolled through roads that cut through fields of sand dunes I looked down at my legs squished against the sticky seat and thought for the first time, “my thighs are so huge.”

When I should have been breathing the rush of the salt air and watching the stretching dunes and dreaming of tumbling into waves and getting sand stuck between my toes, I instead wondered why my thighs had to be so big. Almost twenty years later, I have an answer for my little self: When you’re sixteen you’re going to race a mountain bike around Mt. Washington for twenty-four hours and at two in the morning you’ll feel your thighs shake with exhaustion but they’ll keep going because they know you want this. When you’re twenty years old and live in the Himalayas, you’ll rock climb for the first time and watch men flail as they try to climb slab with their biceps and you will climb with your quads because they’re your secret superpower and you will make it to the top. When you’re twenty-five you will ride a bike for 800 miles in seven days and you will feel your thighs strain with each pedal stroke and you will hurt but you will feel powerful.

And every day, these legs will carry you, they will move you forward as far as you want to go, and when you’ve walked in the wrong direction they’ll be there to retrace your steps. They’re this huge because you’re this strong.