Dispatch from Canada
Fenelon Falls, Kawartha Lakes, June 22, 2025:
½ Marathon Race Day. 104.00°F with humidex.
I placed my palms on my chest, feeling for the hole in time. My heart has beat irregularly since I was a baby. Sometimes it’s an extra beat, most often a missed one. I sucked air from the vapour pressure not to self-soothe anxiousness, but to accommodate a missed beat. This pattern, even, has a circularity. It isn’t a linear line of incomplete beats. It responds. Breathing control is how I’m able to run—how I speak with my heart.
My favourite part of race day is warm-up. My muscles stretch, spreading into smoothness, finding each other like raindrops combining on glass. Despite what warm-up prepares my body to do, its a long, slow, gradual layering of calm. An hour or so of tender movement kneads my body into one warm muscle with taut root feet, as close as I can get to trees—strong and sweetening nerves into race fuel.
This morning, warm-up only needed ten minutes.
Feeling my quads, like dough, I wondered if I could’ve pushed my fingers through or pulled them apart. I looked up at the sky, pale but not pregnant. I scanned the sand beach, wicking humidity. The start chute faced the race path: a forest trail so dense it looked like an elongated green hole. The air was thick inside—none of the trees swayed, even next to the lake.
My focus and vision funneled from parents replacing the evaporating lake with sweat, their children on the playground nearby. As I walked to the start line, my sweat dripped from the tips of my red braids, speckling the heat-moistened dirt with wet holes.
I looked up at the sky again. My potential, for this race, was held together by the sun’s absence. I stepped to the start line. In a few minutes, the horn blared down the green tunnel.
How many steps does it take to poke a one-mile hole in a half marathon? To make one in the ozone layer? For the sun to push a hot white hole through thin atmospheric cloud?
I think I know more about black holes than white ones. The latter feel more like death—like the heat of Hell keeping us alive behind a dying shield. I run to feel the ecstasy of thinking I’m further from burning.
But it’s breathing that white holes take first.
I couldn’t breathe.
And my heartbeat dissolved, perforating the passing seconds.
As the miles piled on, heavy and hot, I peeled off layers of clothes. The heat climbed on top of itself until I couldn’t pare any further, gasping, peeling off pace and heartbeats. My chest became a bird-shaped pain, as if my heart’s chamber holes were expanding, leaking. I peeled off the path to survive, to sprint to the porta-potty, muscles mulch, bowels boiling, pores weeping damp salt.
I only made four holes. My husk, much less. For thirty minutes, I lived our mother dying and knew why I tried today.
I know why I’m hurting in layers—core heart, mantle muscle, crusted skin. I wanted to win. We wanted to win—my body is Earth’s, became her face, felt the peace she longs for, with holes, erased: to run free, to race.
I can’t stop warming up. Faster and faster. I’m dreaming.With these holes of heart-time I keep. There’s no such thing as a hole.
Mikaela Brewer is a Canadian writer, editor, speaker, and researcher. Her work has previously appeared in SAPIENS, The Stanford Daily, The Headlight Review, Unsinkable, The 44 North, Global Sport Matters, and the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Mikaela played basketball for Team Canada and Stanford University, where she studied human biology (brain, behaviour, and mental health), creative writing, and earned a notation in science communication. Some of her other work can be found online at mikbrew.substack.com or @mik_brew on Instagram.