The New Yorker:

What a blood test taught me about testosterone, athleticism, and sex.

By S. C. Cornell

Boulder, Colorado, where I was born and raised, is sometimes called the fittest city in America. Septuagenarians go skiing before work, high-school delinquents hang out at the climbing gym, and people do not so much hike as trail run. 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. 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. 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. 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. My parents were baffled. This was no gene of theirs, surely, but it also didn’t seem to be hard work. I didn’t care about running, and I never trained.

What I did work at, harder than I have worked at anything since, was soccer. 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. I failed, year after year, to make the local club’s first team. I made my high school’s varsity team as a sophomore but didn’t start a game until I was a senior. 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 didn’t dream at night of love but of wide green spaces, well-timed tackles, and chipped shots.

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