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For all that Nana loves her father, she has to admit that he may be just a little bit daft. When she tells him she wants to be a part of Stride, he buys her all the gear a relationer could possibly need. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him she wants to run, wants to take on obstacles and leap and fly and soar, not call the shots from afar. A few weeks later, her dad is jetting off to America, and she is left with her grandparents.
Nana, while feeling incredibly sad that her dad has just gone and left her, isn’t entirely displeased with the whole situation. Her grandparents are fully retired homebodies that only really leave the house to shop, leaving her free to roam to her heart’s content without fear of ever being caught. Which she hasn’t been, yet, but that’s getting ahead.
She wanders around the city hesitantly at first, not sure of herself or the way back home quite yet, but her confidence rises with each trip out. She ranges further and further from her new home, finding places she can run, places she can climb, places she can enjoy. It isn’t all that long before Nana finds people practicing Stride. At first, she just sits atop the monkey bars on the playground of the park the group sporadically visits. But she can’t only watch for long, her feet twitch with the desire to run and her mind is made up.
The third time she sees the group, she asks to join in.
Being a particularly stupid brand of high school boy, they say no.
So she leaves. She goes home. She cries. And then she makes up her mind again. Nana leaves her room with red rimmed eyes and a still sniffling nose to ask her grandparents to sign her on for gymnastics. They seem surprised, which is fair enough, considering she had never expressed an interest before. They say yes. A few phone calls later, some to her father, some to the closest gym, and her first lesson is booked for the very next friday.
Nana is absolutely determined. She is going to be amazing at Stride. She is going to be so good that no one will turn her away again. She goes to her gymnastics classes, grits her teeth through the condescending instructions of her first teacher and the mockery of the girls who had started younger. She keeps her complaints locked tightly away through the painful stretches and almost insane workload. She doesn’t bite at the bait the other girls dangle before her. She learns. She learns, and she gets better. Then better still, until no one can mock her for her technique, or stamina, or anything.
And through it all, she runs.
Four years after she starts her training, middle school begins. She takes her club enrollment form to the Stride club on the very first day of class. She has no official Stride training, but the third years are pleased with her gymnastics and the amount she runs. They tell her that training will be tough, even with the skills she already has. Nana tells them she doesn’t mind, so long as she can do Stride. For all that they shake their heads with knowing smiles, she knows she’ll make it, she knows it.
The third years were right, training is brutal. She runs more in a week than she had in the last fortnight. Her arms ache from the gimmicks, from the flipping and the falling and the rolling and the pulling and the climbing. She has to quit gymnastics, but she doesn’t care, she’s finally a part of an official Stride team. Just like with gymnastics, Nana speaks her complaints only in her own mind. The other first years think she is a snob, the second years think she’s after their regular and substitute positions, and the third years are just impressed.
The first race of the season is a team race, and Nana isn’t in it.
While she knows that she’s only a first year, not even a sub, it still hurts. She holds back the tears and the disappointment and does for her team the only thing she can do from the sidelines, cheers like a madwoman. The other club members move themselves ever so slightly away, her enthusiasm overwhelming for someone who had been passed over for a position.
The next race of the season is an individual tournament, and each school can send only three competitors. The club president decides to hold a time trial race to decide who could go, with the exclusion of the regulars. Nana doesn’t win, but she does come third. Come mid June, she would be facing off against her sempai, and the representatives of all the other middle schools in the region. It’s almost everything she has been waiting for, and her excitement is uncontainable.
Her selection does have it’s downsides though. Where before the first and second years simply disliked her, they now seemed to hate her. Bits of her gear would go missing throughout the day, her lunch might be spoiled, her desk graffitied, and her work made illegible, but Nana isn’t about to let them win. She keeps her joy at being chosen as a burning fire in her chest, one that will warm her against the icy glares of her classmates.
The days don’t fly by, but they do pass quickly. In what feels like no time at all, the first day of the tournament is upon her. The organisers explain the rules, the tournament is a tiered one, with the added element of a time penalty. If any competitor, regardless of whether or not they won their race, has a time twenty seconds slower than the time of the fastest competitor, they will be cut from the tournament. While she understands that there are many people participating, Nana isn’t quite comfortable with the idea of people being stripped of their wins solely to save time and money. Then the running order is announced, and she can no longer think about anything else.
Nana survives the first day of the tournament, then the second, then the third, until she is defeated in the semi-finals by an oddly familiar looking blue eyed boy. He’s just faster than she is, for all her skill in navigating gimmicks, his long legged stride far out paced her fast-paced sprint. She is furious, angry and fuming at her loss, at this boy who beat her. Then he offers her a hand up, hesitant smile barely pulling at the corners of his lips, and she isn’t anymore. She lets it go, choosing instead to smile as genuinely as she can. She tells him to win, holds out her hand for a hi-five, and informs him that he now carries her emotions too. Cringing internally at the cheesy line, she turns and goes back to her club mates, both defeated the day before but grudgingly there still.
A boy called Fujiwara wins the tournament, and no one understands why she can’t stop smiling.
Middle school doesn’t pass in a blur, for all that it feels like it looking back. Nana runs in many tournaments, both individual and team after coming fourth in her very first, though she has to drop the former once she starts the latter. Come the end of the school year, everyone is trying to decide where to go for high school, but Nana already knows, has always known. She is going to Honan, even if mixed Stride stops after middle school and girls Stride doesn’t even exist.
Just like middle school, she joins the Stride club on the very first day.
That evening, she finds the relationer gear her dad had bought her oh so long ago and plugs it in to charge. She can run and leap and fly and soar in her own time, those boys need her to be something a little different. Something not unwelcome, but definitely not what she had wanted.
Nana isn’t quite happy, but for now, she is most definitely content.