A Breather
Several days had passed since the Week 2 results of the mock investment competition were announced.
I came out to the banks of the Charles River on a crisp early-autumn afternoon.
Harvard's Soldiers Field.
This place had originally been a football landmark, lying just north of Harvard University's main campus, between the school and the Charles.
Soldiers Field had been named to honor the Harvard men who died in World War I.
Short-cut grass and a damp river breeze.
The horseshoe-shaped concrete stands were mottled with moss in places, and the old wooden bleachers bolted on at either side had paint flaking from their surfaces like shed scales.
Only the red H stamped on the goalpost padding at the end of the field still looked sharp.
Every Saturday, Harvard played football games against Yale's players at the neighboring Harvard Stadium, and when that happened, Yale hooligans with painted faces and bodies would spill over onto this grass as well, guzzling beer and shouting themselves hoarse.
Harvard in the 1990s was a place that took a scene like that for granted.
But today was not game day.
Only our undergraduates, dressed in gray Harvard Athletics T-shirts and red shorts, stood in neat lines across the grass.
This was a practical session for one of the Core Curriculum natural science courses I had signed up for: Science A-37: The Physics of Sports.
A broad-shouldered white professor clapped his hands together at the center of the field.
"We covered the theory in the lecture hall. Theory is numbers, but the field is sensation. Today, you're going to experience the basics of mechanics—acceleration and top speed—directly with your own bodies."
Last class, we had looked at textbook formulas like F=ma and gone over, again and again, graphs showing how a sprinter's speed rose and fell over time.
The professor had talked about how the initial acceleration depended on how hard, and for how long, you drove against the ground during the first second after the start, and how stride length and cadence then worked together to maintain top speed. Something like that.
After the professor finished, the teaching assistant who was acting as coach explained the 40-yard dash test.
"We'll measure your start reaction, your initial acceleration, your torso angle, and analyze everything later with graphs. We're not using ground-reaction sensors, but even with just a stopwatch and video, the patterns are obvious enough. Focus on the process, not the record itself."
A few muscular white male students stepped up to the starting line first.
...
One student clocked 5.10 seconds, the second 4.98.
That was a pretty good time, and cheers erupted among their friends.
Since this was a class for learning sports theory, setting records wasn't exactly the point, but with young blood gathered in one place, rivalry was bound to flare up anyway.
Then Jack, a senior and our floor proctor, stepped forward.
This was his second time taking the class, meaning he was a retake student, and he was one of the most famous athletes on campus.
Especially as Harvard football's star active quarterback, his name was so well known it even rang across the river at Yale.
Thwump!
Jack burst off the turf with a powerful stride.
"4.75 seconds!"
Gasps rang out all around him.
A few girls gave little squeals and waved their hands.
Then the TA checked the attendance sheet and called the next name.
"Lee Sanha."
A few of the students watching began whispering.
"I've heard that name somewhere."
"You know, the guy from the thousand digits of pi."
"Oh, right. The one who outperformed the professor in investment class?"
"What is a study nerd doing here? Guess he came to fill a science credit."
"Wrong field for him, though. This place is full of huge meatheads."
I ignored whatever anyone was muttering and stepped up to the line.
Now that I've regressed, my body feels ridiculously light. Youth really is a wonderful thing.
Compared to my body in my previous life, when Black Diamond had ground me down until I was dying of pancreatic cancer, this was heaven and earth.
And I had, after all, kept up exercise steadily since middle and high school.
Not because I liked sports, but to avoid being bullied for racial reasons.
"Three, two, one."
At the starting signal, I kicked off the grass and shot forward.
...
Bang!
All that remained in my field of vision was the white line forty yards ahead.
The TA checked the stopwatch in his hand twice, then his eyes widened.
"4.52 seconds!"
At that, everyone around us gaped.
"Wait, he beat Jack?"
"That's seriously fast."
"What, seriously? That's not just fast. That time could play at the pro level."
"No way. I thought sprinting was supposed to be dominated by Black athletes?"
"Isn't that the Asian nerd from investment class? He looks like a totally different person. Was he on something?"
Compliments, suspicion, and prejudice all spilled out in the same familiar tone from every direction.
Jack came up to me with his eyes wide.
"Hey, Sanha. What the hell are you? Did you run track in high school? You could even play return man for our team."
"I don't hate exercise."
"Oh! That's not what matters. Whether you like exercise or not doesn't matter, because exercise seems to love you. Damn it, it'd be a crime to let a body like that sit around doing nothing. From now on, work out with me. I'll teach you weights. You just teach me your starting stance and whatever magic you used to get that acceleration."
Jack's blazing eyes were a little hard to handle.
***
Before long, the 40-yard test ended and it was time for bench work.
"This next part is bench press. We'll be measuring upper-body strength and checking force-transfer efficiency. Today we're not testing max weight, only how many clean reps you can do with a fixed 135 pounds. It's not about endurance; speed and form matter most. Don't do anything stupid trying to show off just because the weight is fixed. No ego-lifting. Focus on the reps."
After the TA's explanation, the students took turns lying down on the benches.
135 pounds was about 60 kilograms.
For an adult man, it was neither especially heavy nor especially light.
The first student managed five reps, the second eight.
Most of them were in the 7-to-10 range.
Then, from farther away, a big white student walked over.
Drake Tomlinson, the strongest physical specimen among this year's freshmen.
He had been a linebacker at Georgetown Prep, a high school famous for churning out football talent, and had made weekly all-star lists every year of high school. Because of that, he was already well known to upperclassmen in Harvard athletics.
It felt as though his entire hundred-kilogram frame carried the arrogant aura of a white supremacist with it.
"All right, next. Drake Tomlinson."
When the TA called his name, Drake lay down on the bench with easy confidence.
One, two, three... ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen... fourteen!
He strained a little at the end, but still completed fourteen clean reps.
It was the best result of the day, and applause broke out among the students.
Drake sat up casually, then for some reason came over to stand beside me.
Just then.
"Next, Lee Sanha."
My name was called.
As I walked forward, Drake leaned in and spoke to me quietly.
"Lee Sanha? You were the one who ran in the 4s in the 40-yard dash, right? That's impressive."
But he hadn't come over to praise me.
"Still, running is all legs. I'm curious about your upper body."
His tone was faintly mocking.
I lay down on the bench.
I drew my shoulder blades together and pressed them firmly into the padding, planting my feet solidly on the ground.
With both hands, I gripped the bar slightly wider than shoulder width and locked my wrists in line.
I inhaled, then lowered the bar slowly to the center of my chest.
Then I drove it up in a short, explosive burst.
One, two, three, four, five, six... ten, eleven, twelve... fourteen...
I overtook Drake's best score of fourteen in no time.
He was probably stronger than I was in raw power, but when it came to fine muscle control, I was several levels ahead.
Of course. I've used this body for a few years longer than you have.
I kept pressing the bar.
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen...
The TA's eyes widened.
"You... how many reps are you planning to do?"
"I'll try to get past twenty first."
Nineteen, twenty...
Drake's face, which had been watching from the side, stiffened.
Twenty-one, twenty-two...
Students who had been watching from farther away started drifting closer one by one and counting along with me.
Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine...
I finished a clean thirty and set the bar back down.
"Thirty reps!"
The TA shouted it out.
Everyone exhaled the breath they'd been holding.
"Thirty... Is he even human?"
"How can he lift like that at that speed?"
"I don't think the strength gap between him and me is even that big."
"Didn't he run crazy fast too? Wasn't it 4.52 seconds?"
"Sanha... isn't he actually amazing? Like, maybe if he took off that baggy shirt, he'd have huge hidden muscles underneath... like Bruce Lee!"
Meanwhile, Drake stared at me intently.
"Hey, Sanha."
He asked outright,
"I'll ask you straight. Did you do drugs in high school? There's no way you can have that kind of speed and strength at the same time. I was an all-star for four years at prep school, and you just wiped the floor with all of it."
"Not really. I just kept exercising steadily."
That was true.
In middle and high school, I hadn't had any friends, so I couldn't play team sports, but I'd kept up with pull-ups and running and built my body that way.
After becoming an adult, I'd switched to entirely different forms of exercise.
Drake, who had no way of knowing that, took another step toward me.
He rested one of his big hands on my shoulder and pressed down hard.
"Then where did you train? I never heard you were from some elite high school's athletics program."
"It's fine if you feel bad about losing, but don't touch my body without permission. Unless you're planning to pay for a doping test."
"What? Lose? Me? To you?"
"Then did you win?"
"Ha!"
Drake suddenly grabbed the collar of my shirt.
Of course, even a place like Harvard was still a place where people lived, which meant it had its share of them.
These were the kind of bullies who never managed to shake off the manners of high school.
Just before Drake's fist could reach my face, I dropped my stance low.
Then, in the empty space after his punch sailed past, I drove my own fist into his side.
...Thud!
A clean liver shot.
No matter how big you were, if you took a proper blow to the liver, you couldn't move.
"Ghk!?"
Drake staggered backward.
I let out a small sigh.
Before my regression, Black Diamond had had an odd little martial arts club that had nothing to do with the firm's image.
Really, it was rare enough for people at a hedge fund that demanded brutal, high-intensity work to share hobbies at all, but there were always a few strange ones wherever you went.
There were unofficial little groups for golf, yacht clubs, wine tasting, poker, and so on, and I had joined the most minor of all of them, the martial arts group called Fight Club.
In 1990s Wall Street, there was something called Vice Culture, a rough-and-ready hobby culture meant to burn off the stress of an ultra-competitive environment. Some people trained in fighting not just to relieve stress, but to show off and prove they were alpha males.
In my case, it had been the latter.
After Black Diamond's Fight Club became famous, Goldman Sachs started a boxing club too, and JP Morgan had an unarmed rock-climbing group, and later on some movie with a similar concept was even made. A great many things happened.
...Anyway.
Which meant that disciplining one oversized freshman in front of me was no trouble at all.
And right then—
"Hic!"
Drake, clutching his side and dropping to the ground, suddenly started crying.
"Waaah... waaahhh..."