My dream is to be a world-class runner and writer

That’s all I want to be… Maybe it’s my goal, not my dream.

I was an unathletic kid, growing up in Soviet Moscow. I did swimming between the ages of six and nine, but that was about it.

Already in the second grade — I was around eight years old — I suffered from bad vision (much later in life I got rid of this problem); more importantly, I simply wasn’t an athletic kid. I was… a nerd. I did OK at my Russian school and later I excelled academically during my year in the US in 1994–1995, then at my boarding school in…