Roofing and Training in Paradise
Teruo Nakamoto was right: Gina worked from sunup to sundown five days a week, and then she trained for the marathon. Naka knew too, since his workers were all women. Naka was one of the locals promoted to foreman after the Sugar Strike of 1946; his female crew worked hard in the volcanic red soil picking pineapples for Del Monte.
Gina learned to ignore the heat, the soot, and the burn of her arms, her back, and leg muscles from bending, squatting, and climbing up and down the ladder throughout the day. She and Tony shoveled tons of debris into the back of their dump truck. There was a daily clean-up on the ground, too. Stray shingles, nails, and chunks of tar had to be picked up by hand. Paolo drove the truck numerous times to the dump.
Tony and Gina shopped for work clothes at Goodwill, sometimes stopping on the way home from a job. There was no time to go back home first to clean up. Gina learned to grin at the patrons who would look away, perhaps thinking she was homeless. Their combined stench invaded the nostrils of the curious doubters.
She thought back to one of the bigger Molokai jobs. The three had flown over from Oahu. Naka had graciously offered them one of his bedrooms to sleep in.
It was another church roof. Not the actual sanctuary, but the adjacent school building. Most homes took one to three days, tops. The church school took five. It was just the three of them.
Paolo was 16 and out of school for the summer.
According to Tony, roofing under the hot Hawaiian sun afforded little patience for weak little pussies. He was made of blue twisted steel, and he expected the rest of them to keep up.
They usually woke before the sun and drove to the job. Then watched the sunrise as they climbed up the ladder and drove home as the sun was setting over the Pacific. Exhaustion became a nebulous term to Gina. It was a luxury that others who didn’t understand what hard work was experienced.
Tony had trained them to take short breaks and a fifteen-minute lunch. Their meal usually consisted of a tossed green salad with a can of tuna fish, packed in water, on top. Dressing always on the side. Gina liked her lettuce crisp. Tony ate his tuna with a pair of chopsticks straight out of the aluminum can as he walked, surveying the job, determining where they would stop each day and how long it would take them to finish.
Molokai in the ’90s had little in the way of restaurants or movie theaters. Tony promised their reward on Friday night after Chinese take-out was to be a half-gallon of ice cream split between the three of them.
Training for a marathon was a piece of cake compared to roofing or listening to Tony grumble about every little thing she wasn’t. She wasn’t thin. She wasn’t as pretty or as quick. But Gina, at thirty-seven years young, learned she could endure just about anything. It was the best time of her life, according to Paula at the motorcycle shop. And strangely it was. Gina, Tony, and Paolo had never been closer and would never be again.
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She had started running in 1994 with her friend Rosie Wall. Gina would get up at 4:00 a.m., drive to Rosie’s house in Kailua, and they would run anywhere from five to seven miles before work, three days a week. Rosie at that time had already completed twenty-five marathons, so Gina felt that she was in experienced hands with Rosie. Gina was averaging a nine-minute mile at the time. Rosie was also her dental hygienist.
Her longest run had been nine miles up to that point. She ran from her home in Kahaluu to her old address in Kaneohe, roughly 4.5 miles one way.
Gina grew stronger as the months flew by. She had another job teaching water aerobics at the Honolulu Club, three days a week. She quickly made friends with the elite trainers and athletes. Training was brutal, but it was supposed to be. They’d do hills on Tuesdays, splits on Thursdays, and the long runs on Sundays.
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