The Quest for High School Mathletic Glory

Chapter 30: Mathlete's Feet

Every night after school, Gen continues to train in the homestretch with her teammates for the EGMO, by solving problems from past EGMOs, but she feels increasingly distant from who she considered, pre-AIME, as her close friends. Let's hope that everything will be back to normal once I return from Kutaisi in a little more than a week; meanwhile, we make a killing because of promotional merchandise sales for the VMC and even more so the EGMO. In the last case, the promotional merchandise will become commemorative in the near future, Gen thinks while she prepares her baggage for the great departure for Georgia, all expenses paid by the MAA.

"Safe travels and bring us back the gold medal!" Gen's parents encourage their daughter.

"Show these drug addicts that you can do it without drugs!" Krista continues.

"Krista, until proven otherwise, the only drug user is the one whose withdrawal drove me to go, Lucy!" Gen tells her friend.

"One last kiss before the departure!" Cory asks his girlfriend, despite this competition straining their relationship, and the USAMO before that.

And so many townsfolk seem to rush out of their homes to look at their darling one last time before the start of the competition. The star who made them live so many mathletics highlights for the last 15 months. The girl that made the local girls harbor desire to excel in a field that they never thought of being able to do so before. Girls as young as four years old dream of having the required mathematical talent to compete, at a minimum, at the VMC, or even at the EGMO or at the IMO.

The next day, on the first flight that brings the team to Tbilisi (with layovers), and, from there, a train for Kutaisi, the four girls on the team are in the same row on the plane; they start doing non-mathematical activities they couldn't do up to this point, too busy to train.

Meanwhile, mathletics team practices no longer have the same allure, especially since there are much fewer people attending the session without being on the team than before. Krista oversees the multi-variable calculus portion of the session, while Trent spends more time with the newest two girls, Imélie and Jennifer. Especially Jennifer, who seems to require a bit more support for the kind of questions asked at the Purple Comet, now that Marcia won't be there because of her quiz bowl commitments, which now forces the team to hold two practices per week, and therefore Imélie to be absent for these two days.

Without Geneviève it's just not the same; it's less stimulating for Marcia and I, but she worked so hard and in part with me to get there. May we train the next generation, Krista thinks, while Marcia, mixes each multi-variable calculus problem with quiz bowl questions from past national championships.

"You seem to have too much confidence in your multi-variable calculus skills; why are you leaving partial derivative or triple integral problems unfinished?" Randy asks, realizing his girlfriend is not very focused on math.

"I care about quiz bowl, too, I did enough partial derivatives and two or three-variable integrals, last year and this year, to release the pedal mathematically a little bit" the mathlete tells the cornerback.

"That's true! How could I forget that?"

Once the session ends, Marcia emails class notes and homework (but there was no new assignment in AP English, not in AP World History) to Geneviève. But she has complete confidence in her friend to do her AP Statistics and Physics assignments quickly and without complication. For the national quiz bowl championship, one might be wondering how many teams will have a player with 10 and higher on the AIME? Other than one of the TJHSST teams obviously. We are by far the strongest team in the state for math and sciences, we can make Imélie play more against a school we know is mathematically weak, but if we play TJHSST or equivalent, I'm the one you want, Marcia thinks, while she pores over the files of potential opponents with Imélie.