Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  That was as much phys ed as I had at Antioch, and I’m afraid it was neither physical nor educational. I’d have needed a few more semesters in order to graduate, and eventually I might have found myself in the awkward position of a few legendary Antiochians, who’d completed all of their course work while neglecting the physical education requirement. The poor bastards would have to come back for another term, during which they’d load up on phys ed and nothing else. That might well have been my lot, but I was spared all that when they expelled me.

  I TOOK SOME interesting courses at Antioch, both English and history. I cut a lot of classes and gave a lot of assignments short shrift, but I picked up a thing or two in spite of myself. My experience in Nolan Miller’s writing workshop probably equipped me to land the job at Scott Meredith.

  And, of course, I learned more outside the classroom than inside. Met some unusual people, formed some enduring friendships. Fell in and out of love, and occasionally in and out of bed. And I smoked a lot, primarily tobacco, and I drank a lot. Beer, wine, whiskey. Hey, whatever you’ve got will be fine…

  And most of that continued for the better part of twenty years after I said goodbye to Yellow Springs in 1959. I spent a lot of those post-Antioch years in New York, so I did a fair amount of walking, because that’s how one gets around in our city. But I never made a conscious effort to walk fast, or to cover great distances. I didn’t racewalk, or even know what racewalking was.

  And, God help us, I certainly didn’t run.

  PART II

  8

  IT WAS THE SPRING OF 1977, AND I WAS living in a second-floor rear tenement apartment on Bleecker at Sullivan Street. I walked up Sullivan two blocks to Washington Square Park, stood on the sidewalk alongside the park facing east, and began to run.

  I proceeded counterclockwise around the little park. It’s not microscopic, the circumference comes to just about five-eighths of a mile. (In other words, a kilometer, but I wasn’t thinking in metric terms. Later, when I ran races measured in kilometers, the word would have more meaning to me.)

  I couldn’t run the whole way around. I ran as far as I could, until I had to walk and catch my breath. I walked until I felt I could run again, and ran until I had to walk again, and so on. I circled the park five times, which I figured came to three miles. Then I walked home, and took a shower that no one could have called premature.

  I did this every morning.

  My running wasn’t much more than a shuffle, and I’m not sure I even called it running. I may have used the term jogging, which was getting a lot of use at the time. I wouldn’t use it now. There is, it seems to me, something both patronizing and trivializing about the term. If you’re jogging, you’re taking it easy. You’re plugging away at it to keep in shape. It’s good exercise, it’ll help you keep your weight down, and if what they say is true, it’ll work wonders for your cardiovascular system.

  But it’s not exactly athletic, is it?

  Dr. George Sheehan, a distinguished runner, writer, and physician, was once asked the difference between a jogger and a runner. A race number, he replied.

  Whatever it was, I did it every day. It wasn’t like learning to ride a bike, or even like learning to walk in the first place, because there was no falling down involved. I ran until I had to walk, walked until I was able to run.

  The day came when I ran all the way around the park, a full five-eighths of a mile, before I had to walk.

  And there was another day, not too long afterward, when I was able to run for the whole three miles. Five laps, three miles, running all the way.

  Who’d have thought it?

  IN A WORD, NOBODY.

  For almost thirty-nine years, if you saw me running you knew I had a bus to catch—and that I’d probably miss it. I was born overweight and out of breath, and by the time I slimmed down some I’d been smoking cigarettes for several years.

  Back in seventh and eighth grades, they had a citywide running competition. At PS 66, the gym teacher, Mr. Geoghan, stood there with a stop watch and had us run the length of the playground. He timed us in the seventy-five-yard dash, and I wasn’t the very slowest in my class, but I came close.

  (Remember Jack Dorfman? Captain of the renowned Wellington Tigers? Quarterback and star shortstop at Bennett High? In both seventh and eighth grades, Jack won the seventy-five-yard dash almost without effort. Then he went on each time to the district semifinals, which he also won. From there he went to the citywide finals, and three black kids sailed past him like he was standing still.)

  My freshman year in high school, my friend Ronnie Benice announced that he and another fellow, Ron Feldman, were going to try out for the cross-country team. I didn’t even know what that was. “Come on along,” he suggested. He explained what cross-country was, and I thought he was out of his mind. Run? Over hill and dale? Me? You’re kidding, right?

  Both Rons ran cross-country in the fall and track in the spring. I spoke with Ron Feldman at a reunion a couple of years ago, and he said he still ran on a regular basis. Ron Benice is living in Florida, but I haven’t been in touch with him in twenty-five years, so I have no idea if he’s still running.

  And then, twenty-two years after high school graduation, I was running around Washington Square Park. How the hell did that come to pass?

  IT WAS IN 1959 that I was sent down from Antioch. (That’s how the British would say it, and it sounds so much nicer than “expelled.”) I’d spent the next eighteen years getting married, siring daughters, writing books, moving around—back to Buffalo, out to Wisconsin, then to New Jersey. To say I drank my way into marriage isn’t much of an exaggeration, and it’s none at all to say I drank my way out of it. My first wife and I separated in 1973, and I moved to a studio apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street. A year later, when I began chronicling the fictional adventures of Matthew Scudder, his hotel room was just around the block from me. How’s that for coincidence?

  He spent twenty years or so in that hotel room, but I was out of my apartment in two years. I moved back to Buffalo again, and that didn’t work, and I got the feeling I’d be better off without a fixed address, on the principle that a moving target is harder to hit.

  I’ve mentioned the wanderjahr that took me to Florida and a reunion with my old scoutmaster. It would have been in December of 1975 that I tracked down Doc Marshall, and it was the following February by the time I got to Los Angeles. I lived there for six months at the Magic Hotel in Hollywood, and my kids flew out and spent the last month with me at the hotel. Then we piled into the Chevy Impala I’d bought when the Ford wagon died, and we spent a wonderful month seeing something of the country on the way back to New York.

  I thought I’d turn around and drive right back to California, but instead I went to visit a friend in South Carolina, and stayed there long enough to finish the book I was working on. I called it Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, and it turned out to be the first of a long series about a light-fingered fellow named Bernie Rhodenbarr. I returned to New York, and I came very close to taking a room at Scudder’s hotel, but instead I wound up signing a lease on that little apartment on Bleecker Street.

  I’d stopped smoking in September of 1974. I had stopped many times over the years, but this time it took. I never did go back to it.

  And, after several months on Bleecker Street, during which I put in some long hours at the Village Corner and the Kettle of Fish, I stopped drinking.

  I’M SURE THAT had a great deal to do with the running, although I never made the connection at the time. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks between my last drink and my first shuffling steps around the park, but when I was trying to work out the chronology the other day, I had trouble determining whether I was still drinking when I started running. Until then, I’d never thought of one thing as having led to the other.

  But of course it did. All of a sudden I had all this nervous energy and nothing to do with it. I didn’t think in those terms, not at all. I just had the
thought one day, out of the blue, that I’d like to try running around the block. I didn’t go to the park, just ran up Sullivan to West Third Street, turned left, went to MacDougal, turned left again…and so on. Running for as long as I could, then gasping as I walked, then running. Somewhere along the way I gave up on the running altogether and walked the rest of the way home.

  I did this in street clothes—jeans, a long-sleeved sport shirt, a pair of leather dress shoes. God knows what I looked like. People probably thought I’d stolen something, or perhaps killed someone, and was trying to escape. But they left me alone. It was New York, after all, and why interfere?

  After a day or two of this I picked up the phone and called my friend Philip Friedman. I’d met Philip through our mutual agent, and he seemed like an interesting guy, but the one extraordinary thing I knew about him was that he was a runner. He lived on the Upper West Side, and ran every day around the reservoir in Central Park. And he’d actually run a marathon. He was from Yonkers originally, and he’d run the Yonkers Marathon, and that impressed me.

  (It would have impressed me even more if I’d known anything more about the event than its name. The Yonkers race is one of the country’s more difficult marathons, generally blessed with wilting heat and humidity, and boasting a couple of positively oedipal hills. I’ve never participated myself, and with any luck at all I never will.)

  I told him I’d started running, and I wasn’t sure if I knew how to do it. He said there wasn’t all that much to it, aside from remembering to alternate feet. Did I have running shoes? I said I didn’t, and he recommended I go to a store that specialized in athletic footwear and let them sell me something.

  I found the right sort of store and came home with a pair of shoes by Pony. I remember that they were blue and yellow, and the most comfortable things I ever put on my feet. I went out and circled Washington Square a couple of times, and when I came home I took off my new shoes and noticed that they had a couple of broken threads in the stitching.

  So I went back to the shoe store, and they pointed out that the shoes were now used, they showed the effects of a few laps around the park, and they couldn’t take them back. And I threw a fit, and to get rid of me they let me exchange them for a pair of Adidas.

  That’s a good brand, but the shoes I took home were singularly unsuitable. They were running flats, and offered about as much cushioning and support as a pair of paper slippers. They were also a little too small overall, and a whole lot too small in the toe box. It was months before it dawned on me that they were the wrong style of shoe and the wrong size, and that they consequently were so damned uncomfortable to wear. I just thought it was a matter of having to get used to them, and I wore the silly shoes for months, ran all over the place in them, and never failed to luxuriate in the feeling of sheer relief that came over me every time I took them off.

  But I didn’t let them stop me. I got out every day for my five laps around Washington Square Park. When I went out of town for a couple of weeks in the summer, I found places to run—in parks, on highways, wherever I could get in a half hour to an hour of alternating feet. I never allowed myself to miss a day, because I had the feeling that once I did I’d give it up forever.

  I must have missed days when it poured, or when there was ice underfoot. And I remember a snowy day around Christmas when I was sane enough to stay indoors, but nuts enough to lace up my Adidas and run in place in my living room.

  I was a runner.

  IT ASTONISHED ME that I could do this. It’s not as though I’d ever spent any time thinking of running as something I might do if I ever got around to it. I can’t say I thought much about running at all—for myself or for other people. I knew there were people who ran, I would see them out there doing it, but I also knew there were people who belonged to something called the Polar Bear Club, whose members went out to Coney Island in the middle of the winter and charged like lemmings into the freezing surf. There was no end of people who did no end of stupid things, and what did any of that have to do with me?

  I remember standing on Bleecker Street one afternoon, a few doors from my apartment, when someone went tearing past me, running for his life, while someone else—a shopkeeper?—stood on the sidewalk shouting for him to stop. I realized that it was within my power to chase this fellow, that I could quite possibly run him down. After all, I was a conditioned runner. He’d gone by at a good clip, but how long could he keep it up? I could lope along for a half hour, and by then he’d pull up gasping.

  Of course I didn’t run after the son of a bitch. I mean, suppose I caught him. Then what? But the realization that chasing him was something of which I was physically capable was remarkably empowering in and of itself. A couple of months ago I couldn’t have done it, and now I could, and that struck me as pretty amazing.

  I SUPPOSE THERE were physical benefits. This was 1977, which was just about the time when the media were overflowing with the purported benefits of getting out there and jogging. If you put in half an hour three times a week, you were presumably guaranteed immunity from no end of unfortunate conditions, heart attacks foremost among them. Doctors with impressive credentials were going so far as to state that anyone who ran marathons (or, as someone phrased it, anyone who lived a marathoner’s lifestyle) never had to worry about coronary artery disease. He might not quite manage to live forever, but when he did die, it wouldn’t be a heart attack that killed him.

  This sort of hyperbolic ranting lost some steam when Jim Fixx, a fine runner and a very prominent writer about running, did in fact suffer a myocardial infarction and die in early middle age. It was clear he had a genetic predisposition to coronary artery disease; he’d lost close male relatives to it. He’d lasted longer than the others, and one could argue (and several did) that running had in fact extended his lifespan.

  Still, it was Fixx’s misfortune not merely to die young but to live on as an object lesson for antirunners. For years, any mention of the benefits of running was apt to be met by a raised eyebrow and an allusion to poor Jim. A couple of years ago, a good quarter century after the fellow sprinted off this mortal coil, I was one of several guest speakers at Mohonk Mountain House, in upstate New York. I put in an hour or so on the treadmill one morning, then joined the other speakers at breakfast. One of them, a forensic pathologist of some renown, had evidently noticed me on my way to the gym and began taking me to task for it.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “Do you plan on living forever?”

  “No,” I said, “though I’m hoping to make it to dinner. I understand there’s venison on the menu.”

  “You people run because you think it’s good for you,” he went on. “Let me ask you something. Do you remember Jim Fixx?”

  “Anyone who ran a marathon…or lived a marathoner’s lifestyle…”

  When I was circumvolving Washington Square Park, or trotting along some country lane or suburban boulevard, I wasn’t trying to live forever. I appreciated the fact that running would take off weight, or at least enable me to eat more without gaining. Since those pounds I lost during my Florida summer had come and gone and come again many times over the years, this alone seemed reason enough to put on my shorts and shoes and get out there.

  Still, the phrase echoed, and began to do its subtle damage. Not the promise so much as the premise. The one word, really.

  Marathon.

  To run a marathon. To be a marathoner.

  I didn’t know much about the marathon. I knew it was 26.2 miles long, and I knew they held one every spring in Boston. I knew there was one in Yonkers, too, because my friend Philip had run it, and one in New York as well. I also knew that 26.2 miles was far longer than I could possibly run.

  And what did I care about races, anyway? I was in this for the exercise, and for empowerment, and the attendant sense of accomplishment. Running was a pastime, certainly, but it wasn’t a sport for me. There was nothing competitive about it, nor was it something I sought to do in the company of others. At
Washington Square, I shared the sidewalk with others, but I wasn’t trying to get around the park’s perimeter faster than anyone else. I might have considered us comrades in some collective endeavor, but I don’t really think I did. It seems to me I never paid much attention to anybody else.

  Then I picked up a running magazine. Runner’s World, most likely, but it may have been Running Times. I soon became a regular reader of both magazines, eager for more information on this new pursuit of mine. Maybe I could become better at it, maybe I could feel more a part of it.

  There was plenty of instructional material in both magazines, but from my point of view it didn’t add much to Philip’s initial advice to alternate feet. I learned a great deal about various methods of training for races of various lengths, along with tips on hydration and nutrition and supplementary exercise. And I read reports on the results of important races, and interviews with their winners, and profiles of prominent runners.

  Gradually, my view of running began to shift. You didn’t just do this to be doing it, or for the good it was presumably doing you. You didn’t do it in a heroic effort to amass endorphins, either, despite the “runner’s high” both magazines nattered on about. (I’d spent the previous two decades ingesting various mood-altering substances, and I damn well knew what it was to be high, and that you couldn’t manage it by running around in circles.)

  The daily running you did was training. You trained as preparation for racing. You trained, and then you raced, and after that you rested and trained again. To race again.

  And why did you race? What was the point of it?

  Well, if you were one of perhaps a dozen elite runners in a field of a few hundred or a few thousand, you raced in the hope of victory. You were out there trying to finish ahead of all of the other runners. If you actually won the race, you might get mentioned on the network news (if the race was, say, the Boston Marathon) or in your hometown newspaper (if your father was friendly with the editor). You wouldn’t get any prize money, not in the late 1970’s, and if you did it would jeopardize your amateur standing, and shut you out of the Olympics.