Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  A mile or so from the finish I heard my name called, and looked up to see my good friend Pat Trese; he was in town on business and showed up to cheer me on. That helped me pick up the pace, and I crossed the line with an official time of 5:22:37.

  I WAS SORE the next couple of days, but not terribly so, and on Wednesday I took a train and a bus to Glastonbury, where I spent a couple of days walking around and climbing the High Tor. Then I flew home and got back to the business of racing.

  I must have done other things that year. I wrote a monthly column for Writers Digest and ghosted a first draft of a screenplay, I contributed four songs to an off-Broadway revue, and in the fall I wrote a long novel, Eight Million Ways to Die. I got out of one relationship and, after a brief interval, got into another. I flew to Europe and back twice, took a batch of westbound buses, and flew home from Los Angeles. It was, all things considered, a fairly busy year, but when I look at the record it seems to me that all I did was race.

  In 1981 I took part in forty races, including five marathons and adding up to 374.5 miles.

  ONE OF THE FIRST things I did after returning from London was sign up for the Madrid Marathon. New York Road Runners was offering a package tour, including airfare, a week in a downtown hotel, and race registration. I entered, and took along my daughter Jill, who would turn eighteen a week or two after the race. There were eight or ten other members of the New York contingent, including two elite runners, Gillian Adams and Odis Sanders, whose entries were sponsored by NYRR.

  I managed to fit in seven races between London and Madrid. I walked four of them and, because my knee seemed to have recovered, ran three. Walking, after all, was something I’d embraced out of need, and if the need no longer existed, why not run? It was certainly faster, by around three minutes a mile in a short race.

  In Madrid I trained some in the Retiro, a well-landscaped park that smelled uncannily like a cat box. Jill, who’d run a few races in Central Park, had thought she might try running the marathon, but decided watching it was enough of a challenge, so Sunday morning she remained a spectator while I lined up with the other entrants.

  My keenest memory of the race was the utter bafflement of the few Madrileños who actually got a glimpse of it. Madrid is a city where the bulk of the population sits down to dinner around midnight before partying until four or five in the morning. Consequently we ran through empty streets, lined not with crowds of cheering spectators but with essentially empty sidewalks. Now and then there’d be a few people on a corner waiting for the light to change, but all they did was stare at us. This was the fourth year of the Madrid Marathon, but it hadn’t yet caught on with the general public, and you could see these folks didn’t have a clue what we were doing, or why we were doing it.

  That was okay with me. I wasn’t really any more interested in them than they were in me. I ran past some imposing public buildings, but I didn’t care about them, either. I just kept on running, and then my knee started to hurt.

  So I ran for as long as I could, and somewhere around the sixteen-mile mark (though it would have been posted in kilometers) I switched to racewalking and wrapped up the final ten miles that way. My time was 4:43:23, which was thirty-nine minutes faster than London, but you couldn’t really compare the two times because one was pure walking and the other was a run-walk mix. Still, it was a faster time than I’d had before, and a second marathon completed, and I felt good about it.

  Gillian and Odis were the marathon’s two winners, which was no huge surprise; they were the event’s world-class entrants, and fulfilled expectations. We all celebrated their victory and our collective triumph, and then Jill and I treated ourselves to two days in Barcelona before flying back to New York.

  On May 31, I took the subway to Queens and ran a 10K race in Forest Park. Then I went home and packed my suitcase, and shortly after midnight I showed up at the main post office at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street and dropped an envelope in the slot. It contained my entry for the New York City Marathon, which had to be postmarked on or after June 1. Entry was by lottery, and having the earliest June postmark didn’t do anything to assure acceptance, but as soon as I mailed my application I was free to leave town.

  I went directly from the post office to the Greyhound station, sat on a bench for two hours, and then boarded a bus for Columbus, Ohio.

  I’D BEEN LIVING with a woman since the fall of 1977, and after three and a half years it was pretty clear that we were done with each other. In New York City, however, it’s easy to postpone the final break in a relationship, especially when there’s a rent-stabilized apartment involved. A kind of inertia comes into play, with each party perfectly willing to have the other move out, but neither much inclined to move on one’s own.

  That spring we received a notice that our building was going co-op, and that we would have the opportunity to either buy our apartment or stay on as statutory tenants. I couldn’t afford to buy anything, and it seemed like the right time to make a break, so we agreed that she would stay on in the apartment while I would leave my worldly goods there until the fall, when I would remove them to whatever new lodgings I’d manage to find.

  As of the first of June, I’d no longer have a place to live, or rent to pay. Nor would I have any pressing reason to hunt for a new apartment for the next three months or so. What a perfect opportunity, then, to go see something of the country—and, while I was at it, run across as much of it as possible.

  Running Times was quick to assure me that there were races every weekend all over America, including those parts of it I’d not yet managed to visit. I didn’t have a car, but neither did I need one. I was perfectly happy to leave the driving to Greyhound, as their commercials suggested I do, and I even used the line in a song:

  I’ll leave my Smith-Corona

  With the fellow who repaired it

  I’ll leave my Village apartment

  To the woman who shared it

  I’ll leave the keys in the mailbox

  Where they’ll be easy to find

  I’ll leave the driving to Greyhound

  I’ll leave New York behind.

  I’m leaving

  On a bus heading west

  What doesn’t fit in my knapsack

  I’ll leave with the rest

  I’ll leave my shirts and collars

  And all of the ties that bind

  I’ll leave the driving to Greyhound

  I’ll leave New York behind.

  The song was one of four I contributed to a revue called Applesauce, and together they earned me $58 the following year when the show had a string of off-off-Broadway performances. But I wrote it without dreams of wealth or glory. It was, like all my songs, just something to sing to myself, off-key and out of tune, while I rode around the country.

  Aside from Alaska and Hawaii, both of them off Greyhound’s route, there were four states I’d managed to miss over the years—Iowa, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho. I sat down with Running Times and a map and worked things out, and once I’d mailed in my marathon application, I was on my way.

  My first bus took me to Columbus, Ohio, where I fit in a run before boarding a connecting bus to Chicago. I got a room at the Y and ran an 8.9-mile race in Lincoln Park. (For some reason I ate nothing but fruit for the week before the race, and this particular nutritional experiment turned out to be a disaster; I ran utterly out of gas during the race, and realized afterward I’d probably been perilously close to collapse.) My time running was no better than I might have managed on a good day racewalking, 1:35, and I was lucky to finish at all. (On the other hand, that’s my PR for the distance, and will likely remain so until another 8.9-mile race comes along.)

  I went from Chicago to Iowa City, where I stayed a few days in some sort of hostel. I met a fellow there around my age who was also working things out after a relationship had failed. “These things take time,” he said. “You can’t rush them. I’m not ready to get back into things yet, but I can tell I’m making
real progress.” And when exactly had his relationship fallen apart? A little over five years ago, he said, and my heart sank.

  I hitchhiked to Des Moines, where I stayed overnight with my old friend Ken Bressett. In 1964 he’d hired me as an editor in the coin supply division at Western Publishing, and I spent an enjoyable year and a half in Racine, Wisconsin, until it dawned on me that I had other things I’d rather do in my life. Now, seventeen years later, Ken had relocated to Des Moines, where he was working for a major coin dealer, and he surprised me with a job offer. That was heartening, but there were still other things I’d rather do with my life, and after breakfast I went to the bus station to do them.

  My next stop was Fort Dodge, where I ran a five-mile race, then caught a bus to Sioux City. I tried for a room at the Y but the front desk was closed, and a fellow outside pointed me toward the downtown hotels. “But you don’t want the Swan or the Bus,” he said, “because there’s nothing but drunken Indians there.” I went straight to the Hotel Swan, and when they proved to be full I tried the Bus Hotel, where my room cost me $6 for the night. If there were any Indians there, they must have already been passed out. I didn’t see them, or anybody else, and in the morning I went out for a look at the Missouri River and then got on a bus to South Dakota.

  I stayed a couple of days in Brookings, spent a memorable afternoon with the Harvey Dunn paintings in the South Dakota State collection, then thumbed a couple of rides to Clark, where their centennial celebration was to include a 10K race. The little town was packed, every living graduate of the local high school had evidently returned for the occasion, and there were no rooms to be had. I slept the night before the race on the big lawn in the center of town, and still turned in a decent performance in the race.

  A few years later I got to know Harold Adams, a Minneapolis resident who wrote a fine series of mystery novels set in Clark in the 1930’s (although he called it something else in the books). I mentioned my own connection to Clark, and later on he reported that he’d checked, and the locals still remembered me.

  “There were hundreds of people there,” I said, “and I didn’t do anything remarkable. Why would they remember me?”

  “Well,” he said, “as far as they could make out, you were the only person there who showed up for no discernible reason.”

  MY NEXT STOP, for no discernible reason, was Fargo, where I managed to find a room for $7 a night—or $20 a week. Years later I read a scrap of Internet flotsam that told of some poor fool who’d subsisted on a diet of nothing but beans and cabbage; he lived in a room without windows, and allegedly farted himself to death. The Snopes Urban Legends site assures me that this never happened, but when I read it all I could think of was my room in Fargo. It was tiny, and it didn’t have a window, and a person wouldn’t need too much in the way of beans and cabbage to replace all the room’s oxygen with methane.

  Windows or no windows, I couldn’t resist a bargain, and took the room for a week. I stayed for five days, and spent most of each day on the streets of Fargo, preparing myself for the upcoming marathon an hour or two north of there in Grand Forks. I ran through attractive residential neighborhoods for as long as I could, then went back to my bargain paradise and rested up.

  The North Dakota Marathon was to be my long race that summer. All I knew about North Dakota was that it was flat, and I figured that made it the perfect place to run a marathon. The course turned out to be as flat as I could possibly have hoped. It was an out-and-back race; we ran out on a two-lane blacktop highway for around ten miles, turned left and kept going to the 13.1-mile halfway point, then turned around and retraced our steps to the finish. Every last bit of it was straight as a die and flat as a fritter. There may have been a wind blowing, there almost always is in that part of the country, but I can’t say I remember it. Nor do I recall anything you could classify as scenery, beyond the endless fields filled with what must have been amber waves of grain. (No purple mountains’ majesty, however, not even off in the distance.)

  While I’m sure many runners would decry the course as monotonous, I was too busy running it to miss uphills and downhills and glorious vistas—or cheering spectators, for that matter. I was able to run for twenty miles before my knee forced me to change my gait, whereupon I switched to racewalking and pushed through the remaining six miles. My time was my best yet, 4:26:23, seventeen minutes faster than Madrid and fifty-six minutes better than London.

  I went straight from the finish line to the local Y, where shower facilities were made available to marathoners, and from there to the bus station; I just had time for a meal before boarding a bus to Fargo, where I switched to another heading west. I positioned myself so that my legs were as comfortable as possible, and I looked out the window at a huge purple cigar-shaped cloud that I remember more vividly than anything about the race itself. I watched it until darkness rendered it invisible, and then I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until we rolled into Billings, Montana, early the next morning.

  Iowa, North Dakota, Montana. I’d now been to three of my four missing states, and had only Idaho to go. I took a room at the Hotel Nevada and trained for three days on the roads north of Billings, in the shadow of the rimrocks. I went to Great Falls, where the race listed in Running Times turned out to have been canceled. From there I went to Missoula, and that’s where I spent the Fourth of July, with some new friends who invited me to a picnic.

  I checked off Idaho without quite setting foot in it; my bus passed through the panhandle, on a trip that ultimately let me off in Coos Bay, Oregon. I ran a 4.8-mile race there, spent a couple of nights on a mattress on the floor of a Presbyterian church there—it was listed as a youth hostel, but what it was, really, was a floor—and then switched to a $25-a-week room downtown. This one had windows, and was actually quite spacious.

  I toured a sawmill in nearby North Bend, then rode a bus to Cottage Grove, where they were hosting the Bohemian Mining Days Half-Marathon. I signed up for it, and when I asked about budget accommodations, the race director and his wife insisted I stay at their house. I did, and ran in an absolutely idyllic race the next morning. It was cool, with a misty runner’s rain falling intermittently, and the course was point-to-point and perceptibly downhill, and it was a pleasure from the start to the finish, and I notched 1:54:46 for 13.1 miles. Afterward I got to talking with another runner, and he turned out to be from Coos Bay and on his way home, and I got a ride with him.

  What a perfect weekend.

  AND SO ON.

  In Great Falls, I’d come close to teaming up with another fellow and continuing my trip in a car. We’d met on the bus to Great Falls, and bumped into each other a couple of times in the few days I spent in that town. (While the race had been canceled, they had a wonderful rubberized track in a public park, an ideal running surface.) I forget what had brought my new friend to Great Falls, but it hadn’t been the promise of a footrace, and whatever it was proved insufficient to hold him. He was ready to head west, and wanted me to join him.

  In a car. He went shopping and bought one and showed it to me with pride. It was his idea that we would split the driving and share the expenses and see something of the country together. The idea was not entirely without appeal, and in the end there were just two things that stopped me.

  First was the car. It looked okay, and the engine sounded all right to my untrained ear, but it was hard to overlook the fact that the door on the passenger side was held shut by a few loops of wire. It wasn’t hard to imagine scenarios in which that could prove problematic.

  That was the bad thing about the car. The good thing was that it was equipped with automatic transmission, which would come in handy during my friend’s stints behind the wheel. Because, see, he had only one arm.

  That I gave serious consideration to climbing into this rolling death trap tells me more about my state of mind than I’d prefer to know. And how could I disappoint my new friend? Suppose, like that brave chap in the Iowa City youth hostel, it wound up taking him
five years to get over it?

  In the end, though, I found a way to break the news to him that I’d go on leaving the driving to Greyhound.

  In Coos Bay, I found myself considering not a car but a bicycle. I had encountered cyclists in the hostel there, catching a few hours of sack time on the floor before resuming their two-wheeled journey south. It seemed I was on the very route favored by bicyclists seeking to cross the country north to south, the direction of choice because of the net decline in elevation. I wouldn’t start at Washington’s border with British Columbia, nor would I keep going all the way to Tijuana, but I was on Route 101 already anyway, so why not hop on a bicycle and share the route?

  A couple of things helped dissuade me from this course. One was the appearance of the cyclists—the ones I met at the hostel, and those I saw zipping by on the highway. They all looked exhausted, and if they were having a good time they were careful not to let it show.

  It struck me, too, that it wouldn’t be all that relaxing to have a constant stream of cars and trucks coming up behind me. Bicycles, unlike pedestrians, were required to go with the flow of traffic, keeping on or near the shoulder and relying on motorized traffic to avoid running them down. I wasn’t that happy with the thought of trusting the good judgment and quick reflexes of a driver I couldn’t even see. Suppose he was drunk, or wired on amphetamines? Hell, suppose the poor sonofabitch only had one arm?