Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  If I went ahead, though, I’d have to buy a bike. And that brought to mind the last time I’d done so.

  IT WAS BACK in the early spring of 1967, and I was in Ireland. I’d been married, and living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the marriage was starting to fall apart, so I flew to Dublin to Think Things Over. (Does a subtle pattern begin to emerge? Oh, shut up.)

  I spent a month in Dublin, finishing a book I’d brought with me. (My third book about Evan Tanner, it was set in Eastern Europe, with a pivotal sequence taking place in Latvia, and in a bookstore on O’Connell Street I managed to buy a copy of Teach Yourself Latvian. The bookseller must have been astonished to see that one walk out of his store.) I lived and worked in a bed-and-breakfast in Amiens Street, where I learned as much about chilblains as I did about the Latvian language, and then I left Dublin with the intention of getting to West Cork and Kerry.

  I hitchhiked, with very poor results; just a week or so earlier a hitchhiker had pulled a knife on a motorist and forced him to drive out of his way, and that was enough to constitute front-page news in Ireland. So for a week or two drivers were stifling their more generous impulses, and it took me forever to get to Wexford Town, where I bought a bicycle.

  What a mistake that turned out to be. There wasn’t a level patch of highway anywhere around, and I was always either walking the bike up a hill or clinging to it, terrified, as it sped downhill out of control. I was lumbered with a heavy backpack, which didn’t help, and the skies, while all of this was going on, were dealing out a seemingly inexhaustible supply of rain.

  I did this for a few days, and wound up in Enniscorthy, a nice enough village but one whose charms wore thin by the third day. The only thing that kept me there was a reluctance to get back on the bike. I tried to sell it to my landlady, whose son greatly admired it, but she was canny enough to wait me out, and finally I told her she could have it outright in exchange for the lodging debt I’d already incurred. She agreed, and I left there feeling I’d pulled a fast one.

  And here I was actually contemplating the purchase of another bicycle. Coastal Oregon wasn’t as hilly as County Wexford, but neither was it as pancake-flat as the North Dakota Marathon. Nor was its climate anything you could label Saharan. Rain, when it came, was never a great surprise.

  Buy a bike? No, I don’t think so.

  I WONDER WHY it never occurred to me to walk.

  Not in races, I was doing fine running them, and in the shorter ones I could get from the start to the finish without hearing from my knee. But why, when I had reached a point where risking my life on a bicycle in highway traffic, or with the one-armed man from The Fugitive, seemed like a viable alternative to Greyhound, did I never even consider the notion of getting from one place to another on foot?

  You’d think I might have tried it for a day or two. Looking back, I can’t imagine I’d have walked from Coos Bay all the way to San Francisco, let alone Los Angeles. But I might have walked to Bandon, a coastal village twenty miles or so south of Coos Bay. I had to stop there to pick up my mail, and it would have been no great challenge to spend a day walking there. If I liked it, I could walk some more the next day, and the day after that.

  But it never even entered my mind. When I left Coos Bay it was on a bus, and when I left Bandon a day or two later it was on another bus.

  I SPENT A WEEK or so in San Francisco; my cousin Jeffrey, who was living north of the city in Santa Rosa, kept a pied-à-terre on the edge of the Tenderloin, and he let me stay there. It was a chance for me to find out what Mark Twain meant when he said the coldest winter he’d ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

  I kept warm by running in the Gay Run, a 5K race in Golden Gate Park, and the souvenir orange tank top would become a treasured possession, albeit one I couldn’t wear just anywhere. A couple of days later I got on another bus and got off in Los Angeles.

  I participated in one race while I was in L.A., another 5K, this one in aid of St. Joseph’s Medical Center. I’d notched a time of 23:51 in San Francisco, and trimmed that to 23:50 in L.A. I figured I’d stay a week or so—I had friends to visit in the area—and then I’d head east.

  The idea of another three thousand miles on buses was not very appealing. I didn’t want the ordeal of a nonstop bus ride across the continent, nor did I feel like breaking it up and taking two or three weeks to get back to New York. I’d been traveling a long time, and I was ready to be home. What I really wanted to do was fly, but I couldn’t really afford the airfare.

  And then a friend of mine, a film and TV writer, popped up with a proposition. He’d managed to take on more work than he could get done on time, and proposed that he hire me to write the first draft of a made-for-television film. It was a project he was pretty sure wouldn’t get greenlighted anyway, and he’d get paid for delivering the first draft, even as I’d get paid for delivering it to him. He’d be guilty of a gross infraction of Writers Guild’s work rules, but I wasn’t a member, so that wasn’t really a problem for me. And, as long as we both kept our mouths shut, it wouldn’t be a problem for him, either.

  So I took a suite for two weeks at the Magic Hotel, where I’d lived for six months on an earlier sojourn in L.A., and I hammered out the screenplay, and got paid enough so that I could forget about Greyhound and fly back to New York, with enough money left over to find myself a place to live.

  12

  THE APARTMENT I FOUND WAS ON JANE STREET, in the basement of a back house—i.e., a house situated immediately behind another house that actually fronted on the street. You had to go through a narrow little passage to get to it, and then you went down a flight of steps, and then you were there, and God help you. It was as Bohemian and romantic as any dewy-eyed arrival from Oshkosh could possibly have wanted, and it was dark and smelled of mold and mildew, and it managed to make me nostalgic for that windowless $20-a-week palace I’d had in Fargo.

  I stuck it out for two months there, then moved in with a girlfriend in Washington Heights. I entered four NYRR races, the 10K New Harlem I’d run back in 1979 and a trip of five-milers, two in Queens and one in Central Park. My times in the five-mile races were remarkably consistent, ranging from 39:22 to 39:50.

  When I wasn’t racing, or working on a book, I was in the park bordering the Hudson, running down to Seventy-second Street and back. Because one of the first things I’d found out on returning to New York was that my 1981 New York Marathon entry had been accepted, and on the last Sunday in October I’d be participating in my fourth marathon of the year.

  The course then was essentially the same as it is now, with the start on the Staten Island side of the Verrazano Bridge. I started out running, and I was still running at the halfway point, in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, when I heard my name called and looked up to see Pat Trese and his girlfriend of the moment; he had once again showed up to cheer me on.

  My knee would have been hurting by then, but not enough yet to make me change my gait. I’m not sure just when I switched to racewalking, but it seems to me I must have made the switch around fifteen or sixteen miles, shortly before crossing the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan. I walked the rest of the way, except for the last hundred yards, when I forced myself into a run—not to get to the finish line faster, but to keep any of the scorers from listing me as a walker. The marathon had a special division for walkers, with prizes awarded; my time of 4:39:38 wasn’t anywhere near good enough to put me in contention for a prize, but I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

  4:39:38.

  My time was four minutes faster than Madrid, thirteen minutes slower than North Dakota. You couldn’t really compare one performance with another, New York was certainly a much more difficult course than Grand Forks, but it was even harder for me to compare the three races because the most important element, it seemed to me, was how much running I was able to do. The more I ran, the less time it took me to cover the distance.

  It seemed unlikely that I’d ever be able to run the entire 26.2 mi
les of a marathon. I could run shorter races—sometimes with pain, sometimes without—but sooner or later in the course of a marathon my knee would announce that it was having no more of this, thanks all the same. The more I pushed it, the more I was risking doing lasting damage.

  Nowadays a whole host of marathoners combine walking and running, and one running maven, Jeff Galloway, prescribes a regular routine of walking breaks, not only to enable new runners to reach the finish line of a marathon, but as a way for more experienced runners to increase their overall speed. He swears it works, and there are plenty of run/walk racers who swear by Galloway, while other runners and walkers swear at him, irritated by all those Galloweenies who rush to edge in front of them only to switch abruptly to a walk.

  Back in 1981, though, it seemed to me that one was either a walker or a runner. Walking breaks had got me around Washington Square at the beginning, but the day I knew I was a runner was the day I didn’t have to take them anymore.

  So what was I now? If I was a runner, I ought to be able to run the whole race. And if I couldn’t, then maybe I ought to walk the whole race.

  I had one more marathon on my schedule for the year. It was the Jersey Shore Marathon, coming up on the first Sunday in December. I thought about it, and I decided to walk it. All of it, start to finish, and I wouldn’t even cheat and run fifty yards across an intersection, as I’d been forced to do in London.

  The course, from what I’d read, was not appreciably hillier than the one in North Dakota, and the weather figured to be ideal for racing. There was only one problem. I was going to have to finish in under five hours.

  SEE, THAT WAS the cutoff time if you wanted a jacket.

  Virtually every race gave you a T-shirt, and all you generally had to do to get one was enter. They handed it to you when you picked up your number, and nobody cared if you finished the race, or even started it.

  But Jersey Shore gave out these jackets. Windbreakers, I guess you’d call them, and they were pretty nice, handsome blue jackets of some sort of shiny material, with the race logo on it. I’d seen people wearing last year’s jackets, and of course I wanted one.

  But they gave them to you when you finished, and you had to do so in under five hours to qualify. (It has since occurred to me that this was probably not the strict requirement it seemed at the time, that the reasoning was that the finish line might shut down at the five-hour mark, or not long after it, and that they thus couldn’t guarantee you a jacket if you didn’t make it home under the wire. If they were still hanging out at the finish line fifteen minutes past the hour, and if some poor bastard came limping across the line, and they still had jackets left, do you suppose they’d tell him he was out of luck? Probably not—but all I knew back then was that I damn well had to make it in five hours if I was going to get that fucking jacket.)

  Well, how hard could that be? I’d done four marathons already, and three of them had beaten that five-hour cutoff with plenty of time to spare.

  But I ran more than half of each of those races. And the one marathon I’d walked, in London, I’d gone over the five-hour mark by almost a full minute per mile.

  This wasn’t going to be a walk on the beach.

  IN ORDER TO QUALIFY for the jacket, I’d have to walk the Jersey Shore at a pace a little faster than 11:30 per mile. Did I have a shot at it?

  A week after the New York Marathon, I entered an 8K Halloween race in Central Park. It was the same race I’d run the previous year, in 46:50, and this time I walked it in 55:47. Eight kilometers is about as close as you can get to five miles, so my pace was roughly 11:10 minutes per mile, which would bring me across the Jersey finish line with a few minutes to spare.

  But that assumed I could sustain my five-mile pace for a whole marathon. The thing about a marathon is that it’s long enough for its sheer distance to be a factor. I wasn’t worried about hitting the wall. Unless you’re an elite runner, stacking up five-minute miles, there’s no wall out there for you to hit; that only happens to runners who move fast enough to deplete their glycogen stores, while the rest of us are burning a certain amount of stored fat in our less highly tuned engines. But you don’t have to hit a wall to slow down some over the course of that long a race.

  The longest race I’d walked start to finish was the Mike Hannon Memorial, that twenty-mile effort that had been my first race as a walker. My time of 4:09 worked out to a little over twelve minutes a mile, a pace that would get me across the finish line twenty minutes too late for a jacket.

  Hmmm.

  Well, that had been my first race as a walker. A month later I’d walked from Coney Island to Prospect Park in the Brooklyn Half-Marathon, and my time had been a brisk 2:22:25. I didn’t have to calculate the pace; all I had to do was double the time, and I’d knock off the marathon in 4:44:50.

  Suddenly it was all looking very achievable. On the other hand, my best time running a half marathon was 1:54 in Oregon, and did that mean I could run a full marathon in under four hours?

  Not too likely. What it boiled down to, really, was that I didn’t know how long it would take me to walk the marathon, and wouldn’t know until I did it. I’d have to push all the way, I’d have to maintain for the entire distance a pace not much slower than I could manage in a short race. All I could do was try, and five hours after the race began I’d find out whether or not it worked.

  I had two more races coming up before the Jersey Shore, a 10K in Buffalo’s Delaware Park and a five-mile Turkey Trot Thanksgiving weekend in Washington, D.C. Most of my training all that month consisted of racewalking along the Hudson, but I ran in both of those races, and in the Turkey Trot my time was 39:05. That was the fastest I’d ever run at that distance.

  And it was a mark that would stand up. Because, as it turned out, it was my final race as a runner.

  RIGHT UP to the start of the Jersey Shore Marathon, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I’d run or walk. Common sense suggested that I play it safe. If I started out with ten or twelve miles of running, I could pretty much guarantee that I’d go home with a jacket. I’d been well under five hours in my last three marathons, and I could expect to do as well in this one.

  First things first, I told myself. Just do what you have to do to get the jacket. There will be other marathons, other chances to prove yourself as a walker.

  But I wanted to walk this race, wanted to respond to the challenge. Because that’s what it was—a challenge, a test. How could I fail to accept it?

  So I took a bus to Red Bank, spent the night at a hotel, showed up at the start the next morning, and set out walking. I don’t remember much about the race. I pushed hard from the beginning, and there was a point where it seemed to me that I had a shot at finishing in under five hours, but it was never a foregone conclusion. I was under two and a half hours at the 13.1-mile point, but not by much.

  I didn’t get faster toward the end of the race, but I didn’t get all that much slower, either. There were a few other walkers in the race, some of whom I recognized from Central Park, and one thing I remember vividly is passing one of them—a faster, stronger racewalker than I—with two or three miles to go. He gave me a wave and a thumbs-up, and I passed him and kept going and began to think I was actually going to make it.

  I did, with an official time of 4:53:28. They handed me a jacket, and I put it on and took a bus back to the city.

  I WONDER WHATEVER happened to that jacket. I don’t think I wore it more than three or four times over the years, but I liked having it, even during all those years when the only walking I did was down to the corner to mail a letter.

  Now and then I’d come across it in a closet, and I’d recall the circumstances of earning it, the urgent push to the finish line, the sense of triumph that came of having done what I’d set out to do. So of course I kept the jacket, and I’m sure I own it now, although I’m damned if I know where it is.

  IT WAS AROUND this time that I first became aware of the twenty-four-hour race.

  I
was beginning to realize that there were longer races than marathons, and that some runners actually put themselves through events of fifty or a hundred kilometers or fifty or a hundred miles. That seemed crazy to me, but no crazier than a marathon had seemed to me not all that long ago.

  And then I read about a twenty-four-hour race, and how walkers who completed a hundred miles or more within twenty-four hours could achieve recognition as Centurions. Such a race, I learned, was held annually on a quarter-mile oval track. You circled it four hundred times and the prize was yours.

  That prize, the article went on to report, was apt to go to an older competitor. Youth seemed to be less and less of a factor the greater the distance raced, with marathons frequently won by runners who’d be too old for top honors in a shorter race. This was even more pronounced in ultras, and the racewalker who then held the U.S. record in the twenty-four-hour event had taken up the sport in his late fifties, and was over sixty at the time of his record-setting performance.

  In fact, the writer suggested, a younger person might be at a considerable psychological disadvantage. When you’re twenty years old, and when you’ve walked ten times around a track and realize you have 390 laps to go, it’s only natural to say the hell with it and figure you can always try again next year. But when you’re past sixty, you realize you’ve got a limited number of next years, and you’re by no means getting stronger by the minute. So you’re that much more inclined to stay with it while you’ve still got the chance.

  It was appealing, I must say. I wasn’t fast and I wasn’t strong, but I did seem to be reasonably good at finishing what I set out to do. You’d have to average a little better than fifteen minutes a mile to cover the distance in the allotted time, and my cruising pace in marathons was a good deal faster than that. Of course this meant doing three marathons and most of a fourth, one right after the other, and somewhere in the course of doing all that, some alarmist might see fit to rush me to the hospital. But if I started training now, and built up the miles slowly but surely…