Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  Three more races in Central Park, a 10K and two five-milers. Then the Bronx Half Marathon, two minutes slower than Queens, but the course was hillier and the July heat a factor. Then three weeks without a race.

  And then, the last weekend in July, Lynne and I rented a car and drove to Wakefield, Massachusetts, just west of Boston, for my first twenty-four-hour race.

  WELL, I’D ALWAYS wanted to try one. When I first heard about it I’d told myself there’d be time enough for that sort of thing when I turned sixty. Now, seven years past that marker, I was ready to give it a shot.

  I did wonder at the wisdom of attempting a twenty-four-hour race before I’d managed a marathon. I thought of the fellow who apologized for writing a long letter, explaining that he hadn’t had time to make it a short one. It was a nice turn of phrase, but I’d always figured the guy was full of crap, because I’ve written short and long letters, short and long stories, short and long novels, and in my experience the long ones take more time. And more thought, and more energy, and more out of you.

  And wasn’t the same true of races? And, if I was by no means certain of my ability to finish a marathon, what was I doing signing up for something that—if you were doing it right—amounted to four marathons?

  “Except I won’t be trying to do four marathons,” I explained to Lynne. “I’d love to go a hundred miles someday and make my bones as a Centurion, but it’ll be a long time before I reach that level of proficiency, and it may never happen. I won’t be shooting for a hundred miles at Wakefield, or even half of that. But I ought to be able to cover 26.2 miles, especially if I’ve got twenty-four hours to do it in.”

  That’s how I looked at it. If I could do the equivalent of a marathon, no matter how much time it took me, I’d leave the course knowing that the October marathon in Niagara Falls was within my reach. And, if I had to quit before I got that far, I’d know just how much I needed to improve in order to show up at my reunion as a marathoner.

  All I can say is it made perfect sense at the time.

  THE WAKEFIELD COURSE is a 3.16-mile clockwise loop around Lake Quannapowitt, an Indian word for You’ve got to be kidding. The start is in the parking lot for the Lord Wakefield Motel, which did make life easier. We got there on Thursday, with our room booked for three nights, and at seven Friday night they got us started with an informality that made a refreshing change from the horns and gunshots that begin most races. “Okay,” said the woman in charge. “Five, four, three, two, one. Go.” And we went.

  The organizers stage two races at once, the twenty-four-hour event (which can be entered individually, as I did, or as a relay team) and a standard marathon. The marathoners begin with a short out-and-back run so that eight circuits of the lake will bring them to precisely 26.2 miles. Then, after three or four or five hours, they pick up their medals and go home, while for the rest of us the real race is just starting to get interesting.

  Except for the very beginning, when each lap begins with a steeply downhill thirty-yard cross-country run, the Wakefield course is scenic enough, with the unpronounceable lake forever on one’s right. One stretch consists of an asphalt path through parkland, while the rest is city sidewalks, mostly concrete, running through an attractive town. For several hundred yards in the latter portion of the loop there’s a cemetery between the course and the lake, but you don’t have to hold your breath on your way past it.

  They had a food tent near the start, and a drinks table with water and Gatorade, and a little more than halfway around the course they’d placed a second drinks station. Volunteers staffed these posts, and others sat at tables recording your number whenever you completed a lap. Since an unrecorded lap would be an uncounted lap, I made a point of calling out my number loud and clear as I came across the line. “Three-oh-four,” I’d cry, and someone at the scoring table would echo me for confirmation, and I’d drink the cup of water Lynne handed me and head out on my next lap.

  In the early going the course was cluttered with marathoners, some of them reeling off six-or seven-minute miles, and the slowest of them still much faster than your average geriatric racewalker. I bore them no ill will, but it was a pleasure to see the last of them.

  They all finished their marathon long before I finished mine, which I did somewhere in the course of my ninth lap. But here’s what I wrote the week after the race, in a report I posted on a marathon walkers Internet board:

  LAP SEVEN: 11:46 P.M. 22.12 MILES.

  A mind, we’ve been told, is a terrible thing to waste. Well, maybe, but it’s even worse to listen to. Mine is telling me two things—that I’m going to be able to finish the marathon, and that maybe that’s enough. After all, I haven’t gone this far since 1981. What am I trying to prove?

  I set three goals before the race—to finish a marathon, to extend it to 50 kilometers, and maybe with divine help and a good tailwind, to log 50 miles. Not only did I set these goals, but I went and told people about them. How can I stop now?

  LAP EIGHT: 12:29 A.M. 25.28 MILES

  There’s an indication on the course of where the marathon finish line is for ultrarunners, but I only learn about this later. My best calculation is that I clock 26.2 miles in roughly 5:50. Faster than I’d planned. Too fast?

  LAP NINE: 1:13 A.M. 28.44 MILES.

  I never consider stopping after nine laps. Just one more lap and I’ve made 50 kilometers, my second-stage goal and significantly farther than I’ve ever raced in the past. All I have to do to get there is keep going, and that’s what I do. “One more makes 50 K,” I tell Lynne, and off I go.

  But it’s getting difficult. My body’s holding up well enough, but my mind is giving me trouble—and I can recognize the problem as such. What stops people in races like this, I remind myself, is very often a lack of mental toughness. And right now I lack mental toughness. I’m trying to find a reason why I should stop.

  LAP TEN: 1:55 A.M. 31.6 MILES

  I’ve done 50 kilometers in seven hours, and I want to sit down. Actually I want to stop. I don’t feel sleepy, it’s not that kind of exhaustion, but something gets me over to the chair and I sink gratefully into it. I gulp Gatorade and chase it with water, and decide to change my socks.

  I’m wearing two pairs, a thin pair of toe socks to keep the toes from rubbing against one another and an outer pair for cushioning. I take off both and replace them with fresh ones, and I think Lynne brings me something from the refreshments table, but I can’t remember what. And I just sit there. Lynne asks me if I’d like to go to the room so I can stretch out, and I’d love to, but I’m not really ready to stop.

  There’s a New York Road Runners race in Central Park in late November, a 60K, and I’ve been planning on doing it. Two more laps would give me 60K now. Can’t I manage that? Sheesh, just two laps.

  I get up and head out. Of course everything hurts now, all I can do is hobble, with my calves and hamstrings all knotted up. I pause in the parking lot and use a car to support me while I stretch out my calves, and that helps, though not much. I take a few more steps and realize that my right foot is not happy. The toes are horribly crowded. I take off that shoe, peel off the outer sock, put the shoe on again, and press on.

  That’s better.

  During this lap, I exchange greetings along these lines with a passing runner. We’d talked before the race, and now he mentions that he’s back after having stopped and slept for an hour. God, imagine stopping. Imagine sleeping…

  LAP ELEVEN: 3:04 A.M. 34.76 MILES.

  I’ve finally worked out how to slow my pace. Just keep going for 55 kilometers and it slows by itself. The tenth lap, as I’ll find out later from Lynne’s careful record keeping, took 42:05; the eleventh takes 47:15.

  And it’s hard to keep going, hard to do it right. I can feel that I’m bending forward and struggle to maintain proper posture, but it’s difficult, and my back’s not up to it. It’s also difficult to maintain the arm swing that facilitates the hip pivot and lengthens the stride. There are stretches du
ring this lap when any racewalking judge would DQ me without hesitation.

  But I keep going. And my form and posture improve markedly when I turn the last corner and head for the finish line, where there’ll be people to watch me.

  Ah, ego. Only avarice can match it as a motivator.

  Lap Twelve: 3:50 a.m. 37.92 miles.

  Sixty kilometers completed, and I go straight to the chair and lower myself gingerly into it. I’ve gone ten kilometers beyond my second goal, and am only four laps from my dream of fifty miles. I remember the fellow who took a nap and got back on the course. If I stopped now, would I come back? Do I give a rat’s ass? I tell Lynne I want to lie down, and we go to the room.

  I’m in desperate need of a shower. It’s cold and clammy outside; you sweat and it doesn’t evaporate. But all I want to do is lie down. I leave my shorts and singlet on, shuck my shoes, leave my socks on. And stretch out.

  Lynne asks if she should set the clock and wake me in an hour. I tell her to make it an hour and a half. I close my eyes, and I’m gone.

  5:20 A.M. RESUME SPEED.

  Remarkably, I hear the clock; even more remarkably, I hop out of bed immediately, knowing that I want to do my four laps. That will bring me to fifty miles. I never really believed I could go that far, and I don’t entirely believe it now, but it’s only four more laps. Lynne is ready to go out there with me, but that’s carrying support to an absurd level. I convince her to go back to bed, that I’ll be fine out there on my own. She’s not all that hard to convince.

  After a sponge bath, I get out on the course again. Earlier, I’d looked forward to watching the sky lighten as I walked on through the night and into the morning, but it’s too late for that; it’s already light out. And it’s like, well, duh, night and day. I’m walking with good form, standing tall, and zipping along, and I feel uncommonly good about the whole enterprise. I don’t have my lap times for the next four laps, as my record keeper’s getting a well-deserved rest. But I think my pace is about the same as it was at the start of the race.

  I do two laps and stop to bandage a couple of blisters. While I’m at it, I put Band-Aids over my nipples. As a child I’d wondered why men have them, and now I know: it’s so they’ll get rubbed raw from friction with the fabric of your shirt. This never happened in the past, but then I’ve never walked this far before.

  At the food tent, I discover a boundless capacity for junk food, which they have in good supply. In real life I stick with Atkins, which works perfectly for me, but an ultra strikes me as a perfect excuse to gorge myself like a pig, and I do. Oreos? Peanut butter and jelly? Oatmeal cookies? Doughnuts? Bring it on! And, mirabile dictu, they’ve got coffee! And I can take my time eating, because all I’ve got to do is two more laps and I’m done, with fifty miles in the bank. I have a second cup of coffee and get back on my feet.

  LAP SIXTEEN: 8:57 A.M. 50.56 MILES. DONE.

  It’s fourteen hours and two minutes since the start of the race, and I’ve gone around that lake 16 times, and that’s fifty miles. (50.56 miles, to be precise.) I’d figured it would probably take me a good thirteen hours to go that far (assuming I could manage it at all) but I hadn’t allowed for a nap.

  I feel wonderful. Sheesh, I just walked fifty miles.

  I go to the room, where Lynne is awake. I strip, shower, get in bed. She asks when she should wake me. I tell her not to bother.

  It’s almost one o’clock when I wake up. There’s over six hours left in the race, and no real reason why I can’t add to my mileage total. After all, another four laps would bring me to 100 kilometers.

  I never mentioned this to anyone, never even said it out loud to myself, but before the race it seemed to me that 100K—62 miles—might actually be possible. And now I’m pretty sure I can do it.

  Outside, the sun’s blazing away. At 9 a.m. it was completely overcast, but now there’s not a cloud in the sky, and it’s pretty hot out there. I decide to wait until at least two before I go out, and wind up hanging out in the room until closer to 2:30. I’d just as soon not spend that much time under the midday sun, as there’s virtually no shade on the course.

  I remember some words of advice in another ultrawalker’s prerace email. He talked about the difficulty in getting through what he called the mental twilight of hours 16–18. No problem for me—I just slept right through ’em.

  2:30 P.M.

  I pin my number to my shorts, leave my singlet in the room, and head on out barechested. I’m stiff and sore at first, of course, but able to walk, and I have to say the sun feels good. And four laps seems a manageable distance. But I find myself letting my arms drop from time to time. My legs turn over at about the same speed as before (I know this from step-counting; I gave up keeping a running total back in the eighth or ninth lap, but still find myself counting breaths on each lap more often than not; it gives the mind something to do, and also gives me a sense of where I am in the lap) but my stride is shorter, and it takes me more breaths (which is to say more steps) to finish a lap.

  Interesting.

  Interesting, too, that my lats are sore now from the arm pumping. Never happened before. Chalk it up to the distance.

  LAP SEVENTEEN—53.72 MILES.

  I polish off the lap and keep on going. Early on I move up on a runner, and he matches my pace, and for the first time in the entire race I’m walking side by side with somebody. His name is Paul, and we get to talking, and it’s fascinating. This lap, #18 for me, is #28 for him. He’s been at it without a break, but this is the last lap for him, because he has to leave early in order to get to the airport in time to catch his flight to San Francisco, where he’s entered in the San Francisco Marathon in the morning.

  Two weeks ago he finished Badwater. That’s the one across Death Valley where you have to run on the painted lines on the road so your shoes don’t melt. And now he’s running 28 laps, which is something like 88 miles, and then he’ll fly across the country and run a marathon.

  Later, I check him out and find out he’s just a kid. That explains a lot. I mean, the guy’s only 58.

  He compliments me on my pace and says he’s afraid he’s not going to be able to keep up with me. I tell him I’ve been pushing myself to keep up with him, and that I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold the pace. There’s a point where I tell him I’m going to let him go ahead, and he does, and I walk along in his wake, impressed by the easy economy of his running style. Then there’s a point where he switches to a walk, and although I’ve dropped out of racewalking form at this point, I still walk faster than a walking runner, and I pass him. I wind up resuming racewalking for the last mile or so, and wait at the finish line to wish him well; he comes in two or three minutes after me, and while he collects his medal and looks around for a ride to the airport, I swig some more Gatorade and get back on the course.

  LAP EIGHTEEN—56.88 MILES.

  Two more laps. On the nineteenth lap I mix walking and racewalking, pumping the arms for a while, then letting them drop for a while. There’s really no hurry at this point. My legs are sore, and my feet hurt some, so it’ll be good to stop, but there’s no rush. All the same, I’m not about to slow down and smell the flowers, or anything else.

  Perhaps half a mile from the end of Lap 19, the thought comes to me that, if this is as bad as it’s going to get, I’m not going to have a problem knocking off one more lap after this one. And, swear to God, within fifteen seconds of having this thought, all of a sudden I’m getting a pain in the little toe of my right foot unlike anything that’s preceded it. It just plain hurts like murder with every step I take.

  It doesn’t really stop, but it doesn’t get any worse, and it gets easier to bear as I keep going. Besides, nothing’s going to stop me now.

  LAP NINETEEN—60.04 MILES.

  I stop to drink something, then announce, “The gun lap!” and start in again. Again, I mix walking and racewalking, but it’s mostly racewalking this last time around, and when I turn the corner for the homestretch
I’m racewalking all out, and really pumping, and am purely delighted that I’ve got enough left for a finishing kick.

  LAP TWENTY: 5:38 P.M. 63.2 MILES.

  “You’ve got time for one more lap,” a race official tells me. That strikes me as the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. I laugh and pass him, go to the scorers’ tent, tell them I’m through for the day, and get my finisher’s medal. I engulf some more food, suck down a packet of PowerBar Gel, eat an energy bar, grab some candy, and otherwise do what I can to make Dr. Atkins spin in his grave.