Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  WHEN I LEFT, Beth and Andy had also both packed it in after thirty-one laps and 62.25 miles. (There were a couple of cots in a rear section of the food tent, and Beth crawled onto one of them and passed out. After a couple of hours she woke up, went back onto the course, and circled it twice, edging me by a lap. If I’d known she was going to do that…well, never mind.)

  I got a shower and a few hours’ sleep, returning to the park a few minutes after Jens hit the Centurion line at 7:15. That left him with plenty of time for another full lap, but he didn’t even want to walk the several hundred yards from the hundred-mile mark to the start/finish line. He’d set out to go a hundred miles, and he’d paced himself with that goal in mind, and he’d done it—and as far as he was concerned, that was that.

  It was a glorious morning, cool and crisp and clear, and if they’d held the race a day later it would have been vastly different. It occurred to me that I had time for another lap myself. Ollie was out there, finishing a lap that would bring him to 76.3 miles. I could join him on the course, and join Beth at 66.26 miles.

  I never seriously considered it. I was wearing jeans, but even if I changed to running shorts I wouldn’t be in any kind of shape to get back out there. My race was over.

  WHEN I FLEW HOME the following day, I had an Ulli Kamm award in my suitcase. It was a handsome wooden plaque, eight inches by ten inches, with the effigy of a bear carved into it. (For Bear Creek Park, of course; that the bear is my totem animal is coincidental.) houston ultra weekend, the inscription reads. in recognition of walking 100 kilometers within 24 hours, the ulli kamm award is presented to—And then there’s a blank space, with two screws on either side of it to affix the brass nameplate, which I was to receive in the mail.

  I’m still waiting for the nameplate, but that’s okay. It’s a fine trophy, and I don’t need my name on it to know whose it is. Nor am I in any danger of forgetting what I went through to earn it. I was happy to have it, proud to show it off to Lynne.

  But it was never quite enough to offset my disappointment.

  At Wakefield I’d gone 63.2 miles and felt an unprecedented glow of accomplishment. In Houston I’d gone a mile farther, and had slogged through puddles to do it, and I felt like a failure.

  I could have done better, rain or no rain, toenails or no toenails. I could have stayed on the course, could have gone around a few more times. Three more laps would have taken me past seventy miles. Instead I’d lingered in the food tent long enough to make it truly painful when I tried to resume walking, and I’d embraced the pain as an excuse to give up.

  The pain had been real enough, and so had the fatigue. But pain and exhaustion are inevitable in that long a race, and I knew it, and knew how to push on through them.

  And didn’t.

  20

  THE SOUVENIR T-SHIRT FROM THE ATHENS MARATHON is one of my favorites. It’s long-sleeved, and the cut is good, and the color a good warm brown, but that’s the least of it. athens marathon, it says. 2006. And, within a classic laurel wreath, there’s the representation of a helmeted Greek warrior, running.

  You’d never guess they meant Athens, Ohio.

  THE RACE WAS held April 2, and I flew to Columbus the day before and drove to Athens. The field was small, with 135 finishers, and the course was beautiful—a flat asphalt path through the countryside, closed to bike traffic during the race. The finish line was in the Ohio University football stadium, and the final quarter-mile was a lap around the oval track.

  My time of 5:41:08 was a good deal slower than Mobile or New Orleans, but I hadn’t expected to break any records that day. I went back to my hotel and ate pizza, and the next morning I put on my new shirt and went home happy.

  I CONTINUED WALKING local Road Runners Club races while I worked out my schedule for marathons and ultras. Between Houston and Athens I raced twice, a 5K in Washington Heights and a return engagement in the Brooklyn Half Marathon. My time in Brooklyn was almost four minutes slower than it had been in 2005, and I found that surprising; with all the training and racing I’d done in the intervening twelve months, you’d think my time would have come down a little. But I chalked it up to lingering effects of the Houston Ultra.

  After Athens, I had three more local races leading up to my next marathon, coming up the first weekend in June in Deadwood, South Dakota. The longest of the three was the Queens Half Marathon, and my time of 2:37:55 was seven and a half minutes slower than the previous year’s.

  Hmmm.

  LYNNE AND I made a real trip out of Deadwood, enjoying the town before the race, then spending the following week driving around the state. During the Buffalo hunt we’d taken Polaroid snapshots of each other, wearing Buffalo T-shirts and posing in front of pertinent signage, and now we took photography to another level by inaugurating a virtual photo collection. In front of some suitable attraction—our favorite was the World’s Largest Pheasant, in Huron, South Dakota—one of us would strike an appropriate pose, while the other would aim an invisible camera, frame the shot perfectly, and click an invisible shutter. The best part of this was the baffled reaction of onlookers, but the aftermath was almost as good; back home, we had no film to develop, no prints to frame, no digital images to bore our friends with.

  The race itself was challenging. It was a point-to-point race on the Deadwood-Mickelson Trail, an old railroad right-of-way that had been converted for recreational purposes. (Rails to Trails, they call this sort of thing, and I’m all for it.) Buses took us to the start, where I stood in the Porta John line until I reached my goal, peed, and then, recognizing the inevitable, got right back into line again. I’d made the round-trip several times before it was time to get in line for the start.

  If the Athens course had been an out-and-back, Deadwood was an up-and-down. We started out at around five thousand feet, had a straight shot uphill for the first fourteen miles, then went downhill all the way to the finish. Overall, there was a net loss of altitude of around a thousand feet.

  The mile-high altitude and the relentless uphill march made the first half of the race demanding, and the first part of the downhill was steep enough to make it hard for a walker to keep from breaking stride. Early on in the downhill I bowed to the inevitable and tried switching to a jog, but that was so hard on my knees I gave it up after fifteen or twenty yards.

  I knew my time wasn’t going to be anything special, and I didn’t really care. I was enjoying the vistas, and I cruised to the finish, getting there with a net time of 6:08:08. Nothing to brag about but nothing to be ashamed of, and I now owned a shirt with Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok on it. And I’d added South Dakota to my marathon list.

  21

  THERE WERE PLENTY OF RACES IN AND AROUND NEW YORK during June and July, but I passed them up. I eased back into training after we’d returned from Deadwood, and upped my mileage along the Hudson, hoping for a good performance at Wakefield. The Houston race, my disappointment notwithstanding, had carried me from 63.2 to 64.25 miles, and I felt I ought to be able to manage at least one more lap than I’d walked a year ago.

  And was it only a year since I’d been unable to dream past fifty miles? Now I was dreaming of eighty. It didn’t seem out of the question. I’d have reached eighty in Houston, if the puddles hadn’t gotten in my way. I’d have still gone well over seventy, rain or no rain, if my own will hadn’t failed. The Wakefield course was less user-friendly, with its little patch of cross-country downhill and its long stretches of concrete, but it wasn’t all that bad, and it had the virtue of familiarity.

  We rented a car on Thursday, drove up, checked into the Lord Wakefield. This time we took along a folding chair for Lynne and a card table for all the supplies I hadn’t thought to bring the first time. (The one thing I forgot was a table knife. The food tent at Houston, besides providing me with an all-too-comfortable place to dawdle, had shown me what a food tent ought to be, and how short Wakefield fell in that department. Aside from a lot of sugary crap, the best thing on offer was peanut butte
r. You had to make your own sandwiches, and you couldn’t, because all they gave you to dig the peanut butter out of the big jar was a dinky little white plastic knife. It barely reached far enough into the jar to get to the peanut butter, and bent and sometimes broke in the process. You couldn’t even hijack a plane with a knife like that, let alone make a sandwich. I had promised myself I’d pick up a couple of thrift-shop knives and donate them, but it slipped my mind.)

  THE POET RANDALL JARRELL famously defined the novel as a long work of prose fiction with something wrong with it. Well, a twenty-four-hour race is a long run—or walk—in which something goes wrong. And in this case, as in Houston, it was the weather.

  It was warm and humid on Thursday. That seems to be the default setting for Wakefield that time of year. It was no different Friday morning, but the forecast advised that a thunderstorm was on its way, and as the day wore on the sky darkened and the winds picked up. And you could smell the rain that was coming. A Dust Bowl farmer on the parched central plains would have fallen to his knees and given thanks to God. I did not.

  It began raining lightly around the time I picked up my number at the sign-in tent. Now there’s nothing wrong with a light rain, and in midsummer it’s often more help than hindrance. I had a hooded Gore-Tex windbreaker along; it had served me well in Texas, although it couldn’t do anything for my feet, and I wasn’t worried about a light rain. But a light rain wasn’t what we got. We got a downpour, and by the time we should have been massing at the starting line, we were instead diverted to a meeting room in the adjacent motel. It wasn’t just a storm, it was a full-blown electrical cloud burst, and they didn’t dare send us out onto the course until it had passed through.

  The start was postponed a half-hour to 7:30; at 7:15 they announced a further postponement, to 8:00. Any delay beyond that hour would cut into the time of the race, because they were required to close down by eight Saturday night. So if we got under way at nine, say, we’d be starting a twenty-three-hour race. That sounds as though it ought to be long enough for anybody, but it’s not, and we were not a happy bunch.

  Beth was there—her home was a half hour’s drive from Wakefield—and so was Andy. It was good to see them again, and good to recognize faces I’d seen the year before; it was nice to have my own face recognized by the people who were putting on the race. Or trying to, if the storm would only move on through.

  Lynne heard two young runners griping about the delay. “Like I’m gonna get struck by lightning,” he said. “I mean, what are the odds?”

  THE STORM, as it turned out, was no problem. It passed overhead just in time for the race to begin at eight o’clock. A light rain continued to fall for the first hour or so, but it really wasn’t anything to complain about. It cooled things off after a hot day, and spared us the swarming gnats I’d had so much fun aspirating the previous year.

  Remember the spiritual?

  God gave Noah that rainbow sign…

  Won’t be water—be fire next time.

  Houston was water. Wakefield was heat.

  FOR THE FIRST ten hours or so, the race was as idyllic as something that effortful can be. There were no large puddles to step in, and the course was virtually dry except for the fifty-yard cross-country downhill plunge near the start. That was pretty soggy, but there wasn’t that much of it and it wasn’t that hard to skirt the watery spots. That stretch was going to be a minor nuisance anyway, and the rain hadn’t made it that much worse.

  I walked side by side with Andy Cable for most of the first six hours. Because Wakefield wasn’t a judged race, and didn’t have a walkers category, he felt free to mix in a sort of shuffling jog (or a jogging shuffle, as you prefer) on the downhill stretches. He’d pull away from me at such times; then he’d deliberately slow down when the course leveled off, and I’d catch up with him on the uphill. And so on. Between shuffles, we talked—and the laps mounted up, and the miles accumulated, and the hours passed.

  For four hours or so, Lynne sat at our table and rose to greet me at the completion of each 3.1-mile lap. Then around midnight she pleaded exhaustion and went to our room. That would have been fine, except a lap later I discovered she’d never retrieved the two big bottles of Coca-Cola from the trunk of the car, and had taken the car keys to the room with her. I drank some water and got under way, concentrating on thinking instead of all of the woman’s good qualities.

  On the ninth or tenth lap, I remember remarking to Andy that I knew I was starting to tire when the Gatorade began tasting good. He told me I didn’t look tired, and I said it didn’t taste good yet. “But it’s not as bad as it was a few laps back,” I admitted.

  AS FAR AS I know, Wakefield’s the only twenty-four-hour race that starts in the evening. The rest, like most marathons and ultras, get under way in the morning. The starting time’s a plus for Wakefield’s marathon contingent; the summer heat is a lot easier to bear when the sun goes down, and the marathoners can wrap up their race, gobble their pizza, and still make it home at a decent hour.

  But is an evening start good or bad for the twenty-four-hour participants? That’s hard to say. One very obvious disadvantage is that, barring a prerace afternoon nap, the entrants have already been awake for twelve hours or so by the time the race gets started. When their usual bedtime hour rolls around, they’ve still got three-fourths of the race in front of them.

  On the other hand, one is psychologically disposed to be most tired during the hours of darkness. With an evening start, ten hours on the course will carry you through to dawn, and the rest of the race will be in daylight, when you’re programmed to be awake. In contrast, consider my own experience in Houston; after eighteen punishing hours on the course, it was two in the morning, and everything in me yearned to be in bed. Would I have been better able to shrug off the fatigue if it had been 2:00 p.m. instead of 2:00 a.m.?

  Maybe. Or maybe not. Because ultimately one returns to that definition of the race derived from Randall Jarrell. What was it again? Oh, right—a long walk in which something goes wrong.

  When dawn broke, I could see what it was going to be this time.

  WHEN I FIRST LEARNED of the existence of twenty-four-hour races, I remember being struck by the delight to the spirits I was sure would occur when darkness gave way to dawn. One would be quite literally running to daylight, and wouldn’t that give you a wonderful feeling?

  Well, no, not really. A sunrise, like a sunset, is a phenomenon I don’t tire of viewing. And, because I ordinarily see fewer of the former, they’re that much more special. I mentioned one in Spain that I still recall—Lynne and I, reaching the top of a hill, and turning around just in time to see the sun break the horizon. I’ve witnessed others on cruise ships, and they’ve never failed to give me a lift.

  But during a race dawn is a very gradual thing, a glow in the distant sky, then an incremental lightening, as if someone’s got a very slow hand on a celestial rheostat. I can’t recall seeing the sun come into view. There’s just a moment, after the sky’s been light for a while, when it’s suddenly up there, a few degrees off the horizon. One may or may not be pleased to see it, but it’s not likely to rank high on one’s life list of peak experiences.

  My first time at Wakefield, the first lightening of the sky took place while I was in my room with my eyes closed. By the time I returned to the course, dawn was already upon us. This time I didn’t take a break during the hours of darkness, and I was out there for the return of daylight.

  And I looked up, and saw not a cloud in the sky.

  It was, no question, an absolutely beautiful morning. It’s a few minutes past seven on a similarly beautiful morning as I write these lines, with the sun up and no more than two or three tiny clouds to be seen against the blue of the sky, but the present morning is in late February, and at this time of year the sun is unequivocally one of the good guys.

  Not so in Wakefield in July. Not so when one’s faced with the prospect of spending the whole day under it.

  THE TEM
PERATURE had been just fine all through the night. The rain had cooled things down, and it was a shame it hadn’t been able to do anything about the humidity. By dawn I was coated with a layer of salty perspiration residue, and the lack of cloud cover suggested it was all going to get a lot worse.

  By six you could feel the sun, and by seven it was already strong. An hour later I’d been on the course for twelve hours, and I wasn’t far off Centurion pace. That didn’t mean I had a shot at a hundred miles, but it meant that eighty was well within reach, and eighty-five or even ninety wasn’t entirely out of the question.

  If only they could do something about the sun. Hang a cloud or two in front of it, say.

  Around nine I left the course for the first time. I wanted a few minutes out of the heat, and I was even more anxious to get under the shower and wash the caked sweat from my skin. After my shower, and after I’d put on clean socks and pinned my race number to a clean pair of shorts, I went out again. I had a cup of coffee and something to eat and got back on the course.

  I needed another break around noon. I went to the room and stretched out on the bed. I can’t recall if I slept, or how long the break lasted, but eventually I was out on the course again.

  It just kept getting hotter and hotter. That weekend was the summer’s hottest, with temperatures throughout the area reaching ninety-five degrees. That’s in the shade, and shade was in short supply on that course. For the remainder of the race, I had to take a break after every three-mile lap, just to get out of the sun. That meant ducking into the food tent and drinking water for five to ten minutes, then walking around in the sun for the forty-five minutes it took to circle the course, then retreating once again to the shelter of the tent.