Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  This was a reversal of the usual order of things for me. Typically, I start slow, reach cruising speed five or six miles into the race, and hold that pace to the finish. As a result I tend to pass more people than pass me, especially in the last half of a long race when injured or undertrained runners are reduced to walking.

  No matter. I hit the finish line with a net time of 5:26:33—and, since there’d been room for every member of the seven o’clock contingent to toe the line at the start, my net time and my gun time were the same. That was a few minutes slower than Mobile a year ago, and slower too than New Orleans, but it wasn’t bad.

  Because of the early start we’d had, the race for the runners had not yet reached the four-and-a-half-hour mark, and I had the unusual experience of standing around eating pizza while I watched middle-of-the-pack runners crossing the finish line. In the usual course of things, by the time I finished they’d have long since packed up and headed for home…after scarfing down all the pizza. There was much to be said, I decided, for an early start.

  Maybe that’s what kept me hanging around the finish line. Usually I pause only long enough to collect my medal and catch my breath, but for a change I was in no rush to get out of there. As always, a good number of my fellows hurried to get into their cars and on their way, but the rest of the small field lingered for the presentation of awards.

  I’d had some aches and pains during the last few miles of the race, and I was mildly fatigued at its end, but all in all I felt pretty good. The weather had held, the course had been a treat, and I’d performed better than I’d expected. This wasn’t quite enough to transform me into a contender for the Miss Congeniality award—it is not for nothing that my totem animal is the bear—but it did push me far enough in that direction to fall into actual conversations with strangers.

  I chatted some with the walker who’d been decent enough to retrieve and return my cap, and relentless enough to beat me to the finish line. His name was John Buckley, he was from Bermuda, and he’d come specifically to add Mississippi to his been-there-walked-there list. Along with states, he was collecting countries and continents, and it seems to me—I wasn’t taking notes—that he’d chalked up marathons in all seven continents. I remember learning that he’d ticked off Antarctica.

  He’d been ticked off in turn by the several competitors who’d entered as walkers and mixed in some light running. We agreed that such behavior was reprehensible, falling somewhere on the moral scale between jaywalking and serial murder, but that neither of us found it quite troubling enough to mention it to anyone. Truly strict judging, we acknowledged, would very likely disqualify both of us, so we figured the hell with it.

  Aside from the local Mississippians, most of the runners seemed to be Fifty Staters, and some of them knew each other from other races. I overheard one man about my age explaining to a woman just how to get to Mobile. The First Light Marathon was coming up tomorrow, and she was thinking about running it. “You might as well,” he advised her. “I mean, seeing as you’re in the neighborhood.”

  I talked to him, and it turned out he would be running Mobile himself, and urged me to drive down and join them. After all, I was in the neighborhood. I told him I’d walked Mobile the previous year, and he nodded, but I got the impression he didn’t think that was sufficient reason to deprive myself of a second shot at it.

  Remarkable, I thought, as I returned to the pizza table. Here was a fellow unarguably old enough to load carbs before a game of shuffleboard, and he was going to run two full marathons on successive days, and evidently did this sort of thing almost routinely. He wasn’t the fastest creature on two legs, but that wasn’t really the point, and he got to the finish line before the pizza was gone, didn’t he?

  Mississippi on Saturday, Mobile on Sunday. There was a man who could eat all the pizza he wanted.

  And so, at least for that day, could I.

  IT TOOK A WHILE for them to process the results and hand out the awards, and by then there were just a handful of us left. When they read off the winning racewalkers, most of the plaques went unclaimed; they’d be mailed to recipients later. John Buckley stuck around long enough to pick up his award for coming in seventh, and I was right behind him in eighth place. I collected my award and drove back to my motel.

  Later in the month, I had occasion to check the race results on the Web. I wanted to make sure my time was as I remembered it. It was, and I noted that I’d been moved up to fifth place, and my Bermudan friend to fourth. They’d evidently sorted things out and taken three nonwalkers out of the standings, allowing the rest of us to move up.

  I just went into the living room and looked at the plaque they gave me in Mississippi. It’s on a shelf in plain sight, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I noticed it. I wanted to confirm that it said Eighth Place, and it does, and I’ll tell you, I can’t make myself believe that I’d treasure it more or display it more prominently if it had me in Fifth Place.

  Looking at it, what struck me was how much I’d enjoyed that race. The memory had a bittersweet aftertaste to it, though, for I know how unlikely it is that I’ll go back to Jackson for another long walk on the Natchez Trace. Even if they continue to stage it, and I continue to enter marathons, the odds are against my returning.

  Mobile, too, was a race I’ll always remember fondly. The two races are always on the same weekend, enabling the Fifty Staters to do them both in quick succession. I’d done them in successive years, and enjoyed them both, and in all likelihood neither of them will ever see me again.

  Because I’m more inclined to choose, if not the less-taken road, at least the one that I myself haven’t yet trod. For me to walk marathons in fifty states would be a sufficiently Herculean task all by itself; I’d make it impossibly difficult if I insisted on entering the same races over and over. When I’d decided on Mississippi, I was at once deciding to forgo Mobile, a race I’d enjoyed and would have liked to repeat. (But not a day later; I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. Well, not that stupid.)

  There were marathons I was just as happy to do once and once only. I hadn’t liked Las Vegas enough to walk it again, although I’d be glad enough of another visit to the city itself. I might want to repeat the New York Marathon, but not for at least a few years.

  But I had good feelings about Mississippi and Mobile and Athens and Deadwood, and the impulse to return year after year to each of them was strong. I could choose to do so, or I could opt for the new and untried.

  It is, I suppose, a choice one confronts over and over in life. I’ve known families who glory in vacationing in the same spot every year, returning again and again to the same hotel, delighting in the fact that the staff remembers them. If they run into the same fellow vacationers, so much the better. The more each year’s experience echoes the ones before, the happier they are with it.

  And I understand the appeal, I really do. When I picked up my number at Wakefield, the race directors remembered me, and I walked away with the theme song of Cheers echoing in my head. No question, it was nice when everybody knew your name.

  Another school of thought holds that the more enjoyable a trip is, the greater the imperative that you avoid trying to replicate it. You had an idyllic weekend in Charleston? Good for you—but don’t ever go back, because your second visit will never match up to the enhanced memory you have of the initial experience.

  (And memory always improves on reality, highlighting the good, toning down the bad. Whatever we remember, we recall it as better, or at least less horrible, than it was. If it’s horrible enough, we forget it altogether. And all of this is just as well; otherwise we’d all kill ourselves.)

  For my own part, I decided to look for a middle ground. There weren’t all that many twenty-four-hour races, and in my limited experience it seemed to me that my relationship to the course came second to the sheer challenge of the time and distance. And so I would have done Houston again, if the bloody Kansans hadn’t canceled the race, and I’d done Wakefield twi
ce and was prepared to do it a third time.

  And, while I’d lean toward those states I hadn’t yet checked off, I’d try not to let that particular goal keep me out of especially attractive races. I couldn’t repeat the North Dakota Marathon I’d run in Grand Forks in 1981, because they didn’t hold that race anymore—but what I’d read about the Fargo Marathon was appealing, and I’d like to enter it one of these years, even if it wouldn’t give me a new state. And the same went for a marathon in Brookings, South Dakota; I’d been to the town a couple of times and liked it, and would be glad of another look at the local university’s collection of Harvey Dunn paintings—and a long walk through its streets.

  And I’d go back to New Orleans. That was Lynne’s ancestral home, it was a city we both enjoyed greatly, and I’d had such a fine time there in 2006. A trophy—second place! A time of 5:17! The good thing about the Houston cancellation was that it allowed me to go back to New Orleans.

  Who knew it would be a disaster?

  24

  BUT YOU REMEMBER THAT PART. FOR TOO MANY MILES—slow, agonizing miles—a two-part mantra echoed in my head. It hurts too much to go on; I’m too stupid to quit.

  You remember as well that I didn’t quit, and that eventually it stopped hurting, allowing me to push through to the finish. What you won’t remember, because I never mentioned it, is that I won another plaque for my accomplishment. It turned up in the mail a few months later, astonishing me with its acknowledgment that I’d finished in fifth place among male racewalkers.

  I guess there were only five of us.

  I WROTE EARLIER about the aftermath of the race, how I stayed on in New Orleans to write a book, Hit and Run, and how I came home to depression, eventually signing up and training for a twenty-four-hour race in Minnesota in the hope that it would have a salutary effect on my mood.

  And it worked.

  I had two months to get myself in shape for FANS. The months were April and May, and there’s no better time to train. Except for the rare days when rain drove me to the treadmill, I did all my training in Hudson River Park, alternating long and short days, and grinding out the miles.

  I thought I’d jotted down all of my training hours for that stretch on my calendar, but the calendar shows no entries before April 29. That week I walked fifteen hours, with the longest day Wednesday, May 2, when I put in four hours. The following week I logged twenty hours, or eighty miles, including a pair of four-hour days and one walk of five hours.

  I was out there only three times the following week, but my long day extended to six hours, and the week’s approximate mileage came to forty-eight. Then I had a seventeen-hour week, with a long day of seven hours. I was focused on time, not distance, but estimated that I was averaging fifteen-minute miles; I trained without paying attention to speed, just going at whatever my cruising pace happened to be, and I know I was going faster in the second hour than the first, even as I’m willing to believe hour seven was slower than hour six. But no matter how conservatively I wanted to calculate, seven hours walking had to be the equivalent of a marathon.

  It wasn’t a terribly interesting marathon, consisting as it did of endless repeat loops on the Hudson piers, and walking down around the foot of Manhattan and up along the other side of the island and back again, with another assault of the piers. I walked it on Sunday, May 20, two weeks before the big race, and I took the next day off, and walked an hour the following day and five hours the day after that, and took another day off, and walked four hours before taking another day off.

  And then, the last week before the race, I walked three hours on Sunday and three more on Tuesday. And that was that. Now all I had to do was fly to Minneapolis on Friday and walk all day and all night.

  I’D HAD ONLY TWO short races so far in 2007, both of them in January, one a week before the Mississippi Marathon, the other a week after. The first was the Fred Lebow five-miler, which I was walking for the third year in succession. I walked through a lot of pain—it took me the first four miles to warm up—and my time, while a little better than 2005, was noticeably slower than 2006. The second race, also in Central Park, was the Manhattan half-marathon, and I really suffered during the three hours I spent walking it. I probably started out too rapidly, a fault I found it difficult to avoid in races shorter than marathon length, and it took me forever to warm up, and I never really got into a comfortable rhythm. I’d done the same race on the same course the previous year, with a net time of 2:36 and change, and now it was just one year later and my time was 3:03:40.

  I walked off the course profoundly disappointed. My pace had slowed from 11:38 to a sluggish 14 minutes per mile, yet it wasn’t as though I’d been taking it easy and coasting. On the contrary, I’d been pressing all the way, trying to get to the finish line as quickly as possible, and well aware that those of us who took more than three hours might not get our times recorded. I’d expended a great deal of effort, and all I had to show for it was a bad performance—and another ugly long-sleeved white T-shirt.

  It seemed to me that I could expect more of the same in any future short races. While I might have a better time of it if I managed to warm up more effectively and start slower, I didn’t stand much chance of improving my times, or even maintaining them. Because I was having to face up to the inexorable nature of the aging process, and the surprising realization that the universe wasn’t going to make an exception in my case.

  No matter how diligently I trained, no matter how hard I pushed myself, the years were going to slow me down. This had been hard to see at first, because when I’d returned to racewalking three years earlier I had improved from one race to the next, as I got into shape, polished my technique, and learned pacing and race strategy.

  And, of course, I had denial working for me. I’d reacted with surprise when it took me fourteen minutes longer to walk the Brooklyn Half Marathon than it had in 1981, and wound up telling myself I ought to be within reach of that earlier mark in another year or two. Why, all I had to do was shave a minute per mile off my time in 2005. How hard could that be?

  But aging did seem to be real, and worse yet it seemed to apply to me. It seemed to me I could feel the two years since I resumed racing, that they’d already begun to take their toll.

  Well, so what? The number of minutes and seconds it took me to cover 3.1 or 5 or 6.2 or 10 miles was, in the first place, of no interest whatsoever to anyone else in the world but me. And did I myself really care all that much? I would never be faster than I was now, but when had I ever been other than slow? As long as I got a sense of accomplishment out of my races, a feeling of satisfaction irrespective of the numbers on the clock—

  And I did—but only in the long races. The sheer unforgiving distance of a marathon made it a triumph to get to the finish line, however long it took. Every time I finished one, I felt as though I’d done something worth doing. It was easy to feel good after the first Mardi Gras Marathon, when I’d been so pleased with my time, but my second go at New Orleans left me with a good feeling of another sort. I’d taken more than an hour longer to cover the same course, but no matter; I’d gone the distance.

  That happened with every marathon. If it was in a state that was new to me, the finish line brought me one step closer to the goal of fifty states. (Plus, I suppose, D.C.) If I already had the state on my list, no matter; it was still one more marathon on my record. The ultras I’d endured might allow me to drop the phrase just a marathon into my conversation, but never without a drop or two of irony.

  After my first race in New Orleans, after I’d seen my time drop in three successive marathons from 5:45 to 5:21 to 5:17, it had been easy for me to envision the improvement continuing—not forever, mind you, but for a while. A year later, it was harder to sustain that vision, and seemed rather more likely that 5:17 would be a high-water mark, that I’d never again cover that much ground in that little time.

  I could, if I wanted, use one of a variety of formulae designed to measure one’s performance ag
ainst one’s age; that way I could race not only the clock but the calendar as well, and there were enough different measuring sticks on offer so that I could almost certainly find something that would provide reassurance. This all struck me as a pop science take on I’m in pretty good shape for the shape I’m in, and I decided the hell with it.

  And in fact I was in pretty good shape, and more likely to stay that way if I kept on doing marathons. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep at it, but I didn’t know how long I’d go on having a pulse, either. As long as I could, I’d go on walking marathons.

  And twenty-four-hour races. There would be a point, of course, when I finished with a twenty-four-hour performance equivalent to my 5:17 in New Orleans. So far I’d been in three such events, and I’d done a little better each time. Someday that would no longer be the case.

  But for now the twenty-four-hour race still offered room for improvement.

  LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON in Minneapolis I drove to the park to pick up my T-shirt and number. At the prerace pasta party, I met some of my fellow walkers. Ollie Nanyes had come up from Peoria, and introduced me to Marshall King, the Texan who’d qualified as a Centurion a year and a half earlier at the Ultracentric. I loaded up on pasta and drove back to my hotel.

  The goody bag included a parking pass; it would entitle me to park overnight in one of the lots adjacent to the course. Before I went to bed I put it where I’d be sure to remember it, and of course I forgot all about it. I was able to get a spare pass the next morning from one of the race directors, and left my car in a good spot.

  The course was a 2.42-mile loop around Lake Nokomis, most of it on asphalt paths through the park. There were a few brief cross-country sections, where they routed you from one path to another, and one significant cross-country stretch that had us going over a significant rise. Someone had posted a sign identifying the thing as Mount Nokomis, with a mock elevation chart that showed the decimal point migrating to the right, depending on which lap one was on. A walker would be hard put to maintain good form while scaling Mount Nokomis, but no one expected you to.