There were other elements of the course that kept it interesting, including a small wooden pedestrian bridge over a trickling creek and a much larger bridge that was part of an automobile route; we didn’t have to contend with traffic, there was plenty of sidewalk, but it was what the organizers referred to apologetically as “one unavoidable stretch of concrete.”
The local racewalkers’ club had pitched a support tent near the start/finish line, manned by Bruce Leasure, who would be doing the judging. Walkers were encouraged to use the tent, and one local walker, Dave Daubert, kept all his shoes there. He’d brought eight pairs along—all the same make and model, as far as I could tell—and he went through them systematically, changing his shoes every three hours. That struck me as genuinely strange, but I guess it didn’t hurt his performance any. When the race ended, Dave had gone the farthest.
Before the race got under way, I was already impressed with the way it was organized. They made you weigh in before the start, and got you back on the scales every four hours; if you lost more than a certain percentage of your body weight, they gave you a chance to eat and drink your way back to normal; if you couldn’t manage that, they could pull you out of the race.
I wondered if this was one more goddam thing to worry about, and then I remembered the words of the ultrarunner who’d volunteered in the food tent at Houston, the one where I’d spent far too much time. He’d announced that he’d never been in an ultra without weighing more at the end of the race than he had at the start.
FANS had a food tent, of course, and a medical tent as well, where volunteers were on hand to provide first aid for blisters and, remarkably, massages. The whole enterprise was well thought out and efficiently organized, and that was a plus, but then they blew the whistle or sounded the horn or fired the gun, whatever the hell they did, and from then on we had to get out there and roll up the miles.
TYPICALLY, LAPS are run counterclockwise. That’s how milers do it on an oval track, or horses at the Churchill Downs. But circumstances alter cases. At Corn Belt they switch every four hours. At Wakefield laps are clockwise, to make that steep fifty-yard cross-country patch downhill; that way it’s no worse than a nuisance.
At FANS, the start is clockwise. Then, after we’d gone perhaps just over four-fifths of a mile or just past Mount Nokomis, they turned us around, had us scale Mount Nokomis a second time, and sent us back to the starting line. We crossed it and kept on going, and the rest of our race was counterclockwise.
(Incidentally, I wonder how long that phrase will remain in use, or even comprehensible. When all the world’s clocks are digital, how will we describe our progress around a track? I may have pondered this question while I circled Lake Nokomis. I had plenty of time for idle thought, and nothing all that important to think about.)
The point of the out-and-back was not to provide us with an extra turn on that hill, but to make a couple of key points in the race coincide with the start/finish line. So we would hit the fifty-mile mark at the completion of the twentieth lap, and five more laps would bring us to a hundred kilometers. (The hundred-mile mark would come a half mile before the end of the forty-first lap.)
The start was at 8:00 a.m., and as this was June the sun was already giving a good account of itself. There was a good amount of cloud cover, though, and this increased until the sky was largely overcast by noon. It looked as though we’d be spared the full heat of a June day, which was a relief, but the trade-off was a strong possibility of rain before the day was over.
It’s always something.
Meanwhile, though, I was doing fine. It was a pleasure to be in a race that was long enough to keep me from worrying about time. I found it maddening that I had to stop to pee as often as I did in the early miles of a marathon; here there was a john set up a little more than halfway around the loop course, and I didn’t resent my stops there. In fact, I made it a part of my routine to duck in every other lap, welcoming the brief break.
AFTER THE FEBRUARY 2006 race in Houston, Andy Cable had posted an interesting observation on the ultrawalking message board. He’d stopped when he reached one hundred kilometers, although he was sure he’d been capable of quite a few more miles. What took him out of the race, he decided, was that he’d set himself too few goals. His first goal, which he’d achieved, had been to go 100K and take home an Ulli Kamm award. His second goal was to circle that loop fifty times and qualify as a Centurion.
Fifteen hours into the race, it became inescapably evident to him that a hundred miles was out of reach that day. And so, once he’d walked his hundred kilometers, he had no real reason to keep going. It was late, he was tired, his feet were soaked, so why not go back to his hotel and get some sleep?
If he’d had some intermediate goals—seventy miles, eighty miles—he might have stayed on the course a couple of hours longer.
I’d read his post and took it to heart, and set my own goals accordingly. At a minimum, I wanted to win another Ulli Kamm award. After that, I wanted to extend my personal record beyond the 66.3 miles I’d managed last year at Wakefield. I’d been less than a lap short of walking my age in that second Wakefield race, and would probably have done so if I’d been thinking in those terms, so I added that this time around. I was still sixty-eight, with my birthday a couple of weeks away, so I’d be aiming at that many miles.
After that, 70 miles was a goal. Then 75. Then 78.6—a triple marathon. And then, God willing an’ the creek don’t rise, eighty.
That didn’t mean I’d necessarily slam on the brakes at the eighty-mile mark. Anything beyond that number would be just fine. But eighty seemed like a good dream goal, not entirely unrealistic, not if everything went right, but—well, I won’t say it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, because that’s precisely what it was going to be. But it would be a very long walk in the park.
I HAD ANOTHER GOAL, a goal of another sort. There was no number attached to it, and it didn’t have anything directly to do with distance.
I wanted to keep going for the full twenty-four hours. The secret to distance, it seemed to me, lay in staying on the course. Four miles an hour was the slowest setting I ever chose on the treadmill, and four times twenty-four is ninety-six; that easy pace would carry a walker to the very brink of Centurion status.
Which is not to say that I could become a Centurion by walking fifteen-minute miles. Everyone slows down in the second half of that long a race. But suppose you walked at that pace for the first twelve hours and slowed to a stroll of three miles an hour for the remaining time. You’d wind up covering eighty-four miles. Why, if you simply averaged three miles an hour, poking along at twenty minutes a mile, you’d go seventy-two miles in twenty-four hours—and that was better than I’d managed in my three previous attempts at the distance.
That was the answer, I told myself. Perseverance. Stay on the course, keep putting one foot in front of the other. No naps, because you won’t really need one. Just pretend you’re back in college, pulling an all-nighter, wired on pharmaceuticals and bad coffee, trying to knock off a term’s worth of studying before the sun comes up…
Maybe that wasn’t the best memory to draw on.
Still, no naps, no long breaks. There’d be plenty of time to sleep when the race was over. If I just managed to keep myself on the course, to go on walking, I didn’t have to worry about my pace, didn’t have to think about it any more than I did walking unmeasured miles for hours on end along the Hudson River. All I had to do was put in my hours—not five or six or seven of them this time, but twenty-four. If I took care of the hours, well, the miles would take care of themselves.
Nothing to it, really.
RACE CONDITIONS WERE GOOD. I can’t remember paying much attention to the weather during the first eight hours or so, and that’s what you want in a race, really: weather that doesn’t make all that much of an impression. The cloud cover increased as the day wore on, and by late afternoon it was raining, but never hard enough to be a problem. It went on raining
off and on through the early evening, which wasn’t all that bad, and eventually it stopped, which was even better.
There were a lot of walkers on the course, 27 in a field of 167, but only 8 of us were signed up for the full twenty-four hours. (The other 19, along with 43 runners, would get to go home after twelve hours.) I was glad of their presence, but I didn’t see much of them as we all strode along. Once we’d strung out after the start, we were pretty much on our own. Marshall, whose cruising pace is much faster than mine, might cover five laps in the time it took me to do four—but that meant we’d only encounter each other once every couple of hours.
One person I did see with regularity was a young runner, Oz Pearlman. We’d exchanged a few words before the start, managing to establish that we’d both come from New York, and he had a cheerful greeting for me every time he breezed past me, which was something he did with astonishing regularity. I didn’t keep count, but it seemed to me as though he were racking up two laps to every one of mine, and if he wasn’t winning the race he was certainly among its leaders.
I KEPT WALKING, and the laps mounted up. There was a chart near the finish line with the mileage listed for the various laps—the out-and-back start made it impossible to keep track otherwise—so I could note, for example, that my thirteenth lap had brought me to 33.13 miles, and my seventeenth to 42.82.
That’s probably where I was around the time the twelve-hour race wrapped up, and you could tell you were in the last hour of the twelve-hour when you saw runners doing short back-and-forth minilaps near the finish line. At Wakefield, only complete laps are counted, and if you complete a lap with less time remaining on the clock for you to manage another 3.16 miles, then your race is over. At Lake Nokomis, they gave you the option during the last hour of walking back and forth on a measured eighth-mile strip, and you could zip back and forth, back and forth, until the clock ran all the way to the twenty-four-hour mark.
Or, from seven to eight that evening, the twelve-hour mark. I made my way through a batch of them as they tacked on their final fractions, and the next time I came by they were gone, and there were far fewer of us still on the course, and the daylight was pretty much gone.
“Hey, Larry! Looking good!”
It was Oz, passing me once again. He was still running. I was still walking.
WHICH IS NOT to say that I hadn’t thought about stopping.
Not dropping out of the race, nothing like that. Because I was walking well and making good time, and my feet weren’t hurting and my legs felt fine. I had every intention of finishing the race, and it looked as though I’d achieve most of my goals with relative ease. A new personal record seemed likely, and a total in excess of eighty miles was by no means out of the question.
But I couldn’t help noticing that I was tired. Maybe I could just go lie down for a while, refresh myself with a little nap. A hundred yards or so off the course there was a building with cots you could lie down on, and it seemed to me they’d said something about showers as well. Or, if I didn’t want to go that far, couldn’t I just sit in a chair for an hour?
I said as much to Ollie. We ran into each other at the food tent, or somewhere on the course—I don’t remember where, but it was an hour or two before the light failed. I remember he said I was making good time, and I said in reply that I figured I was going to have to take a break soon.
“Just slow down,” he suggested. “Keep walking, but slow your pace. Do that for a lap or two, and then you can pick it up again.”
I said I didn’t think I knew how to do that.
“For starters,” he said, “stop racewalking. Quit swinging your arms. Just walk.”
It turned out to be excellent advice. I made myself do just that for the better part of a lap, and I don’t know that it slowed me much, probably no more than a minute a mile. I can’t say that it was the equivalent of eight hours of sound sleep, and maybe all it provided was the illusion of a break, but the point is that it kept me on my feet and on the track, and by the time I’d completed that lap I’d gotten past the feeling that I needed a break, that I had to have one, that I couldn’t just keep on walking like this forever.
Through the evening hours, I repeated this trick of Ollie’s whenever fatigue suggested the idea of a break. I let my hands drop to my sides, I reduced my hip pivot and let my stride shorten, and my pace slowed accordingly. I rarely did so for more than a few hundred yards, and without conscious volition on my part I’d find I had returned to my form and my usual cruising pace. But I’d have dodged a mental bullet.
Sometimes, evidently, a change is as good as a rest. Sometimes it’s better.
THE LOOP COURSE had never been what you’d call crowded, but it thinned out considerably as the night wore on. The end of the twelve-hour race removed 62 entrants from a field of 167, and as the hour grew later, some of the twenty-four-hour crowd decided that enough was enough. Others slipped off for a nap.
I’d been told that a flashlight would be useful out on the course, but of course I neglected to bring one. Ollie had a spare, and gave it to me, and that was reassuring until I had occasion to dig it out of my fanny pack and switch it on, at which point I discovered that, unless I pointed the beam directly at my face, I couldn’t determine whether or not the damn thing was on. I guess the batteries had wasted their fragrance on the desert air, because what power remained was barely enough to enable one to locate the thing in a dark room.
That was all right, I knew the course well enough by then and there weren’t that many stretches where I’d have needed the light anyway. But between the darkness and the dropouts, I felt a good deal more alone out there; there were fewer people, and it was harder to see them.
This was something I was aware of, but that’s not to say that it bothered me. There were plenty of people at the start/finish line, counting my laps, repeating my number when I called it out (as I did each time, to make damn sure my lap got counted), providing food and drink as desired. I’d call it out again as I passed the smaller tent where Bruce Leasure was keeping his own tally of walkers’ laps—and standing guard over Dave Daubert’s shoe collection. He’d tell me I was looking good, and I’d advise him that I still had a pulse, and off I’d go on another lap. On past the double row of individual tents, where runners could stow their gear and food and stop for a quick nap, on to that first little wooden bridge, and on into the darkness.
All I had to do was keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, and I was going to break my record. In fact it looked as though I’d smash it to bits.
Unless, of course, something went wrong.
MY CAR WAS parked where I could get to it easily, and I had the keys in my waist pack. (They took up far too much space there, because the Hertz people, for reasons I’ve never been able to determine, put two or three copies of the same key on the little ring, along with the remote-control gizmo, and the ring holding them all together is fused, so you can’t disassemble it. The need for multiple keys would seem questionable, since to lose one is to lose them all. The only answer I’ve found is to cut through the ring, tuck the remote into a pouch or pocket, and leave everything else in the car. Think Alexander, and the Gordian knot.)
Sometime after midnight I went to the car, prompted by a sensation of heat on the bottoms of my feet. After sixteen-plus hours, I had blisters threatening to form. I put some tape where it was likely to help, changed my socks, laced up my shoes, and returned to the fray.
I managed another couple of laps, and stopped in at the medical tent. By this time I had substantial blisters on the forepart of each foot. A volunteer did a good job of bandaging them and got me on my feet again.
There are two ways to cope with a blister, aside from simply ignoring it altogether. You can puncture it and expel the fluid before dressing it, or you can leave it intact and protect it with the bandage. The former method relieves the pressure, and thus reduces the pain, but may bring the risk of infection. I probably would have run that risk, given the choice, b
ut I figured the fellow on duty knew what he was going. He got me on my feet again, and while I remained well aware of the blisters, they didn’t keep me from walking. If they slowed me down, it wasn’t by much.
At least I could stay in the race. While I was getting my blisters seen to, another medical volunteer was having a look at Oz Pearlman’s knee, and I guess it didn’t look good. My fellow New Yorker was twenty-four years old, wearing bib number 24 in a twenty-four-hour race; you’d think all of that boded well, and he’d breezed through forty-three laps for 105.78 miles by the time he had to visit the medical tent, but that was as far as he’d go that night. That was still good enough for twelfth place. The fellow who won the race, Paul Hasse, reached 131 miles and change, and I suspect Oz would have gone farther than that if his knee had held up.
Well, something always goes wrong in a twenty-four-hour race. It was about this time that something went wrong for Marshall King, who’d hoped to repeat as a Centurion. He was on pace to do so for the first sixteen hours or so, but his energy levels dropped precipitously sometime after midnight, and he recognized that he just didn’t have it on this particular occasion. His twenty-ninth lap was his last one, and he left the course with 71.88 miles.
Something had gone wrong for me, and it had taken the form of blisters, and I was able to walk through them. I was doing well, though not quite as well as I thought—I got my count wrong, thought Lap Twenty-two was actually Twenty-three, and when I realized their count was correct I felt as though I’d just walked an entire 2.4 miles without getting anywhere. Still, I was on pace to make eighty miles, and I’d been able to walk well past midnight without leaving the course or taking a nap. The longest time I’d spent sitting down was the five or ten minutes it took me to get my blisters attended to. I was tired, no question, but I wasn’t by any means exhausted, and all I had to do was stay on my feet and keep moving for another five hours, and that was something I was confident I could do.
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