Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  From the middle of October right up to race time, I made it a way of life. It wasn’t purposeful, but it must have looked that way. I overate consistently, and when I thought about it all I did was slide into depression and self-loathing, and that only served to make me hungry.

  I don’t know how much weight I may have put on in that final month, because I certainly wasn’t fool enough to set foot on a scale, but my clothes were tighter and I felt sluggish. That’s never welcome, but it’s an especially unhappy state of affairs at a race.

  Excess weight impedes performance. Whether you’re a slow walker or a fast runner, the more you weigh the slower you go, and the more energy you expend moving your body through the miles. The more you weigh, the greater the impact on your feet—and everything else—of every step you take. The more you weigh, the more the miles and the hours weigh upon you.

  There’s a widespread assumption among those who don’t run or walk great distances that doing so is a guarantee of slimness, and it’s not hard to guess where it comes from. The most successful walkers and runners are a lean lot indeed, and it’s natural to infer that running made them so, and to take it a step further and assume that anyone who trains and races as they do is sure to wind up looking like them.

  Even when one knows better, it’s easy to find oneself thinking along these lines. At Houston in 2006, I got a look at the list of forty-eight-hour entrants, and noted that one fellow had listed the T-shirt he wanted as 3XL. “Sheesh,” I told a friend, “he’ll probably be a Medium by the time he finishes.”

  It doesn’t work that way. A volunteer at the food tent of that particular race, himself an ultrarunner, allowed as how he’d never finished an ultra without gaining a pound or two. It’s just not that hard to ingest more calories than you burn, no matter how long you keep on circling the track.

  In my own case, I’ve always found it easier to keep my weight where I want it when I’m putting in my time on the road or the treadmill. And I’ve also found that doing so is no guarantee I won’t regain whatever I’ve lost. If exercise is a remarkable thing, appetite is every bit as remarkable, and more than equal to the challenge exercise flings at it.

  The edge exercise sometimes provides lies less in the calories it consumes than in the motivation it provides. I got on the treadmill in August of 2004 out of profound dissatisfaction with the shape I was in. I started walking to lose weight, and—because I was also paying attention to what I ate—I was successful.

  And after I’d been doing it for a while, after I’d gone from working out to training to racing, I found I was no longer walking to lose weight so much as I was losing weight in order to walk faster.

  When I began training for the Ultracentric, I was not merely intent upon putting miles on my legs and toughening my feet. I was every bit as interested in bringing myself to the starting line in the best possible condition for the ordeal that awaited me, and that meant dropping a few pounds. So when I got into the swing of training that last week of August, I made sure my diet was appropriate. It wasn’t all that severe a regimen, and it worked just fine, providing sufficient fuel for high-mileage training while whittling away the pounds.

  Until the month before the race, when all at once everything went to hell.

  MY FLIGHT WAS BOOKED, my hotel reserved and paid in advance.

  I wanted to stay home.

  Because I knew there was no way I could give a good account of myself. I’d trained with great intensity for two full months, and then I’d somehow done everything I could short of chopping off a couple of toes to undo that training and render myself unfit for the Ultracentric.

  I felt like that woman in the cartoon: “Ohmigod, I forgot to have children!” Except I hadn’t been unaware of what I was doing, or not doing. I realized throughout that I was neglecting my training, and the effect this neglect was almost certain to have. And, a day at a time, I persisted in neglect. I was, as far as I could tell, quite powerless to do anything about it.

  So why go? I knew I wouldn’t walk a good race, and I didn’t see how I could possibly enjoy myself. I might not be able to get my money back for the flight or the hotel, but did that mean I had to waste my time and energy, too?

  Why not stay home and watch college football? I’d been following it closely this season. Did I really have to be rubbing up a new crop of blisters while Ohio State was playing Michigan?

  I did. And I blame Werner Heisenberg.

  NOT THE MAN. The principle.

  Which I grasp but dimly and metaphorically, if at all. But you’ll remember I cited Heisenberg’s principle earlier to explain what we’d discovered while hunting Buffalos. That the towns were like subatomic particles, that the mere act of searching for them brought more of them into existence.

  Observe an experiment, we are given to understand, and you inevitably affect its outcome. Your presence as observer alters the results.

  So why did this impel me to head for Grapevine, Texas, in mid-November? Why, because I was headed there not merely as a reluctant walker but, God help me, as a writer.

  The book made me do it.

  This book, the one you’re reading, the one I so enjoyed writing in Anchorage, after the marathon, before the cruise. The book I added to aboard ship, and took up again back home. Holed up in my daughter’s house on Fire Island, assiduously avoiding my training, engulfing three meals a day and snacking between them, I’d written the whole section on our great walk across Spain.

  By now it was more than half done, this book of mine. Another month or two would recount how I’d started training on the treadmill in 2004 and resumed racing at the start of the new year. Then all I had to do was bring the story up-to-date, noting my persistence through adversity at FANS, my disappointment in my third try at Wakefield, and, finally, my performance in Grapevine at the Ultracentric. That was the race I’d been aiming at for the whole year, and it would be a fitting closer for the book, however it might turn out. All I had to do was show up and give it my best shot, and whether I broke my record or the race broke my spirit, I could write honestly about it and wrap up the book.

  All of this, though, absolutely required my presence in Texas. I could go there and walk a magnificent race, soaring past eighty miles as if on the wings of angels, and that would furnish the book with a spectacular ending. Or I could give it a brave try and be felled by weather or blisters or stomach cramps or the heartbreak of psoriasis, and the book would have an ending of quite another sort, but one that might be every bit as effective if I wrote it well.

  Or, well, how’s this? “And so when the fateful Friday came up on the calendar, I decided the hell with it, and stayed home instead. I let them run the race without me, so we’ll never know how I would have done. That’s all. The End.”

  Impossible. I couldn’t do that. I had to get on the goddam plane, had to show up at the goddam race.

  The book made me do it.

  28

  THE RACE WAS EVERY BIT AS BAD AS I FEARED.

  On the Friday before Thanksgiving, I took a cab to Newark Airport and boarded a plane to Dallas. When it landed I collected my wheeled duffel bag, picked up my rental car, and let its GPS guide me to my hotel. I walked into a lobby shrouded in plastic, the air thick with the smog of renovations in progress. I checked in and went to my room, where more renovations were proceeding apace. The cheerful fellow on the desk was quick to give me another room. Not surprisingly, they had plenty of them.

  I drove to the race site, picked up my number, had a look around. I went back to my hotel, got a pizza delivered, ate it, and went to bed. I got up in the morning, put on my running gear, and showed up at the start in plenty of time. There were quite a few walkers, with several of them good prospects for qualifying as Centurions, but the only one I knew was Ollie, and it was good to see him again.

  I told him I didn’t have much hope for a good performance, and he was sympathetic when I recounted the abrupt manner in which I’d aborted my training. We agreed that the weat
her would probably be all right, with not much chance of rain. The midday heat would be a burden, and it might get colder than we’d like during the night, but all in all we should be okay.

  The course was simple enough, and comfortingly flat. You went out for a mile, turned around, and came back. A lap was an even two miles. Do fifty of them and you were a Centurion. Nothing to it.

  I knew I wasn’t going to do fifty of those laps, or forty, either. If I did thirty-six I’d break my FANS record. If I did thirty-five I’d walk my age. Twenty-four laps would be a little more than I’d managed in July’s Wakefield debacle, and even that seemed out of the question. How could I possibly stay on my feet that long? How could I hope to cover that much ground?

  How long did I have to do this before I could give up and drop out and go home?

  FROM THE FIRST LAP, my legs didn’t feel right. What I felt couldn’t have amounted to more than the usual aches and pains, but I was overly conscious of them. Any stiffness and soreness served to confirm what I’d already decided—that I couldn’t expect to do well, that I was going to be forced to drop out, that the best I could hope for was to do enough to quit gracefully.

  There’s a TV boxing commentator who’ll sometimes describe a fighter as “doing enough to lose.” He means that the fellow’s not making the kind of effort he’d need in order to win the fight, but managing to look as though he’s trying. I was out there walking my laps, and I was doing enough to quit.

  At one point Ollie and I were walking together, and I was singing some version of the blues, lamenting that my future as a racewalker lay largely in the past. I’d come to terms with the idea that I’d never improve on my best marathon performance, that I’d be lucky ever again to get within half an hour of the 5:17 I’d done in New Orleans. I’d only get slower with age.

  And, I went on, what made me think I could ever top my 70.24 miles at FANS? I’d never be a Centurion, and I’d never reach eighty miles, either. I’d been on pace for that distance a couple of times, at FANS and at Wakefield, but each time something had gone wrong, and I could expect more of that in the future.

  Ollie told me I had an eighty-mile performance in my legs. Age might continue to slow me, and I was probably right that I could never improve my personal best in the marathon, but one of these times in a twenty-four-hour race I’d manage to put it all together, and I wouldn’t be stopped by blisters or a bad back, and neither rain nor heat would take me down. And I might never go a hundred miles, but there was no reason why I couldn’t get eighty. Maybe not today, but in some race down the line, when everything went right and, for a change, nothing went wrong.

  Well, maybe, I allowed. But not today.

  AFTER TWO OR three laps, I began to entertain the thought that this might be a good day after all. I looked at my average lap time, multiplied it out, and wondered if I could put together a respectable total. Maybe I could even set a new record, maybe I could have a shot at eighty miles, maybe—

  Then again, maybe not.

  It was in the sixth lap that the bottoms of my feet began to bother me. They felt hot, the way they do before blisters form. This time, though, I remembered the lesson I’d learned at Wakefield, and at the lap’s end I went straight to my car, where my first aid supplies were waiting. I affixed moleskin pads to the soles of my feet and returned to the course.

  That got me through two more laps, but I could tell I wasn’t going to be able to keep at it much longer. The sun was higher in the sky, the heat was mounting, and my feet were hurting me, moleskin or no moleskin. I sank into a chair after the eighth lap and had a chat with Glen Mizer, whom I hadn’t seen since we’d both struggled through the New Orleans race back in February. He lived in the area, and would be starting the six-hour race in a little while.

  I forced myself back on the course, wondering when I could let myself give up.

  Just now, writing this, I poked around online and found my lap times for the Ultracentric. I’d started off slowly, walking 15:32-minute miles, and I’d only gotten slower as the race wore on. By the tenth lap I slowed to a stroll, and at its end I’d taken five hours and thirty-eight minutes to go an even twenty miles. My feet bothered me during the seventh and eighth laps, and I’d really had to force myself through laps nine and ten, and when the tenth lap was finished, so was I.

  I announced as much during my final lap to Ollie, and to Dave Gwyn, who was one of the four Centurion judges for the walkers. Both pointed out that it was in fact a twenty-four-hour race, and that if I was hurting I could certainly quit the course for a long break and come back later on. Why, I wondered, were they telling me this? What made them think I could possibly want to return?

  I got in my car, drove to my hotel. I bought two liters of Coca-Cola from the vending machine in the lobby, called Domino’s from my room, and drank one bottle while I waited for them to bring the pizza and the other between slices. I turned on the TV, found a football game.

  At some point I took off my shoes and socks and checked my feet. I decided they didn’t look too bad. And I realized they’d pretty much stopped hurting as soon as I left the course.

  29

  SIX WALKERS QUALIFIED AS AMERICAN CENTURIONS at the Ultracentric that year, three from the Netherlands, one from Australia, and two Americans. A Belgian was seventh, at sixty-two miles; then an American at sixty, and two more, one of them Ollie, at fifty-eight. The sole woman walker in the race was an American who wins events of this sort here and in Europe almost routinely; this time she had an off day, and quit after eighteen miles.

  I went home, tossed my dirty clothes in the laundry basket, and hung up my Ultracentric sweatshirt. It was a presentable garment, it even had a hood, and it made a nice change from all those T-shirts, but I couldn’t imagine what would prompt me to wear it. I didn’t want something to help me remember that race. I’d have been more grateful for help forgetting it.

  First, though, I wanted to get it down before I did in fact forget it, and I spent a string of mornings pecking away at my computer. I’d left off writing the book—this book, that is to say—a little ways past the conclusion of the pilgrimage to Santiago, and now I skipped ahead and wrote about what I’d just gone through. It wasn’t much fun, and after a few days and a few thousand words, and hardly anything about the race itself but no end of lamenting the weeks preceding it, I gave it up. I told myself I’d get back to it in a while, and then I began to wonder if that was true. Maybe I was done with it.

  Maybe I was done with walking.

  IT DID LOOK THAT WAY. I didn’t much welcome the thought, but it was impossible to dismiss it out of hand. Writing about my preparation for the Ultracentric—or, more to the point, my lack thereof—I’d been struck by the manner in which I’d deliberately (if unconsciously) sabotaged myself. After weeks of intensive training, high-mileage weeks marked by walks of marathon length and longer, I’d abruptly pulled the plug on training and made sure I showed up at the start of the race in the worst possible condition. Just as I’d walked through twenty miles looking forward to the opportunity to quit, so I’d spent the weeks leading up to the race working to guarantee myself such an opportunity.

  When I looked back at the year, all I seemed to see was a mix of pain and disappointment and failure. I could find ways to regard my performances at Huntington Beach and New Orleans as heroic, simply for having persisted to the end in spite of the pain. That was one way to look at it, but in the end those were hard races, pain-filled races, and the only pleasure they’d held lay in their having finally ended. Wakefield had been a disaster this time, and the best I could say about it was that I’d been lucky enough to be off the course when it got rained out. And the Ultracentric, well, it had become a failure and a disappointment for me before it had even begun.

  I’d resumed racing in January of 2005, and in three years I’d taken part in fifty-two races, including eleven marathons and seven ultras. My list of states in which I’d walked a marathon or ultra stood at fourteen, plus England, Spain,
and Canada.

  Maybe that was enough.

  AFTER ALL, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d stopped. My enthusiasms are often intense, but they tend to be impermanent. I throw myself into them, and they run their course, and the day comes when they no longer hold much interest for me. I could regret this trait, and sometimes did, but it seemed to be the way I was.

  I had, after all, been a runner and walker years ago, and trained relentlessly, and entered races obsessively. And then I’d stopped, only to resume in time with as much passion and commitment as I’d ever brought to the sport. If my ardor cooled, I could stop; when the time was right, I could take it up again.

  Oh, really? Another twenty-five-year break would have me lacing up my Sauconys at age ninety-four. The good news, I suppose, is that I’d generally win my age group. Assuming I could remember how to walk.

  WHILE THE REST OF 2007 ran out, I mostly sat around and watched it go. I wasn’t working on this book or on anything else. I wasn’t walking along the Hudson, or showing up at the gym.

  What I felt, when I felt anything at all, was a sort of lingering sadness, backed with a measure of dread. That I was apparently discontinuing a practice of walking enormous distances was not alarming all by itself, but it became unsettling in context. Because I could then see it as the next item in a lengthening list of activities that no longer held much joy for me. And several of them were not the sort of transient enthusiasms one routinely picks up and sets down. They were lifelong pleasures that of late had ceased to be pleasurable.

  Reading, for instance. I’d been a reader almost as long as I’d been a walker, and it was my strong response to fiction that did much to incline me toward writing it. Over the past decade or so, I’d discovered that it rarely worked for me anymore.