Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Still, it was Fixx’s misfortune not merely to die young but to live on as an object lesson for antirunners. For years, any mention of the benefits of running was apt to be met by a raised eyebrow and an allusion to poor Jim. A couple of years ago, a good quarter century after the fellow sprinted off this mortal coil, I was one of several guest speakers at Mohonk Mountain House, in upstate New York. I put in an hour or so on the treadmill one morning, then joined the other speakers at breakfast. One of them, a forensic pathologist of some renown, had evidently noticed me on my way to the gym and began taking me to task for it.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Do you plan on living forever?”

“No,” I said, “though I’m hoping to make it to dinner. I understand there’s venison on the menu.”

“You people run because you think it’s good for you,” he went on. “Let me ask you something. Do you remember Jim Fixx?”

“ Anyone who ran a marathon... or lived a marathoner’s lifestyle...”

When I was circumvolving Washington Square Park, or trotting along some country lane or suburban boulevard, I wasn’t trying to live forever. I appreciated the fact that running would take off weight, or at least enable me to eat more without gaining. Since those pounds I lost during my Florida summer had come and gone and come again many times over the years, this alone seemed reason enough to put on my shorts and shoes and get out there.

Still, the phrase echoed, and began to do its subtle damage. Not the promise so much as the premise. The one word, really.

Marathon.

To run a marathon. To be a marathoner.

I didn’t know much about the marathon. I knew it was 26.2 miles long, and I knew they held one every spring in Boston. I knew there was one in Yonkers, too, because my friend Philip had run it, and one in New York as well. I also knew that 26.2 miles was far longer than I could possibly run.

And what did I care about races, anyway? I was in this for the exercise, and for empowerment, and the attendant sense of accomplishment. Running was a pastime, certainly, but it wasn’t a sport for me. There was nothing competitive about it, nor was it something I sought to do in the company of others. At Washington Square, I shared the sidewalk with others, but I wasn’t trying to get around the park’s perimeter faster than anyone else. I might have considered us comrades in some collective endeavor, but I don’t really think I did. It seems to me I never paid much attention to anybody else.

Then I picked up a running magazine. Runner’s World, most likely, but it may have been Running Times . I soon became a regular reader of both magazines, eager for more information on this new pursuit of mine. Maybe I could become better at it, maybe I could feel more a part of it.

There was plenty of instructional material in both magazines, but from my point of view it didn’t add much to Philip’s initial advice to alternate feet. I learned a great deal about various methods of training for races of various lengths, along with tips on hydration and nutrition and supplementary exercise. And I read reports on the results of important races, and interviews with their winners, and profiles of prominent runners.

Gradually, my view of running began to shift. You didn’t just do this to be doing it, or for the good it was presumably doing you. You didn’t do it in a heroic effort to amass endorphins, either, despite the “runner’s high” both magazines nattered on about. (I’d spent the previous two decades ingesting various mood-altering substances, and I damn well knew what it was to be high, and that you couldn’t manage it by running around in circles.)

The daily running you did was training. You trained as preparation for racing. You trained, and then you raced, and after that you rested and trained again. To race again.

And why did you race? What was the point of it?

Well, if you were one of perhaps a dozen elite runners in a field of a few hundred or a few thousand, you raced in the hope of victory. You were out there trying to finish ahead of all of the other runners. If you actually won the race, you might get mentioned on the network news (if the race was, say, the Boston Marathon) or in your hometown newspaper (if your father was friendly with the editor). You wouldn’t get any prize money, not in the late 1970’s, and if you did it would jeopardize your amateur standing, and shut you out of the Olympics.

You’d get some glory, among the relative handful of people who paid attention to that sort of thing. But some elite runners didn’t even want the glory, and it wasn’t uncommon for a couple of lead runners to deliberately adjust their pace at the end and breast the tape hand in hand, demonstrating that this was a sport without winners and losers, that everyone who finished was victorious.

And that, of course, was what brought the vast majority of runners to the starting line, and carried them through to the finish. A race was by definition a competitive event. You might time your training runs, might try to go all out and cover the distance in the shortest time possible, but it was never the same as participating in a race with other runners. Even if it was what they called a fun run, even if no one was recording the times, when you were one of a group of runners, when they blew a whistle or fired a pistol to signal the start, when there was a finish line to be crossed, it was a race.

But you didn’t have to win it to be a winner. All you had to do was finish. You would try to do better than you’d done in your last race — and, as a way of delivering your best possible performance, you might make a special effort to overtake the fellow running a few steps ahead of you. But that didn’t really matter, and you’d forget him the moment you passed him, even as you’d forget the runners who ran past you.

You and the others were in this together, but your competition was not with them but with yourself. You pinned a race number on your singlet, repinned it a few times, tied your shoelaces, retied them a dozen times, peed and peed and peed again, and finally took your place at the start and waited for the race to begin.

Remember what George Sheehan named as distinguishing a runner from a jogger? A race number.

I read the magazines, Runner’s World and Running Times, and the message began to soak in. What I was doing every day was not an end in itself. It was preparation, and I was preparing to race.

I found the prospect very exhilarating, and I also found it terrifying. Looking back, I can understand the excitement, but what was I scared of? That others might finish ahead of me? I knew they would, virtually all of them, and so what?

That I would have a heart attack and die? That a bear would escape from the zoo and run me down and kill me? No, none of that.

I was afraid I’d embarrass myself.

Now I was realistic enough to realize that, if a few hundred people joined me in this race, every last one of them was going to be concentrating on his or her own performance, and paying no attention whatsoever to me. I could finish dead last, and the only person likely to be aware of this would be the person who finished immediately ahead of me. And how would he feel toward me? Would he hold me in contempt? Hell, no. He’d be grateful, hugely grateful, for wouldn’t I have just spared him the ignominy of a last-place finish?

I knew all this, and it didn’t help a whole hell of a lot. I was desperately afraid of failing at an event in which there was no such thing as failure.

It didn’t hold me back forever. There came a time when I had a trip to Buffalo coming up, and discovered that Running Times carried a listing for a race that very weekend in Orchard Park, a Buffalo suburb. Here was a perfect opportunity; no one would know me, no one would recognize me, and no one back in New York would learn what I’d done. If I disgraced myself, it would be my little secret.