Lawrence Block - Step by Step

It’s funny, really, the way things happen, and the way they don’t. I’d done five marathons in the course of a year, and had ended on a high note, and I certainly expected to do as many marathons in 1982, if not more.

One thing I did, not long after the first of the year, was move from Washington Heights to Greenpoint. The apartment I found, a fourth-floor railroad flat, was on Manhattan Avenue, just a little ways past the midpoint of the New York City Marathon. I’d taken note of Greenpoint while running through it, and was impressed enough to choose it for the secret residence of Matthew Scudder’s client in Eight Million Ways to Die, and that’s where I looked when I decided to get a place of my own.

I liked living in Greenpoint. It’s become very trendy since then, though it doesn’t look all that different. While I was living there, I found the dated feel of the neighborhood very appealing. It was situated, I told friends, in a different time zone from the rest of the city. “When it’s eight-thirty in Manhattan,” I explained, “it’s 1948 in Greenpoint.”

It was an easy place to live, and it should have been a good place to train. McCarren Park was five or ten minutes from my apartment, and the oval asphalt path was ideal for racewalking.

Or it would have been, if it weren’t for the goddam kids.

There was a high school on Bedford Avenue across from the park, where a few hundred of Brooklyn’s finest young men were presumably engaged in studying auto or aviation mechanics. I could see where a knowledge of auto mechanics would come in handy when the little bastards went into business as car thieves and chop shop bandits, but the airplane portion of the curriculum struck me as impractical.

Evidently it struck some of them the same way, because a substantial portion of the student body spent much of their time outdoors, in or around the park. And they seemed to believe — not, I grant you, without some justification — that a middle-aged man racewalking was as funny a sight as you could see this side of the Cartoon Network.

I was sustained by the notion that, if you ignore people who are jeering at you, sooner or later they’ll stop. They, on the other hand, had figured out that if you make sport of some poor bastard long enough, sooner or later he’ll give up and go home — and the longer he lasts, the more amusement he’ll provide.

I’ll tell you, it took a lot of the joy out of my training.

Still, i could have managed. If it had been important to me, I could have found a way to get the miles in.

I joined the Greenpoint YMCA, just a block or two from my apartment, and went there a couple of times a week to work out with weights. I stopped using the sauna when some of the junior members discovered the lasting impact they could achieve by pissing on the hot rocks. It was enough to keep a person out of the sauna — and, before too long, out of the Y altogether.

They may have had a treadmill at the Y. I don’t recall one, and at the time cardiovascular equipment was by no means standard in neighborhood gyms. If they’d had one I doubt I’d have used it. Running and racewalking, as far as I was concerned, were things you did outside.

If you did them at all.

And it was becoming increasingly easy not to bother. The conventional wisdom held that running was addictive, but it seemed to me that not running was a good deal more addictive. It was an easy habit to acquire, and a hard one to break.

And so it wasn’t until June that I finally entered a race, and in October the 8K Halloween race was my ninth and last of the year. I walked all nine races, and my record book shows that I averaged eleven-minute miles. There were three four-mile events, a couple of 10Ks, and one half marathon. (There was also a six-mile race held right in Greenpoint, and my time of 1:04:03 would be more impressive but for the fact that the course measurement was off by a substantial distance.)

There was a five-mile race in Central Park on October 17; they called it a Computer Run, because they used the occasion to test the computerized scoring system that would be in use a week later at the NYC Marathon. I never even tried to register for the marathon, never even considered it, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the training base for it. A week later was the Halloween 8K, and my time was a little over two minutes slower than the previous year, so a year of light training hadn’t cost me all that much. I could still do this.

But I didn’t, not for more than twenty-two years.

in July of 1982, I started spending time with a woman I’d met the previous fall, shortly after my return from California. We’d become friendly, but we were both involved with other people at the time; by July we had both found our way out of those relationships, and discovered one another.

One thing that was clear to both of us was that we were not interested in a relationship. Yeah, right. The following February we became engaged — engaged! — and in October of 1983 we were married, and we’ve been remarkably happy ever since.

It’s tempting to make the case that I’d taken up running (and eventually walking) out of discontent with my circumstances. Any dimestore Freud could nod sagely at my odyssey in the summer of ’81, stroke his beard, and pontificate: Ah, so. And what were you running away from, eh? And then, he’d point out, once Lynne and I began keeping company, I no longer had to run away from anything, and so I stopped.

Well, maybe. It’s hard to argue the point, but it seems to me there were other factors operating.

One was a matter of overload. I’d done far too much running and walking in 1981 — forty races, for God’s sake, and five of them full marathons. I was tired of it, mentally and emotionally, certainly, and very likely physically as well.

Just as important, I had a lot more demands on my time. Besides my writing workload, which picked up around then, I developed an interactive writing seminar, and for a couple of years Lynne and I were in the seminar business, flying around the country every weekend. (We called the seminar Write For Your Life, and what a mistake that turned out to be; a surprising number of venues thought it had something to do, pro or con, with abortion, and didn’t want to have anything to do with us.) The seminar was enormously satisfying in every respect but financially — I think the return on our time amounted to something like fifty cents an hour — and we put a lot of time and effort into it for about three years.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1985, we gave up our apartment in New York and moved to Florida. We bought a house right on the Gulf, and the first day I took a walk on the beach, heading north. The next day I did the same thing but headed in the opposite direction. The day after that I stayed home.

A couple of times during our Florida years I tried running on the beach. (Racewalking on the sand didn’t really work.) But it was too hot, and I was out of shape, and it didn’t take me long to abandon the enterprise. Running, or walking, or whatever you wanted to call it, seemed to be something I had embraced for a while, and something with which I was finished. Once in a while I would wear a race T-shirt and remember what I’d done to earn it. Now and then I would recall, in contemplation or conversation, that I had in fact run marathons, that I’d done five of them in the course of a single year. When I reported this to acquaintances, they seemed impressed; I was impressed as well, and a little wistful. All of that was a part of the past now, as impossible to recapture as any of the rest of it, and all of it, as the song had it, Gone, alas, like my youth, too soon .

I was sitting in the living room of our house in Fort Myers Beach when, out of nowhere, I envisioned a man walking eastward across America. As he walked, other people joined him.