Lawrence Block: Step by Step

All of a sudden I couldn’t do better than a slow and rather pathetic limp. I just stood there for a minute or two, trying to figure out what to do next. If this had happened half an hour earlier, when I was at Fairchild House, the answer would have been obvious. I’d have stopped there and then, no question. But now I was two miles past Fairchild House, and both my choices involved walking; I could walk back or walk on.

And there was the chance that the pain would vanish as abruptly as it had appeared. So I limped on to give it the opportunity.

Didn’t happen. I was limping along when Glen showed up; he’d already reached the turnaround in Audubon Park and was on his way back, and feeling pretty lousy himself; he’d had some sort of sports drink that his stomach wasn’t happy with. He asked me what I was going to do, and said later that, if I’d said I was going to quit, he’d have accompanied me to Fairchild House and quit himself. But for some reason I said I’d push on for a little while, and I did.

It took me an hour to cover the next two miles. What kept me going was the thought of how I’d feel if I started back before reaching the turnaround, only to have the pain recede. I’d really have found that infuriating. So I kept on limping, and tried to ignore the people who asked me if I was okay ( No, idiot, if I were okay I’d be walking right ) and the helpful soul who wanted to know if I needed electrolyte replacement tablets ( Thanks, but what would they possibly do for my toe? ). By the time I reached Audubon Park and swung into the 1.5-mile loop around it, I figured out my situation. I was in too much pain to go on and too stupid to stop.

And that became my mantra. I can’t go on, I told myself. I’m too stupid to quit, I replied. I can’t go on. I’m too stupid to quit. Can’t go on. Too stupid to quit...

During the park loop, my foot pain lost intensity to the point where I could walk without limping, but still couldn’t manage more than a leisurely pace. That picked up a little by the time I was out of the park and up to the twenty-one-mile marker, and it was then that I realized I was probably going to be able to finish the race. The only question was whether I could reach the finish line before the seven-hour mark, when they were scheduled to shut it down. I didn’t care if it took me every minute of seven hours, didn’t care if I was the last person across the line, but I really wanted to finish.

And the pain backed off. I honestly don’t know how that happened. Barring the intervention of a Higher Power, and I have trouble envisioning one with nothing better to do than enable an aging athlete to persist in his folly, the best I can come up with is this: the protesting nerves decided I clearly wasn’t getting the message, so why bother sending it? The fool’s best interests would be served by stopping, they realized, but he really is too dumb to quit, just as he’s been muttering to himself. So why waste our time on him?

The anthropomorphism aside, I’m not sure this isn’t how it works. Pain, like everything else, exists for a purpose, and the purpose in this instance was to alert the organism to the fact that he’d done damage to a portion of himself. The message had been delivered, and with a vengeance; the message had been ignored; there was accordingly no need to go on sending it, and the transmission ceased.

I tried this theory on a friend, and he shook his head and lectured me on endorphins. My brain started producing endorphins, he told me, and they were better than morphine at drowning pain. Well, okay, but what prompted the brain to send out this tidal wave of endorphins? Exercise? I’d been exercising for hours, and that was what had earned me the pain in the first place. I still like my theory, and there’s room to stick endorphins into it. The mind, realizing that its message was being ignored, ordered up a big batch of endorphins as a mechanism for canceling the message. There!

With the pain gone, I could pick up my pace. I was racewalking at cruising speed by the time I reached Fairchild House, and the last two miles saw me moving at my regular racewalking pace, such as it is. I was going flat out when the finish line came into view, and I sailed across it with a net time of 6:34:25. That was an hour and seventeen minutes longer than the same course took me a year ago, and my slowest marathon ever by a good half hour, and yet it felt like my greatest triumph.

“I honestly don’t know what the hell kept me going,” I posted in my race report, “outside of a deplorable stubborn streak, but whatever it was I’m grateful for it.”

They hung a medal around my neck after I crossed the finish line, and at the top of the stadium ramp there was still plenty of food and drink left. More to the point, there was Lynne, who’d headed for the Superdome after I’d passed her at the twenty-four-mile point. She drove us back to Fairchild House, and in no time at all I was in a chair with my feet up.

It took me a while, though, to take my socks off, because I was afraid of what I would find. I was still surprisingly free of pain, but enough blood had leaked through the sock to assure me that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. I did peel the sock off, finally, and the toe didn’t look good, but it didn’t look that bad, either, and it was impossible to guess why it had hurt as severely as it had.

I put a bandage on it and got on with my life. We ate in that night, Lynne went out and came home with a pizza, but the next day I was on my feet and walking around, and the day after that, Tuesday, Lynne drove herself to the airport, turned in our rental car, and flew home. And I set myself up at the desk, switched on my laptop, and started work on the new book.

It went well. Wednesday or Thursday I walked a block to the gym on St. Charles Avenue and joined for a month, and for the rest of my stay I got there a couple of times a week to put in an hour or so on the treadmill, along with a brief workout with weights. The weather was good throughout, cool early on and a good deal warmer toward the end, and I could have walked on the median strip of St. Charles, where the trolleys used to run before Katrina put them temporarily hors de combat . But that struck me as more of an adventure than I wanted. The treadmill was enough.

I’d allowed five weeks for the book, and was done in just over three. (As I said, it went well.) I stayed out the week, took one day for a walk around the French Quarter and another for a stroll up Magazine Street, then took another long walk up Prytania Street to see a movie at a neighborhood theater. I walked a two-mile stretch of the marathon route, and it was like seeing it for the first time. I’d traversed it twice in this year’s marathon and twice a year earlier, and at the time I thought I was well aware of my surroundings, but I never really pay attention to anything but the race. (I don’t wear my glasses when I race or train, I only need them for seeing.) It’s an attractive street, is Prytania, and I was happy to get a good look at its splendid live oak trees and stately homes.

I paid about as much to change my ticket as it had cost me in the first place, and flew home to New York a week early. Lynne read the new book — Hit and Run, my fourth book about a hit man named Keller — and pronounced it terrific, and my agent and editor agreed. Revisions were minimal, and took about an hour. The book was done, and I didn’t have another race until the Anchorage Marathon June 21, and I could walk it or cancel it, as I preferred.

Everything was wonderful. This book, I had decided, would be the last one for which I would contract in advance. From this point on I would simply write books when I wanted to, and submit them for publication after they were complete. Thus I would never be in a position of owing a book to anyone, and that was as close to official retirement as I figured I ever needed to be.