Lawrence Block - Step by Step

But now in an instant I’m on Amazon or Alibris, and in another instant I’ve bought the book, and before I’ve had time to think it through I’ve bought two more books I don’t want or need just to save on shipping charges.

Now all of that is fine when it happens to somebody else, and they’re buying my books. So I suppose it evens out, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

If I’d had time to think about it, if I’d had to make out a check and write a letter and address an envelope, and then go hunt for a stamp, well, maybe the outcome might have been different. But all I had to do was tap a few keys and click my mouse a few times and suddenly I was a member in good standing of New York Road Runners, with my registration prepaid for a five-mile race on January 9 and a tenmiler three weeks later. And, because I was over sixty-five (though evidently not old enough to know better) I joined as a senior member, and got a reduced senior rate on my race entry fees. Such a deal!

Lynne was very supportive. She thought it was a great idea, and asked if they’d be giving out shirts. I said it seemed likely, and she said that was terrific, a free T-shirt. I told her there was no such thing as a free T-shirt.

Nor was my investment going to be limited to what I’d spent online. I’d been walking up to five miles at a clip, but I’d been doing every bit of that training indoors, on a treadmill, and they weren’t going to be so considerate as to hold the race in my gym. I’d be walking in Central Park, with its renowned hills, and it was January, which meant it would be cold and there might well be snow on the ground. I had to go to a sporting goods store and pick out things to wear, high-tech gear that would keep me warm while allowing perspiration to escape. I could have stocked up on T-shirts for what I shelled out.

I emailed my kids with news of my upcoming adventure, and my daughter Jill surprised me by signing up for the five-mile race; she lives near the club’s headquarters, and offered to pick up my number bib and T-shirt. I met her at her apartment on Sunday morning, and after I’d spent ten minutes getting my number pinned on just right, we walked over to the park in time for the race.

And it went fine. It was cold, but it turned out I was dressed fine for it, and my legs were up to the challenge of the park’s hills. I hit the big hill at the northern end of the park about a mile into the race, and it was challenging, but I was pleased to note that I passed a lot of back-of-the-pack runners on the long steep ascent. They found themselves forced to break stride and walk, and as a racewalker I was able to breeze right by them.

Breeze may not be the word I’m looking for here, as it suggests a degree of effortlessness that was not at all in evidence. The race took all I had to give it, and when I was done Jill was waiting at the finish line, having run across it a few minutes ahead of me. We went out for breakfast, and back at her place I changed into street clothes, and put on the shirt I’d just earned. The race was the Fred Lebow Memorial, and the shirt bore a likeness of the man himself, and I wore it with pride.

Then I went home, and without having to think about it I went right to the very bookshelf where my copy of Joe Henderson’s Run Farther, Run Faster had been waiting all this time. (Well, actually, it had been waiting in that spot for a mere eleven and a half years, because that’s how long we’d been living in our apartment. Before that, it had followed me from place to place.)

I took it from the shelf and flipped to the once-blank pages at the back, where I’d logged all of my old races. The final entry for my last event in 1982 read: 8K Halloween—58:05—racewalk—#1265.

One line down I wrote 2005, and on the line below that I printed 5 mile Fred Lebow—9 Jan—1:00:21—racewalk, then added my bib number ( #5203 ) and my pace per mile ( 12:04 ).

Wow.

The weeks went by and the list began to lengthen. Ten miles in Central Park on January 29. Five kilometers in Las Vegas a week later. Another race in the park, 15K, on February 13, and then a 5K in the streets of Washington Heights the first week in March.

Two weeks later came a race I’d completed once before. It was the Brooklyn Half Marathon, and I’d been in its inaugural edition in 1981; it was my fifth race as a walker, and my final race before the London Marathon. The course was as I remembered it, starting with an out-and-back couple of miles on the Coney Island boardwalk, then following Ocean Parkway through the borough to Prospect Park, where Lynne was waiting to greet me. Coming home, they let us all on the subway for free. A free shirt, a free ride home — how could you beat that?

But when I logged the race in my book, I compared my time of 2:36:04 to my 1981 time of 2:22:25. I was a little more than a minute a mile slower, and I couldn’t understand it. Back then I’d just been learning to racewalk, it was only my fifth race, and my form these days was greatly improved, and—

“Honey,” Lynne pointed out gently, “you’re twenty-four years older now.”

“Oh,” I said.

Now I knew well enough that age, all by itself, was enough to knock the edge off any athlete’s game. It takes a few miles per hour off a pitcher’s fastball, it keeps a wide receiver from racing clear of a cornerback, and on the golf course it shortens tee shots and even makes putts a little less likely to find the cup. And of course it slows runners down. That’s why they award prizes by age groups, and why runners with milestone birthdays can draw some consolation from their new status. On the day you turn forty, you stop competing with the thirty-five-to-thirty-nine crowd and set your sights on the forty-to-forty-four year olds. Cold comfort, perhaps, but better than no comfort at all.

I knew all that, but evidently shrugged it off as one tends to dismiss mortality; yes, sure, everybody dies, but I’m different.

While I wasn’t quite ready to abandon the notion that I was going to live forever, I had to acknowledge that an additional minute per mile after a quarter of a century was only to be expected. In fact, all things considered, it wasn’t that bad at all.

Besides, I was improving, wasn’t I? Training longer and harder, working on my form. It stood to reason that I could trim a few minutes off my half-marathon time. I might not quite get it down to what it had been in 1981, but I could at least move in that direction, couldn’t I?

Not that speed really mattered all that much to me. It was a way to check on how I was doing, but it wasn’t important in and of itself.

What I really cared about was being able to finish a marathon.

This time I couldn’t even blame the Internet. It was in a copy of Running Times that I learned about the Fallsview Casino Marathon, scheduled for the 23rd of October. The race would begin in Buffalo, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and after a few miles in a neighborhood I knew intimately it would cross the Peace Bridge into Canada and skirt the Niagara River all the way to the Falls.

The race was on a Sunday, and the following weekend members of the Bennett High School Class of 1955 would be celebrating their fiftieth reunion. Lynne and I were planning to attend, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and how would it feel to walk into the reunion after having just days before completed a marathon right there in Buffalo?

By the time I found out about the race and signed up for it, I had a good six months to prepare for it. That seemed as though it ought to be ample time — if in fact a 26.2-mile race was within the realm of possibility for me. I didn’t know that it was, not at this stage of my life, not on these feet and legs. And as far as I could make out, the only way to find out if I could go the distance was to try.