Lawrence Block - Step by Step

A couple of times a week I put on my sneakers and went out to walk alongside the Hudson. In the past few years they’ve given the waterfront a makeover, and it’s become a wonderful place to train. So I’d go out for an hour or two, and then I’d come home. And read something, or sit in front of the television set.

It was toward the end of March when I came home, and there were a couple of ultramarathon events on the horizon. Earlier I’d been considering the Corn Belt twenty-four-hour, in Iowa, which is held at a quarter-mile track — every four or six hours, I forget which, all the entrants who’d been going counterclockwise switched to clockwise, just to keep the event from becoming boring.

(Actually that’s not the purpose. I think it’s so that you don’t wind up with one leg shorter than the other. And for all that most people I know are gobsmacked by the prospect of the boredom they’re sure would accompany such an event, I don’t think boredom would enter into the equation for me. If I managed to traverse Prytania Street four times without seeing the magnificent houses that line it, how much difference does the scenery make to me? There are people who have run a hundred miles on a treadmill — not over time but in one straight shot — and that doesn’t sound boring, either. It sounds very goddamn demanding, but it doesn’t sound boring.)

Corn Belt takes place the first weekend in May, and I’d thought about it earlier, but never seriously considered it after New Orleans. But a month after Corn Belt was the FANS twenty-four-hour race in Minnesota. (That’s an acronym, and rolls rather more trippingly off the tongue than the Family Advocate Network System, for which the annual race raises funds.) FANS had seemed to have possibilities. I thought about it, and decided I didn’t want to put myself through that kind of an ordeal. I stuck to an easy walk two or three times a week, and watched some TV and read some books, and slid all too comfortably into depression.

I have friends who are subject to clinical depression, and I don’t suffer from anything anywhere near that scale. They can’t get out of bed, they can’t think of anything but killing themselves, and the only thing that keeps them from following through is lack of energy. My malaise is worlds lighter than that, so much so that I almost hesitate to use the word, but there’s no getting around it. Depression is what it is.

So, depressed, I went through the motions of being alive. It was all I could do to check the two message boards for walkers to which I subscribe; I looked in only every few days, and posting anything was out of the question. When I did force myself to go out and walk, my mind was all over the place, thinking about entering the FANS race, then thinking about canceling Anchorage.

Around the end of April, my friend Andy Cable posted a report of his first multiday race, a six-day Sri Chinmoy event held in Queens. (Sri Chinmoy was a spiritual leader who inspired his acolytes to rather extraordinary athletic feats, primarily in endurance races; his organization sponsors such events throughout the world.)

If I hadn’t been depressed I probably would have gone out there to see how Andy was doing. It’s only a subway ride away, but the way I felt it might as well have been in Mongolia. (And I’ve been to Mongolia, and I didn’t have a good time.) Andy hung in there for all six days, and logged a total of 235 miles, and posted a race report consisting chiefly of his explanation of why he’d done so poorly, and what he’d learned from the experience. Six days walking around a one-mile loop in the park! Six days! 235 miles! That’s nine marathons in six days. And he was apologizing for his performance? Sheesh...

By the time I read Andy’s report, I’d already made a decision of my own. On the 26th of April, I printed out the entry blank and mailed off a check to the people running the FANS race in Minnesota.

I had five weeks to prepare myself to walk for twenty-four hours. I didn’t know if that was enough time, nor did I have any reason to believe my feet would be up to the challenge. They’d given me trouble at Huntington Beach, and they’d put me through hell in New Orleans.

What I did know, as I was quick to explain to Lynne, was quite simply this: Given the choice, I’d rather be hospitalized for exhaustion than depression.

And it worked.

I signed up one day and went out for a walk the following afternoon. I was out for an hour. I walked two hours the next day, an hour the day after that, then three hours a day later.

Somewhere in the course of those first several days, I stopped being depressed.

Endorphins, no doubt. Exercise, everyone will tell you, induces the brain to produce endorphins, and they in turn engender a feeling of well-being. This is all too frequently described as a “runner’s high,” and for all the running and walking I’ve done over the years, and all the feeling of well-being it may have engendered, I’ve never experienced anything I’d call a high.

But perhaps the folks who use the term neglected to spend their youth ingesting mood-altering chemicals. What do they know about getting high?

Never mind. What’s noteworthy here, it seems to me, is not that endorphins were the agent of my ascent from depression, but that essentially the same exercise that produced them had failed to do so in the weeks since I’d returned from New Orleans. I’d been walking several times a week for an hour or two, with nothing to show for it but a deepening suntan and a sweaty headband. Now, all of a sudden, the same exercise on the same course was turning me into Little Endorphin Annie.

It wasn’t just the walking. That seemed clear to me. It was the fact that signing up for the race had given my walking in particular and my life in general the illusion of purpose. I was not out there walking to feel better, or walking to stay in shape, or walking to stifle my inner couch potato. I was walking with the noble goal of preparing myself to — to what, exactly?

Why, to walk innumerable 2.4-mile laps around a blameless lake in Minnesota.

And could I do it? Did I have enough time to get in enough training? And would my feet hold up?

Unanswerable questions, all of them. At worst, I figured, I could train sufficiently to cover 26.2 miles around Lake Nokomis. That’s the length of a marathon, and if I did that much I could add Minnesota to my marathon life list. I told myself I’d be satisfied with that, but I knew I wouldn’t. I’d been in three twenty-four-hour races since July of 2005, and in each one I’d improved, albeit very slightly, on my previous performance. The most recent race was at Wakefield, Massachusetts, in July 2006, and I’d managed 66.3 miles. So what I wanted in Minnesota was to break that record. And I wanted to break it resoundingly. It would be nice to walk my age and hit sixty-eight miles. It would be even nicer to go seventy.

It would also probably be impossible, but right now that didn’t really matter. I was walking, and walking for a reason, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel genuinely good about it.

I’ve been a walker all my life.

Well, wait a minute. That’s not entirely true. Before I was a walker I was a crawler, and before that I just sort of lay there like a lump.

Or so I’ve been told, but I can’t say I remember any of that. My conscious childhood memories are all of a time when I’d already learned to walk. I don’t even recall the learning process — getting up, falling down, getting up again, falling down again. I don’t have any trouble believing it happened, but I can’t remember it.

But I can specifically remember crawling, come to think of it. It was after I’d learned to walk, long after, and I think I must have been four years old. I couldn’t have been more than that, because we were still living on Buffalo’s Parkside Avenue, and I was not yet five when we moved a couple of blocks to Starin Avenue. And I couldn’t have been less than that, either, because I crawled across the living room floor to look at the newspaper. So I was old enough to read, or at least to make out a fair number of words.