Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Two weeks ago he finished Badwater. That’s the one across Death Valley where you have to run on the painted lines on the road so your shoes don’t melt. And now he’s running 28 laps, which is something like 88 miles, and then he’ll fly across the country and run a marathon.

Later, I check him out and find out he’s just a kid. That explains a lot. I mean, the guy’s only 58.

He compliments me on my pace and says he’s afraid he’s not going to be able to keep up with me. I tell him I’ve been pushing myself to keep up with him, and that I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold the pace. There’s a point where I tell him I’m going to let him go ahead, and he does, and I walk along in his wake, impressed by the easy economy of his running style. Then there’s a point where he switches to a walk, and although I’ve dropped out of racewalking form at this point, I still walk faster than a walking runner, and I pass him. I wind up resuming racewalking for the last mile or so, and wait at the finish line to wish him well; he comes in two or three minutes after me, and while he collects his medal and looks around for a ride to the airport, I swig some more Gatorade and get back on the course.

Two more laps. On the nineteenth lap I mix walking and racewalking, pumping the arms for a while, then letting them drop for a while. There’s really no hurry at this point. My legs are sore, and my feet hurt some, so it’ll be good to stop, but there’s no rush. All the same, I’m not about to slow down and smell the flowers, or anything else.

Perhaps half a mile from the end of Lap 19, the thought comes to me that, if this is as bad as it’s going to get, I’m not going to have a problem knocking off one more lap after this one. And, swear to God, within fifteen seconds of having this thought, all of a sudden I’m getting a pain in the little toe of my right foot unlike anything that’s preceded it. It just plain hurts like murder with every step I take.

It doesn’t really stop, but it doesn’t get any worse, and it gets easier to bear as I keep going. Besides, nothing’s going to stop me now.

I stop to drink something, then announce, “The gun lap!” and start in again. Again, I mix walking and racewalking, but it’s mostly racewalking this last time around, and when I turn the corner for the homestretch I’m racewalking all out, and really pumping, and am purely delighted that I’ve got enough left for a finishing kick.

“You’ve got time for one more lap,” a race official tells me. That strikes me as the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. I laugh and pass him, go to the scorers’ tent, tell them I’m through for the day, and get my finisher’s medal. I engulf some more food, suck down a packet of PowerBar Gel, eat an energy bar, grab some candy, and otherwise do what I can to make Dr. Atkins spin in his grave.

Back in the room, Lynne tells me one of the officials asked her if she thought I’d be back next year. “Well, there are two possibilities,” she said. “either you’ll never see him again or he’ll be back every year. It could go either way.”

How well she knows me.

After a shower and a little downtime we go out again to watch the finish. There’s a photo op, a trophy being presented to the overall winner, a guy in a singlet with flames on it who ran straight through without a break and clocked 40 laps in the time it took me to do 20. I can believe it, as he seemed to pass me every lap or so. I never did catch Flame Guy’s name, but I tell Lynne there were no flames on his singlet when he started out. It was his incendiary speed that did it.

I wonder if there’s anyone my age or older who covered as many miles as I did. Lynne says one fellow who looked older logged 21 laps, and I tell her it’s just as well I hadn’t known that, or I probably couldn’t have kept myself from going around one more time.

We stay over that night, and visit friends in Connecticut on the way home. They steer us to a celebrated ice cream place, so I can replace fat and carbs expended during the race. Actually, I’ve replaced enough of both to sustain me for another thousand miles, but the ice cream here is supposed to be special, and it seems silly to pass up something good after all the garbage I’ve ingested in the past 48 hours.

It lives up to its billing. “Some sins are worth the price,” Lynne says.

I’ve never felt a greater sense of accomplishment than I did at the conclusion of the race, and it hasn’t faded. I wound up with bad blisters on my right heel, but the cushioning I applied kept me going, and I didn’t have to break them after the race was over; by now they’re absorbed. I did have to do some surgery on a few toe blisters, and one toe’s a mess, but it’s manageable. Yesterday I was hobbling around, and didn’t even attempt a training walk, but I couldn’t see any reason not to go to the gym, where I did an upper body workout that did me a world of good. I also got on the elliptical trainer, because I was surprised to discover in the course of the race how much of a beating my quads took. (In training walks and shorter races, my quads are just fine. Chalk up another one to distance.) Turned out using the elliptical trainer (ET?) was utterly pain-free. I’ve used it a little in recent months, and it does work the quads nicely, so I’m going to try to put in more time on it in the future.

Today I’m not limping anymore, and might try a short walk now. We’ll see.

I do natter on, don’t I?

And now I see a post on the Ultrawalking board from Ollie, who has convinced the folks at an end-of-November 24-hour race outside of Dallas to include a walker category, thus conveying Centurion status on anyone completing 100 miles in the 24 hours. There’ll be judges, but the only requirement will be that one foot is in contact with the ground at all times. (Most of the time, I’ve got both feet in contact with the ground.)

It’s been said of marathons, as of childbirth, that you’re ready to do it again when enough time has passed so that you’ve managed to forget how horrible it was the first time. And that clearly hasn’t happened yet. And there’s no way I could manage a hundred miles in 24 hours.

But my form would pass the judging. And I ought to be ready for another long ’un about then.

I have to say I’m tempted...

it was not quite three months later when Lynne and I drove up to Niagara Falls and checked into a hotel on the Canadian side. On Sunday morning, a fleet of buses carried the entrants across the border to Buffalo’s Albright Knox Art Gallery, perhaps a mile from the apartment where my mother spent the last twenty-some years of her life. A few hundred men and women in shorts and singlets spent an hour looking at abstract paintings, pausing now and then to tie their shoes or dash to the bathroom. Then we went outside and lined up in the cold rain, listened to two national anthems, and began the running of the Fallsview Casino Marathon. The course looped around one of the city’s more attractive neighborhoods for a couple of miles before taking us across the Peace Bridge to Canada; then it hugged the shore of the Niagara River all the way to the Falls.

I crossed the start line, and in due course the bridge, and, after five hours and forty-five minutes, the finish line. It was an ordeal; I pushed myself, hoping to come in under six hours, and the wind and rain took a lot of the joy out of the day. But I was never in any doubt that I’d finish. It was, after all, just a marathon.