Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Why mobile?

Well, what I read about the race sounded good. And it came at the right time, three weeks before the Mardi Gras Marathon in New Orleans. And it was in Alabama, and if I intended to rack up a marathon in every state, I’d have to include Alabama sooner or later. It was, after all, first alphabetically. I couldn’t start there, I’d already logged three states (all of them beginning with N ) a quarter of a century ago, but I could certainly kick off 2006 with Alabama.

And did I intend to knock off marathons in all fifty states?

There was, I had to admit, a certain appeal to the notion. I’d read about runners in the grip of this particular obsession, and I have to say they sounded like my kind of people. They’d organized a club, which promptly schismed itself into two clubs, one for runners trying for fifty states, the other adding the District of Columbia to the mix. (Most of the Fifty-Staters seem to belong to both clubs.)

Here’s one thing these folks managed a couple of years ago. Frustrated by the lack of a marathon in Delaware (The First State, according to the license plates) they drummed up local support and managed to organize one. At its first running, a handful of Delaware residents turned up, and so did a vast crowd of maniacs from all over the country, thrilled at the opportunity to add this elusive state to their list.

How could a man who’d spent a couple of years driving from Buffalo Gap, Saskatchewan, to Buffalo Corners, Pennsylvania, by way of Buffalo Springs, Texas, and New Buffalo, Michigan, fail to be moved by all this? I found their pursuit a laudable one, and in fact I seemed to recall that it had occurred to me back in my first marathon year of 1981, when along with England and Spain I’d nailed North Dakota, New York, and New Jersey. I’d thought then that I might add other states until I had them all — but instead I gave up the pastime altogether.

I don’t know how committed I felt now. Was the goal realistic for me? Could I hang in there long enough to get all the states? If I managed five races a year, I was looking at a ten-year project. Would I still be capable of covering twenty-six miles in my late seventies? Would I feel like trying?

There was no way to answer those questions. In the meantime, though, if I was going to be entering marathons anyway, why not pick ones in different states? And why not start in Mobile?

Mobile had another thing going for it. It was one of a handful of marathons with a racewalking category. In both of the day’s races, the marathon and the half-marathon, judges would be stationed on the course to make sure that entrants in the racewalking division adhered to the rules of the sport, and the fastest male and female walkers would be awarded prizes.

I’d thus far been careful to avoid racewalker contests in New York, suspecting that my form would get me disqualified in a dedicated walking event. For all I knew, that might happen at Mobile, but if it did I’d simply be bunched with the runners in the scoring, and it would still be a marathon, and I’d still get the T-shirt. And I had the feeling the judging wouldn’t be as strict as it might be in a race exclusively for walkers.

It was a very enjoyable race; the weather was good and the course an attractive one. Some people complained about the hills, but I found them manageable after all those races in Central Park. My performance pleased me; I’d wanted to trim a little time off Niagara Falls’ 5:45, and had wistful hopes of breaking 5:30. I finished in 5:21:10, good enough for second place in the male racewalker division... but there were in fact only three walkers, two men and one woman, so it’s not as though I actually beat anybody. (A dozen or more walkers participated in the half-marathon.)

I didn’t have to beat anybody to feel elated with my accomplishment. I went home in triumph, and eventually my award arrived, a sort of abstract collage of colored paper. It came framed, but the glass was broken by the time it arrived, because it had simply been tucked into a manila envelope and dropped in the mail.

“What kind of moron would do that?” Lynne wondered.

“A bona fide one,” I told her, explaining that the awards had been handmade by the residents of a home for the retarded, one of the race’s beneficiaries. She felt awful. I, on the other hand, felt proud, and found a spot on a shelf for my prize.

A week after Mobile, I walked a ten-mile race in Central Park, and followed that a week later with the Manhattan Half-Marathon. Then Lynne and I flew to New Orleans for her first look at her hometown since Hurricane Katrina... and for my first shot at the Mardi Gras Marathon.

Katrina had severely reduced tourism in the city, but you wouldn’t have known that from the turnout for the race. Like Mobile, it recognized walkers with a separate section, and at registration I received not one but two numbered bibs; racewalkers were to wear them fore and aft, so that they could be readily distinguished from runners by the officials and judged accordingly.

I didn’t expect to win anything this time. There were more entrants, so I couldn’t pick up a prize just by showing up and reaching the finish line. Nor did I expect to beat my time in Mobile. Everything had gone right at that race, and I’d somehow managed to clip fifty-five seconds per mile off my Niagara Falls time, and I doubted I could do that well again.

Still, the course here was flatter than Mobile. So maybe I could stay under five and a half hours.

When I try to remember the race, what I recall most is how often I had to stop to pee. I greeted the dawn, as I often do, with a cup of yerba maté, and I didn’t have any breakfast, and consequently for the first two hours of the marathon I had a tougher time passing a tree than a German shepherd with a kidney ailment. They had Porta Johns set up along the course every mile or so, but during the first half of the race there were always a couple of people waiting in line, and that struck me as an insupportable waste of time.

I mean, this is a race, isn’t it? Do you see anybody standing in line for the trees? Like, do the math.

In a line for the Porta Johns at the staging area for a race in Staten Island, I heard one young man announce expansively to his companion, “The whole world is my urinal.”

When I remember the races I ran a quarter-century ago, I can’t seem to recall a single occasion when I paused somewhere between the start and the finish line to relieve myself. To be sure, memory is a selective process, and it’s certainly possible that I’ve simply forgotten the pit stops my early marathons required.

But I remember the imperative need to pee in the minutes before a race. That was something everybody evidently needed to do, even more urgently than we all had to tie and retie our shoelaces. Much of that was probably attributable to anxiety, and whatever its cause, the starter’s pistol put a stop to it. Once it went off, I was done tying my shoes, and no longer noticed that they were too loose, or too tight, or whatever I’d decided they were a moment before the gun went off. And, as far as I can remember, I was done peeing, too.

But is it possible that I ran and walked whole marathons without being interrupted by a call of nature? London, Madrid, North Dakota, New York, New Jersey — I’ll tell you, I’m pretty sure I finished them all without once stopping for a pee.

Actually, the length of the race hasn’t got that much to do with it. There’s a point in the course of a long race when that particular system seems to shut down. The dehydration resulting from perspiration may have something to do with it. Even now, I’m generally able to sail past the Porta Johns during the second half of a marathon.