Lawrence Block - Step by Step

It would have become less so if I’d forced myself to start walking. That’s how it works, as I’d discovered back in July at Wakefield. Taking a break gave the pain a chance to flower; walking through the pain forced it to recede.

But this time I couldn’t make myself do it. Besides the pain, I was profoundly fatigued. I didn’t want to walk anywhere. I wanted to be in bed. I wanted to sleep.

I got in my rental car, drove to my hotel, and called it a night.

When i left, Beth and Andy had also both packed it in after thirty-one laps and 62.25 miles. (There were a couple of cots in a rear section of the food tent, and Beth crawled onto one of them and passed out. After a couple of hours she woke up, went back onto the course, and circled it twice, edging me by a lap. If I’d known she was going to do that... well, never mind.)

I got a shower and a few hours’ sleep, returning to the park a few minutes after Jens hit the Centurion line at 7:15. That left him with plenty of time for another full lap, but he didn’t even want to walk the several hundred yards from the hundred-mile mark to the start/finish line. He’d set out to go a hundred miles, and he’d paced himself with that goal in mind, and he’d done it — and as far as he was concerned, that was that.

It was a glorious morning, cool and crisp and clear, and if they’d held the race a day later it would have been vastly different. It occurred to me that I had time for another lap myself. Ollie was out there, finishing a lap that would bring him to 76.3 miles. I could join him on the course, and join Beth at 66.26 miles.

I never seriously considered it. I was wearing jeans, but even if I changed to running shorts I wouldn’t be in any kind of shape to get back out there. My race was over.

When i flew home the following day, I had an Ulli Kamm award in my suitcase. It was a handsome wooden plaque, eight inches by ten inches, with the effigy of a bear carved into it. (For Bear Creek Park, of course; that the bear is my totem animal is coincidental.) houston ultra weekend, the inscription reads. in recognition of walking 100 kilometers within 24 hours, the ulli kamm award is presented to — And then there’s a blank space, with two screws on either side of it to affix the brass nameplate, which I was to receive in the mail.

I’m still waiting for the nameplate, but that’s okay. It’s a fine trophy, and I don’t need my name on it to know whose it is. Nor am I in any danger of forgetting what I went through to earn it. I was happy to have it, proud to show it off to Lynne.

But it was never quite enough to offset my disappointment.

At Wakefield I’d gone 63.2 miles and felt an unprecedented glow of accomplishment. In Houston I’d gone a mile farther, and had slogged through puddles to do it, and I felt like a failure.

I could have done better, rain or no rain, toenails or no toenails. I could have stayed on the course, could have gone around a few more times. Three more laps would have taken me past seventy miles. Instead I’d lingered in the food tent long enough to make it truly painful when I tried to resume walking, and I’d embraced the pain as an excuse to give up.

The pain had been real enough, and so had the fatigue. But pain and exhaustion are inevitable in that long a race, and I knew it, and knew how to push on through them.

And didn’t.

The souvenir t-shirt from the athens marathon is one of my favorites. It’s long-sleeved, and the cut is good, and the color a good warm brown, but that’s the least of it. athens marathon, it says. 2006. And, within a classic laurel wreath, there’s the representation of a helmeted Greek warrior, running.

You’d never guess they meant Athens, Ohio.

The race was held April 2, and I flew to Columbus the day before and drove to Athens. The field was small, with 135 finishers, and the course was beautiful — a flat asphalt path through the countryside, closed to bike traffic during the race. The finish line was in the Ohio University football stadium, and the final quarter-mile was a lap around the oval track.

My time of 5:41:08 was a good deal slower than Mobile or New Orleans, but I hadn’t expected to break any records that day. I went back to my hotel and ate pizza, and the next morning I put on my new shirt and went home happy.

I continued walking local Road Runners Club races while I worked out my schedule for marathons and ultras. Between Houston and Athens I raced twice, a 5K in Washington Heights and a return engagement in the Brooklyn Half Marathon. My time in Brooklyn was almost four minutes slower than it had been in 2005, and I found that surprising; with all the training and racing I’d done in the intervening twelve months, you’d think my time would have come down a little. But I chalked it up to lingering effects of the Houston Ultra.

After Athens, I had three more local races leading up to my next marathon, coming up the first weekend in June in Deadwood, South Dakota. The longest of the three was the Queens Half Marathon, and my time of 2:37:55 was seven and a half minutes slower than the previous year’s.

Hmmm.

Lynne and I made a real trip out of Deadwood, enjoying the town before the race, then spending the following week driving around the state. During the Buffalo hunt we’d taken Polaroid snapshots of each other, wearing Buffalo T-shirts and posing in front of pertinent signage, and now we took photography to another level by inaugurating a virtual photo collection. In front of some suitable attraction — our favorite was the World’s Largest Pheasant, in Huron, South Dakota — one of us would strike an appropriate pose, while the other would aim an invisible camera, frame the shot perfectly, and click an invisible shutter. The best part of this was the baffled reaction of onlookers, but the aftermath was almost as good; back home, we had no film to develop, no prints to frame, no digital images to bore our friends with.

The race itself was challenging. It was a point-to-point race on the Deadwood-Mickelson Trail, an old railroad right-of-way that had been converted for recreational purposes. (Rails to Trails, they call this sort of thing, and I’m all for it.) Buses took us to the start, where I stood in the Porta John line until I reached my goal, peed, and then, recognizing the inevitable, got right back into line again. I’d made the round-trip several times before it was time to get in line for the start.

If the Athens course had been an out-and-back, Deadwood was an up-and-down. We started out at around five thousand feet, had a straight shot uphill for the first fourteen miles, then went downhill all the way to the finish. Overall, there was a net loss of altitude of around a thousand feet.

The mile-high altitude and the relentless uphill march made the first half of the race demanding, and the first part of the downhill was steep enough to make it hard for a walker to keep from breaking stride. Early on in the downhill I bowed to the inevitable and tried switching to a jog, but that was so hard on my knees I gave it up after fifteen or twenty yards.

I knew my time wasn’t going to be anything special, and I didn’t really care. I was enjoying the vistas, and I cruised to the finish, getting there with a net time of 6:08:08. Nothing to brag about but nothing to be ashamed of, and I now owned a shirt with Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok on it. And I’d added South Dakota to my marathon list.

there were plenty of races in and around New York during June and July, but I passed them up. I eased back into training after we’d returned from Deadwood, and upped my mileage along the Hudson, hoping for a good performance at Wakefield. The Houston race, my disappointment notwithstanding, had carried me from 63.2 to 64.25 miles, and I felt I ought to be able to manage at least one more lap than I’d walked a year ago.