Lawrence Block - Step by Step

And was it only a year since I’d been unable to dream past fifty miles? Now I was dreaming of eighty. It didn’t seem out of the question. I’d have reached eighty in Houston, if the puddles hadn’t gotten in my way. I’d have still gone well over seventy, rain or no rain, if my own will hadn’t failed. The Wakefield course was less user-friendly, with its little patch of cross-country downhill and its long stretches of concrete, but it wasn’t all that bad, and it had the virtue of familiarity.

We rented a car on Thursday, drove up, checked into the Lord Wakefield. This time we took along a folding chair for Lynne and a card table for all the supplies I hadn’t thought to bring the first time. (The one thing I forgot was a table knife. The food tent at Houston, besides providing me with an all-too-comfortable place to dawdle, had shown me what a food tent ought to be, and how short Wakefield fell in that department. Aside from a lot of sugary crap, the best thing on offer was peanut butter. You had to make your own sandwiches, and you couldn’t, because all they gave you to dig the peanut butter out of the big jar was a dinky little white plastic knife. It barely reached far enough into the jar to get to the peanut butter, and bent and sometimes broke in the process. You couldn’t even hijack a plane with a knife like that, let alone make a sandwich. I had promised myself I’d pick up a couple of thrift-shop knives and donate them, but it slipped my mind.)

The poet Randall Jarrell famously defined the novel as a long work of prose fiction with something wrong with it. Well, a twenty-four-hour race is a long run — or walk — in which something goes wrong. And in this case, as in Houston, it was the weather.

It was warm and humid on Thursday. That seems to be the default setting for Wakefield that time of year. It was no different Friday morning, but the forecast advised that a thunderstorm was on its way, and as the day wore on the sky darkened and the winds picked up. And you could smell the rain that was coming. A Dust Bowl farmer on the parched central plains would have fallen to his knees and given thanks to God. I did not.

It began raining lightly around the time I picked up my number at the sign-in tent. Now there’s nothing wrong with a light rain, and in midsummer it’s often more help than hindrance. I had a hooded Gore-Tex windbreaker along; it had served me well in Texas, although it couldn’t do anything for my feet, and I wasn’t worried about a light rain. But a light rain wasn’t what we got. We got a downpour, and by the time we should have been massing at the starting line, we were instead diverted to a meeting room in the adjacent motel. It wasn’t just a storm, it was a full-blown electrical cloud burst, and they didn’t dare send us out onto the course until it had passed through.

The start was postponed a half-hour to 7:30; at 7:15 they announced a further postponement, to 8:00. Any delay beyond that hour would cut into the time of the race, because they were required to close down by eight Saturday night. So if we got under way at nine, say, we’d be starting a twenty-three-hour race. That sounds as though it ought to be long enough for anybody, but it’s not, and we were not a happy bunch.

Beth was there — her home was a half hour’s drive from Wakefield — and so was Andy. It was good to see them again, and good to recognize faces I’d seen the year before; it was nice to have my own face recognized by the people who were putting on the race. Or trying to, if the storm would only move on through.

Lynne heard two young runners griping about the delay. “Like I’m gonna get struck by lightning,” he said. “I mean, what are the odds?”

The storm, as it turned out, was no problem. It passed overhead just in time for the race to begin at eight o’clock. A light rain continued to fall for the first hour or so, but it really wasn’t anything to complain about. It cooled things off after a hot day, and spared us the swarming gnats I’d had so much fun aspirating the previous year.

Remember the spiritual?

Houston was water. Wakefield was heat.

For the first ten hours or so, the race was as idyllic as something that effortful can be. There were no large puddles to step in, and the course was virtually dry except for the fifty-yard cross-country downhill plunge near the start. That was pretty soggy, but there wasn’t that much of it and it wasn’t that hard to skirt the watery spots. That stretch was going to be a minor nuisance anyway, and the rain hadn’t made it that much worse.

I walked side by side with Andy Cable for most of the first six hours. Because Wakefield wasn’t a judged race, and didn’t have a walkers category, he felt free to mix in a sort of shuffling jog (or a jogging shuffle, as you prefer) on the downhill stretches. He’d pull away from me at such times; then he’d deliberately slow down when the course leveled off, and I’d catch up with him on the uphill. And so on. Between shuffles, we talked — and the laps mounted up, and the miles accumulated, and the hours passed.

For four hours or so, Lynne sat at our table and rose to greet me at the completion of each 3.1-mile lap. Then around midnight she pleaded exhaustion and went to our room. That would have been fine, except a lap later I discovered she’d never retrieved the two big bottles of Coca-Cola from the trunk of the car, and had taken the car keys to the room with her. I drank some water and got under way, concentrating on thinking instead of all of the woman’s good qualities.

On the ninth or tenth lap, I remember remarking to Andy that I knew I was starting to tire when the Gatorade began tasting good. He told me I didn’t look tired, and I said it didn’t taste good yet. “But it’s not as bad as it was a few laps back,” I admitted.

As far as I know, Wakefield’s the only twenty-four-hour race that starts in the evening. The rest, like most marathons and ultras, get under way in the morning. The starting time’s a plus for Wakefield’s marathon contingent; the summer heat is a lot easier to bear when the sun goes down, and the marathoners can wrap up their race, gobble their pizza, and still make it home at a decent hour.

But is an evening start good or bad for the twenty-four-hour participants? That’s hard to say. One very obvious disadvantage is that, barring a prerace afternoon nap, the entrants have already been awake for twelve hours or so by the time the race gets started. When their usual bedtime hour rolls around, they’ve still got three-fourths of the race in front of them.

On the other hand, one is psychologically disposed to be most tired during the hours of darkness. With an evening start, ten hours on the course will carry you through to dawn, and the rest of the race will be in daylight, when you’re programmed to be awake. In contrast, consider my own experience in Houston; after eighteen punishing hours on the course, it was two in the morning, and everything in me yearned to be in bed. Would I have been better able to shrug off the fatigue if it had been 2:00 p.m. instead of 2:00 a.m.?

Maybe. Or maybe not. Because ultimately one returns to that definition of the race derived from Randall Jarrell. What was it again? Oh, right — a long walk in which something goes wrong.

When dawn broke, I could see what it was going to be this time.

When i first learned of the existence of twenty-four-hour races, I remember being struck by the delight to the spirits I was sure would occur when darkness gave way to dawn. One would be quite literally running to daylight, and wouldn’t that give you a wonderful feeling?

Well, no, not really. A sunrise, like a sunset, is a phenomenon I don’t tire of viewing. And, because I ordinarily see fewer of the former, they’re that much more special. I mentioned one in Spain that I still recall — Lynne and I, reaching the top of a hill, and turning around just in time to see the sun break the horizon. I’ve witnessed others on cruise ships, and they’ve never failed to give me a lift.