Lawrence Block - Step by Step

But during a race dawn is a very gradual thing, a glow in the distant sky, then an incremental lightening, as if someone’s got a very slow hand on a celestial rheostat. I can’t recall seeing the sun come into view. There’s just a moment, after the sky’s been light for a while, when it’s suddenly up there, a few degrees off the horizon. One may or may not be pleased to see it, but it’s not likely to rank high on one’s life list of peak experiences.

My first time at Wakefield, the first lightening of the sky took place while I was in my room with my eyes closed. By the time I returned to the course, dawn was already upon us. This time I didn’t take a break during the hours of darkness, and I was out there for the return of daylight.

And I looked up, and saw not a cloud in the sky.

It was, no question, an absolutely beautiful morning. It’s a few minutes past seven on a similarly beautiful morning as I write these lines, with the sun up and no more than two or three tiny clouds to be seen against the blue of the sky, but the present morning is in late February, and at this time of year the sun is unequivocally one of the good guys.

Not so in Wakefield in July. Not so when one’s faced with the prospect of spending the whole day under it.

The temperature had been just fine all through the night. The rain had cooled things down, and it was a shame it hadn’t been able to do anything about the humidity. By dawn I was coated with a layer of salty perspiration residue, and the lack of cloud cover suggested it was all going to get a lot worse.

By six you could feel the sun, and by seven it was already strong. An hour later I’d been on the course for twelve hours, and I wasn’t far off Centurion pace. That didn’t mean I had a shot at a hundred miles, but it meant that eighty was well within reach, and eighty-five or even ninety wasn’t entirely out of the question.

If only they could do something about the sun. Hang a cloud or two in front of it, say.

Around nine I left the course for the first time. I wanted a few minutes out of the heat, and I was even more anxious to get under the shower and wash the caked sweat from my skin. After my shower, and after I’d put on clean socks and pinned my race number to a clean pair of shorts, I went out again. I had a cup of coffee and something to eat and got back on the course.

I needed another break around noon. I went to the room and stretched out on the bed. I can’t recall if I slept, or how long the break lasted, but eventually I was out on the course again.

It just kept getting hotter and hotter. That weekend was the summer’s hottest, with temperatures throughout the area reaching ninety-five degrees. That’s in the shade, and shade was in short supply on that course. For the remainder of the race, I had to take a break after every three-mile lap, just to get out of the sun. That meant ducking into the food tent and drinking water for five to ten minutes, then walking around in the sun for the forty-five minutes it took to circle the course, then retreating once again to the shelter of the tent.

I had gone twenty laps the previous year, and I was determined to go twenty-one this time around. It was still mathematically possible for me to hit eighty miles, there was plenty of time left, but the heat was unbearable. I did my twentieth lap, and I treated myself to five or ten minutes in the shade, and then I knocked off my twenty-first lap. That brought me to 66.36 miles, an improvement of just over two miles on my performance at Houston.

And I decided that was going to have to be enough. My feet and legs felt fine, and I had a few more laps in me and over four hours to fit them in, but the heat had taken too much out of me, and I was concerned that it might be genuinely dangerous to spend more time under that sun.

I had very nearly run my age: I was sixty-eight, and one more lap would have taken me past that mark. I thought of that after I had well and truly retired form the race, and if it had occurred to me earlier, I probably would have stayed out there and pushed myself through Lap Twenty-two. And if I had done so, I’d have noted that I was within a lap of breaking seventy miles, and I might very well have managed a twenty-third lap on the strength of that.

It was probably just as well I didn’t.

Beth, who’d started the race with an injured calf muscle, left the race after twenty laps. Andy had a good race, twenty-four laps for 75.84 miles, but quit early because of the heat. Two runners managed thirty-nine laps (123.24 miles); one finished three minutes ahead of the other, and was therefore the winner.

I felt all right the next morning. My legs were sore and my feet knew I’d spent a lot of time on them, but I was otherwise intact. We packed up our card table and folding chair and drove home, stopping en route to visit an old friend in southern Columbia County. A few years ago, after an angioplasty, he’d begun going out each morning for a brisk half-hour walk. It was, he’d confided, an easy enough regimen for him. “On a flat surface,” he’d said, “I could walk all day long.”

Oh?

During the summer I’d entertained thoughts of entering another marathon in September. There were several good candidates, but in the end I decided to pass them all up and wait for the New York City Marathon, scheduled as usual for the first Sunday in November.

I’d earned guaranteed entry. There are several ways to avoid being one of the fifty thousand applicants who get turned away each year. You can be an elite runner; you can be from another country, enrolling through one of the official marathon tour groups; you can essentially buy your way in, contributing a certain amount to a particular charity; you can win a place via the lottery; you can enter the lottery unsuccessfully for two successive years, in which case the third time is the charm, bringing the consolation prize of automatic acceptance.

Or you can start and finish nine New York Road Runners Club races in the course of the previous calendar year. That gets you in.

And that’s what I had done. In 2005 I’d qualified twice over; my ninth NYRRC race, the four-mile Thomas G. Labrecque, was in the record books by late April, and in December I closed out the year with number eighteen, another four-miler in the park. So when the time came I sent in my entry for the marathon, and on the Saturday I picked up my number (#44464), and before dawn Sunday morning I boarded one of the designated buses in front of the main library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and in due course got off it at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island.

The hardest part of the race was the four hours before it got under way. It was a very cold morning, and most of us showed up wearing whatever sweatshirts and warm-up clothes we were willing to see the last of. I have a real Depression Era mentality when it comes to old clothes, and find it curiously difficult to part with them. I knew I was going to toss what I was wearing, and I’d accordingly picked out garments I’d owned for ages and hadn’t worn in years. For a hat I’d grabbed the remarkably ugly yellow baseball cap that had been included in the bag of goodies given to all registrants; the minute I saw it I couldn’t wait to throw it away.

I was dressed in layers, and I had gloves on, and I was still freezing. There were bagels and coffee available, but the bagels ran out, and I knew I didn’t want to drink too much coffee, as its effects are not all that different from the yerba maté that had made me hydrate all those live oaks in New Orleans.

They’ve done a brilliant job getting things going, with several corrals shuttling the runners toward the starting line at the Verrazano Bridge. I was careful to position myself way at the rear of my group, and even so, there was only an eleven-minute difference between my gun and net times. That’s how long it took me to reach the start, and there was something positively surreal about those eleven minutes, in that I spent them striding, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, along a stretch of pavement that made its way through a veritable sea of old clothes.