Lawrence Block - Step by Step

It was a hell of a sight. Piles and piles of sweats and T-shirts and gloves and stocking caps, enough discarded garments to clothe the impoverished multitudes of the underdeveloped world. (And that, as I understand it, was their destiny; all of our discards were collected and shipped off, and somewhere in some famine-raddled corner of the planet, some indescribably lucky chap is even now wearing my buffalo: city of no illusions sweatshirt. With pride, I can only hope.)

While I’m sure there had been a number of slight modifications, the marathon route was essentially unchanged from the course I’d followed in 1981. There may have been more spectators on the course, but maybe not; the turnout was pretty good back in the day.

Long after I’d left the bridge and hit the streets of Brooklyn, I continued to see discarded clothing at the curb. And by the time I was about to quit Bedford-Stuyvesant for South Williamsburg, I took off that ugly yellow cap and handed it to a very small boy.

It was not unusual for me to start a race wearing a baseball cap I’d decided I was willing to toss. Nor was it unusual for me to finish the race with the cap still on my head, or tucked into the waistband of my shorts.

I mentioned the cap I got in Summit, New Jersey; it advertised the website of Summit’s own Jim Cramer, who evidently had more baseball caps than he needed. I can’t tell you how many races and long training walks that cap survived. The damn thing had more lives than a cat. I would have worn it in the New York Marathon, and would surely have come home without it, but it was like the biblical sacrifice of Isaac, with a ram providentially appearing as a substitute. In this instance the Lord sent not a ram but a crappy yellow cap, and TheStreet.Com lived to fight another day.

It’s gone now. I can’t recall where or when, but the day did come when I took it to a race and heaved it halfway through. I can’t say I miss it, and I took a little satisfaction in seeing the last of it, but I’ll say this — to this day, it feels a little wasteful.

Walking New York after twenty-five years was like rereading a novel after a similar length of time; I remembered each part of the route as I came to it. There were sections I was able to anticipate — the curve in Greenpoint when you reach Manhattan Avenue, the Queensboro Bridge, the move from Fifth Avenue to the hills of Central Park — but other portions had faded from my memory, and only lit up when I reached them.

I had covered the course the first time by a combination of running and walking, switching to walking when my knee complained around the midway point. This time, of course, I walked all the way. My net time of 6:05:20 meant I’d spent almost an hour and a half more on the course than in 1981, but you couldn’t really compare the two; I’d run half of it the first time around, and I’d been twenty-five years younger. My 2006 time also was a good deal slower than Mobile and New Orleans and Athens, but the nature of the course accounted for at least some of that. All things considered, I was pleased with my effort and satisfied with my time.

After I’d crossed the finish line and had the chip removed from my sneaker laces and a medal hung around my neck, I had a job finding Lynne; there was an area set aside for family reunions, and I’m sure the layout would have been more immediately comprehensible to someone who hadn’t just pushed himself through 26.2 miles of New York streets. But we did find each other, and I did a little stretching, and we walked down to Columbus Circle and caught the A train home.

Three weeks after the New York marathon, I’d have another shot at the Knickerbocker 60K. I didn’t even consider it. That same weekend they’d be holding the Ultracentric near Dallas, with a program that would include a twenty-four-hour race with Centurion judging. Marshall King, whom I knew from one of the message boards, had made his Centurion bones there in 2005, and there were sure to be ultrawalkers showing up for this year’s event.

But it didn’t seem like a good idea for me, not three weeks after New York. I’d wait for Houston in February, and meanwhile I’d make my next race the Las Vegas Marathon, December 10, a proper five weeks after New York.

I don’t know that the Knickerbocker was the only local race on offer between the two marathons, but I found I was no longer all that keen on the shorter races. I had entered only one, the Staten Island Half, between Wakefield and New York, and I’d done so because of an NYRRC incentive. The club held five half-marathons a year, one in each borough, and if you entered four of the five and finished in less than three hours they gave you an iron-on patch. I’d done this in 2005, and hadn’t ironed the patch onto anything, but tossed it in the box where I keep all my race numbers. I figured I’d do the same with the 2006 patch.

I’d used the Staten Island race as a premarathon training walk, and just made it in under the three-hour limit. It was my ninth NYRRC race in 2006, which meant I had just earned entry into the 2007 marathon. But by the time I’d completed the 2006 version, I was fairly certain I wouldn’t want to do it again the following year. It was a race with many pleasures and satisfactions, but I wasn’t sure they outweighed the chilly tedium of those prerace hours in Staten Island.

(Incidentally, nine NYRRC races alone will no longer assure you of guaranteed entry. In early 2008 they announced a rules change; from now on, in addition to running the nine races, you have to serve as a volunteer in at least one race. Too many people were qualifying.)

Las Vegas has been home to my cousin Petie ever since he quit practicing law and settled into a second career as an advantage gambler, devoting himself to blackjack and poker tournaments. He’s grand company, and Lynne was glad to join me for a weekend at the Mandalay Bay while I added Nevada to my marathon list.

The course sent us several miles down the Strip and through the Fremont Street Experience before bringing us the long way home through an unappealing commercial stretch of discount furniture stores and strip malls. It was the Las Vegas the tourist never sees, and advisedly so, and we were bucking a relentless headwind all the way, and those of us at the back of the pack wound up sharing the street with unregulated traffic for the last half-hour or so. Not my favorite marathon, and not my best performance, either, with a net time of 6:03:34, but it was by no means a disaster, and I finished it uninjured and not much the worse for wear. And I got a T-shirt out of it, and logged another state. Nothing wrong with that.

I raced in Central Park a week after Las Vegas, in the ten-mile Hot Chocolate Run, so-called because that’s what they served us at a nearby school afterward. That brought me to the end of my second year as a reborn racewalker, and compared to the previous year I’d covered far more ground (375.41 versus 277.2 miles) in considerably fewer races (18 versus 25).

It was the longer races that mattered to me. My eighteen 2006 races included six marathons and two twenty-four-hour events. For over twenty years I’d regarded my record of five marathons in 1981 with awe that verged on disbelief — how could I possibly have accomplished all that in a single year? Now I was older and slower, and I’d racked up more marathons than I had in 1981, and a pair of twenty-four-hour races besides. I’d already had New York and Massachusetts on my marathon life list (along with New Jersey and North Dakota), but this year I’d added Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Ohio, South Dakota, and Nevada. If I could keep on picking up five new states a year, well, maybe reaching fifty states wasn’t entirely out of the question.

So I set about planning my marathon schedule. The Internet has made that infinitely simpler than it ought to be, and once I’d discovered marathonguide.com I no longer needed the listings in Running Times or Runner’s World : I could choose from a complete menu of races here and abroad, could check descriptions and reviews of each race right there on the site, and could follow links to the race’s own website and sign up with a few mouse clicks. After all that, having to get out and walk the race by the time-honored method of putting one foot in front of the other seemed curiously primitive.