Lawrence Block - Step by Step

I picked out my races, starting with the Mississippi Marathon on January 13, then two marathons in February, Surf City in Huntington Beach, California, on the first Sunday and a return to New Orleans on the last. (I hadn’t planned on repeating New Orleans this year, because they’d scheduled it before rather than after Mardi Gras, and I didn’t want to miss the Houston twenty-four-hour walk. Houston, alas, was quietly canceled; the weekend had always been organized by a society of ultrarunners in Kansas, and I guess they had tired of it. A twenty-four-hour race, you’ll recall, is a very long walk in which something goes wrong, and what went wrong this time was that there wasn’t going to be a race.)

Once New Orleans had replaced Houston in my schedule, I scrapped my plans to spend the month of March at a writers’ colony in Illinois and decided to stay in New Orleans instead until my book was written — to come back with my shield or on it, as it were.

And there would be other twenty-four-hour races. A couple of years ago, Ollie Nanyes had reached a hundred miles on the quarter-mile track at Corn Belt; he didn’t earn Centurion recognition because there were no judges on hand, but the accomplishment was his all the same. Corn Belt in May was a possibility, and so was FANS in June in Minnesota.

A third try at Wakefield loomed on the horizon at the end of July. Earlier that month Lynne and I would be on a Cruise West voyage among the Aleutians and on the Bering Sea to the Russian Far East. Just a week before we were to set sail from Anchorage, that city would host the Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon.

Oh, why not?

Mississippi was first. I flew to Jackson the day before, drove to the motel I’d booked for its location, and discovered I’d chosen well. Not only was it a short drive from the race’s starting line, but it was adjacent to a Waffle House. I have come to regard that particular mostly southern chain as the embodiment of the phrase guilty pleasure, difficult to resist and impossible to justify.

Unless, of course, one has the rationale of loading carbohydrates before a marathon, or replenishing one’s caloric reserves after one. I dutifully sucked up the carbs Friday night, went back to top off the tank first thing in the morning, and got to the starting line hoping to get under way before sugar shock kicked in.

Mississippi was another of the handful of races with a walkers section, and going home with some hardware looked like a safe bet, in that they were going to hand out ten trophies in that division. They also offered a seven o’clock start for walkers, an hour before the rest of the crowd got under way. (Some runners took advantage of an even earlier start, at six, so that they could get to work on time. It was, all in all, a remarkably user-friendly race.)

If the Internet made it easy to find a race and sign up for it, it also let you know what kind of weather to expect. The site I consulted the week before the race was quite unequivocal. It was going to rain in Jackson, probably starting on Friday, and certainly soaking us good on Saturday.

Well, they were wrong. Friday was overcast and Saturday was sunny. I think it looked like rain on Sunday, but I don’t remember if any actually fell, and wouldn’t have cared if it did; by then I was hunkered down in my motel room, watching the NFL playoffs and leaving only to answer the siren song of the Waffle House.

There were perhaps twenty of us, mostly walkers, who took advantage of the seven o’clock start. The flat course was a simple out-and-back on the Natchez Trace, a wonderfully scenic limited-access two-lane road that cuts northeast to southwest across the state. I took it easy at the start but upped my pace once I was warmed up.

The small field, virtually all of it walkers, acted as a spur. We’d covered five miles in that first hour, so it was easy to forget there were any others in the race.

I passed one fellow a couple of miles out, and he stayed close enough that I heard his breathing and his footsteps for miles. I’m sure I walked faster for trying to get away from him, even as he walked faster trying to keep up with me. Two miles from the finish he put the hammer down and surged, pausing long enough to hand me the baseball cap that had dropped from my waistband, then powering on to the finish line. I tried, but I couldn’t catch him, and finished fifty seconds behind.

In an out-and-back race, you get to see the leaders returning as you approach the midpoint; then, after you’ve made the turn, you get to see who’s behind you. My look at the leaders was unsettling, because some of them wearing walker bibs were not walking. One woman’s gait was about as legal as the Andy Cable Shuffle, and another was clearly mixing running and walking, which is a perfectly fine way to finish a marathon, but not if you’re competing as a walker.

My response mixed resentment and outrage, and it powered me at least as effectively as those syrup-soaked pancakes I’d had for breakfast.

After the turn, I got to see the people behind me — and there were dozens of them, and most of them were running. The entrants who’d started at eight o’clock, around 140 of them, were fast overtaking us, and we spent the second half of the race with runners — fast ones at first, slow ones toward the end — floating effortlessly past us.

This was a reversal of the usual order of things for me. Typically, I start slow, reach cruising speed five or six miles into the race, and hold that pace to the finish. As a result I tend to pass more people than pass me, especially in the last half of a long race when injured or undertrained runners are reduced to walking.

No matter. I hit the finish line with a net time of 5:26:33 — and, since there’d been room for every member of the seven o’clock contingent to toe the line at the start, my net time and my gun time were the same. That was a few minutes slower than Mobile a year ago, and slower too than New Orleans, but it wasn’t bad.

Because of the early start we’d had, the race for the runners had not yet reached the four-and-a-half-hour mark, and I had the unusual experience of standing around eating pizza while I watched middle-of-the-pack runners crossing the finish line. In the usual course of things, by the time I finished they’d have long since packed up and headed for home... after scarfing down all the pizza. There was much to be said, I decided, for an early start.

Maybe that’s what kept me hanging around the finish line. Usually I pause only long enough to collect my medal and catch my breath, but for a change I was in no rush to get out of there. As always, a good number of my fellows hurried to get into their cars and on their way, but the rest of the small field lingered for the presentation of awards.

I’d had some aches and pains during the last few miles of the race, and I was mildly fatigued at its end, but all in all I felt pretty good. The weather had held, the course had been a treat, and I’d performed better than I’d expected. This wasn’t quite enough to transform me into a contender for the Miss Congeniality award — it is not for nothing that my totem animal is the bear — but it did push me far enough in that direction to fall into actual conversations with strangers.

I chatted some with the walker who’d been decent enough to retrieve and return my cap, and relentless enough to beat me to the finish line. His name was John Buckley, he was from Bermuda, and he’d come specifically to add Mississippi to his been-there-walked-there list. Along with states, he was collecting countries and continents, and it seems to me — I wasn’t taking notes — that he’d chalked up marathons in all seven continents. I remember learning that he’d ticked off Antarctica.

He’d been ticked off in turn by the several competitors who’d entered as walkers and mixed in some light running. We agreed that such behavior was reprehensible, falling somewhere on the moral scale between jaywalking and serial murder, but that neither of us found it quite troubling enough to mention it to anyone. Truly strict judging, we acknowledged, would very likely disqualify both of us, so we figured the hell with it.