Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Aside from the local Mississippians, most of the runners seemed to be Fifty Staters, and some of them knew each other from other races. I overheard one man about my age explaining to a woman just how to get to Mobile. The First Light Marathon was coming up tomorrow, and she was thinking about running it. “You might as well,” he advised her. “I mean, seeing as you’re in the neighborhood.”

I talked to him, and it turned out he would be running Mobile himself, and urged me to drive down and join them. After all, I was in the neighborhood. I told him I’d walked Mobile the previous year, and he nodded, but I got the impression he didn’t think that was sufficient reason to deprive myself of a second shot at it.

Remarkable, I thought, as I returned to the pizza table. Here was a fellow unarguably old enough to load carbs before a game of shuffleboard, and he was going to run two full marathons on successive days, and evidently did this sort of thing almost routinely. He wasn’t the fastest creature on two legs, but that wasn’t really the point, and he got to the finish line before the pizza was gone, didn’t he?

Mississippi on Saturday, Mobile on Sunday. There was a man who could eat all the pizza he wanted.

And so, at least for that day, could I.

It took a while for them to process the results and hand out the awards, and by then there were just a handful of us left. When they read off the winning racewalkers, most of the plaques went unclaimed; they’d be mailed to recipients later. John Buckley stuck around long enough to pick up his award for coming in seventh, and I was right behind him in eighth place. I collected my award and drove back to my motel.

Later in the month, I had occasion to check the race results on the Web. I wanted to make sure my time was as I remembered it. It was, and I noted that I’d been moved up to fifth place, and my Bermudan friend to fourth. They’d evidently sorted things out and taken three nonwalkers out of the standings, allowing the rest of us to move up.

I just went into the living room and looked at the plaque they gave me in Mississippi. It’s on a shelf in plain sight, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I noticed it. I wanted to confirm that it said Eighth Place, and it does, and I’ll tell you, I can’t make myself believe that I’d treasure it more or display it more prominently if it had me in Fifth Place.

Looking at it, what struck me was how much I’d enjoyed that race. The memory had a bittersweet aftertaste to it, though, for I know how unlikely it is that I’ll go back to Jackson for another long walk on the Natchez Trace. Even if they continue to stage it, and I continue to enter marathons, the odds are against my returning.

Mobile, too, was a race I’ll always remember fondly. The two races are always on the same weekend, enabling the Fifty Staters to do them both in quick succession. I’d done them in successive years, and enjoyed them both, and in all likelihood neither of them will ever see me again.

Because I’m more inclined to choose, if not the less-taken road, at least the one that I myself haven’t yet trod. For me to walk marathons in fifty states would be a sufficiently Herculean task all by itself; I’d make it impossibly difficult if I insisted on entering the same races over and over. When I’d decided on Mississippi, I was at once deciding to forgo Mobile, a race I’d enjoyed and would have liked to repeat. (But not a day later; I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. Well, not that stupid.)

There were marathons I was just as happy to do once and once only. I hadn’t liked Las Vegas enough to walk it again, although I’d be glad enough of another visit to the city itself. I might want to repeat the New York Marathon, but not for at least a few years.

But I had good feelings about Mississippi and Mobile and Athens and Deadwood, and the impulse to return year after year to each of them was strong. I could choose to do so, or I could opt for the new and untried.

It is, I suppose, a choice one confronts over and over in life. I’ve known families who glory in vacationing in the same spot every year, returning again and again to the same hotel, delighting in the fact that the staff remembers them. If they run into the same fellow vacationers, so much the better. The more each year’s experience echoes the ones before, the happier they are with it.

And I understand the appeal, I really do. When I picked up my number at Wakefield, the race directors remembered me, and I walked away with the theme song of Cheers echoing in my head. No question, it was nice when everybody knew your name.

Another school of thought holds that the more enjoyable a trip is, the greater the imperative that you avoid trying to replicate it. You had an idyllic weekend in Charleston? Good for you — but don’t ever go back, because your second visit will never match up to the enhanced memory you have of the initial experience.

(And memory always improves on reality, highlighting the good, toning down the bad. Whatever we remember, we recall it as better, or at least less horrible, than it was. If it’s horrible enough, we forget it altogether. And all of this is just as well; otherwise we’d all kill ourselves.)

For my own part, I decided to look for a middle ground. There weren’t all that many twenty-four-hour races, and in my limited experience it seemed to me that my relationship to the course came second to the sheer challenge of the time and distance. And so I would have done Houston again, if the bloody Kansans hadn’t canceled the race, and I’d done Wakefield twice and was prepared to do it a third time.

And, while I’d lean toward those states I hadn’t yet checked off, I’d try not to let that particular goal keep me out of especially attractive races. I couldn’t repeat the North Dakota Marathon I’d run in Grand Forks in 1981, because they didn’t hold that race anymore — but what I’d read about the Fargo Marathon was appealing, and I’d like to enter it one of these years, even if it wouldn’t give me a new state. And the same went for a marathon in Brookings, South Dakota; I’d been to the town a couple of times and liked it, and would be glad of another look at the local university’s collection of Harvey Dunn paintings — and a long walk through its streets.

And I’d go back to New Orleans. That was Lynne’s ancestral home, it was a city we both enjoyed greatly, and I’d had such a fine time there in 2006. A trophy — second place! A time of 5:17! The good thing about the Houston cancellation was that it allowed me to go back to New Orleans.

Who knew it would be a disaster?

But you remember that part. For too many miles — slow, agonizing miles — a two-part mantra echoed in my head. It hurts too much to go on; I’m too stupid to quit.

You remember as well that I didn’t quit, and that eventually it stopped hurting, allowing me to push through to the finish. What you won’t remember, because I never mentioned it, is that I won another plaque for my accomplishment. It turned up in the mail a few months later, astonishing me with its acknowledgment that I’d finished in fifth place among male racewalkers.

I guess there were only five of us.

I wrote earlier about the aftermath of the race, how I stayed on in New Orleans to write a book, Hit and Run, and how I came home to depression, eventually signing up and training for a twenty-four-hour race in Minnesota in the hope that it would have a salutary effect on my mood.

And it worked.

I had two months to get myself in shape for FANS. The months were April and May, and there’s no better time to train. Except for the rare days when rain drove me to the treadmill, I did all my training in Hudson River Park, alternating long and short days, and grinding out the miles.