Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Maybe that wasn’t the best memory to draw on.

Still, no naps, no long breaks. There’d be plenty of time to sleep when the race was over. If I just managed to keep myself on the course, to go on walking, I didn’t have to worry about my pace, didn’t have to think about it any more than I did walking unmeasured miles for hours on end along the Hudson River. All I had to do was put in my hours — not five or six or seven of them this time, but twenty-four. If I took care of the hours, well, the miles would take care of themselves.

Nothing to it, really.

Race conditions were good. I can’t remember paying much attention to the weather during the first eight hours or so, and that’s what you want in a race, really: weather that doesn’t make all that much of an impression. The cloud cover increased as the day wore on, and by late afternoon it was raining, but never hard enough to be a problem. It went on raining off and on through the early evening, which wasn’t all that bad, and eventually it stopped, which was even better.

There were a lot of walkers on the course, 27 in a field of 167, but only 8 of us were signed up for the full twenty-four hours. (The other 19, along with 43 runners, would get to go home after twelve hours.) I was glad of their presence, but I didn’t see much of them as we all strode along. Once we’d strung out after the start, we were pretty much on our own. Marshall, whose cruising pace is much faster than mine, might cover five laps in the time it took me to do four — but that meant we’d only encounter each other once every couple of hours.

One person I did see with regularity was a young runner, Oz Pearlman. We’d exchanged a few words before the start, managing to establish that we’d both come from New York, and he had a cheerful greeting for me every time he breezed past me, which was something he did with astonishing regularity. I didn’t keep count, but it seemed to me as though he were racking up two laps to every one of mine, and if he wasn’t winning the race he was certainly among its leaders.

I kept walking, and the laps mounted up. There was a chart near the finish line with the mileage listed for the various laps — the out-and-back start made it impossible to keep track otherwise — so I could note, for example, that my thirteenth lap had brought me to 33.13 miles, and my seventeenth to 42.82.

That’s probably where I was around the time the twelve-hour race wrapped up, and you could tell you were in the last hour of the twelve-hour when you saw runners doing short back-and-forth minilaps near the finish line. At Wakefield, only complete laps are counted, and if you complete a lap with less time remaining on the clock for you to manage another 3.16 miles, then your race is over. At Lake Nokomis, they gave you the option during the last hour of walking back and forth on a measured eighth-mile strip, and you could zip back and forth, back and forth, until the clock ran all the way to the twenty-four-hour mark.

Or, from seven to eight that evening, the twelve-hour mark. I made my way through a batch of them as they tacked on their final fractions, and the next time I came by they were gone, and there were far fewer of us still on the course, and the daylight was pretty much gone.

“Hey, Larry! Looking good!”

It was Oz, passing me once again. He was still running. I was still walking.

Which is not to say that I hadn’t thought about stopping.

Not dropping out of the race, nothing like that. Because I was walking well and making good time, and my feet weren’t hurting and my legs felt fine. I had every intention of finishing the race, and it looked as though I’d achieve most of my goals with relative ease. A new personal record seemed likely, and a total in excess of eighty miles was by no means out of the question.

But I couldn’t help noticing that I was tired. Maybe I could just go lie down for a while, refresh myself with a little nap. A hundred yards or so off the course there was a building with cots you could lie down on, and it seemed to me they’d said something about showers as well. Or, if I didn’t want to go that far, couldn’t I just sit in a chair for an hour?

I said as much to Ollie. We ran into each other at the food tent, or somewhere on the course — I don’t remember where, but it was an hour or two before the light failed. I remember he said I was making good time, and I said in reply that I figured I was going to have to take a break soon.

“Just slow down,” he suggested. “Keep walking, but slow your pace. Do that for a lap or two, and then you can pick it up again.”

I said I didn’t think I knew how to do that.

“For starters,” he said, “stop racewalking. Quit swinging your arms. Just walk.”

It turned out to be excellent advice. I made myself do just that for the better part of a lap, and I don’t know that it slowed me much, probably no more than a minute a mile. I can’t say that it was the equivalent of eight hours of sound sleep, and maybe all it provided was the illusion of a break, but the point is that it kept me on my feet and on the track, and by the time I’d completed that lap I’d gotten past the feeling that I needed a break, that I had to have one, that I couldn’t just keep on walking like this forever.

Through the evening hours, I repeated this trick of Ollie’s whenever fatigue suggested the idea of a break. I let my hands drop to my sides, I reduced my hip pivot and let my stride shorten, and my pace slowed accordingly. I rarely did so for more than a few hundred yards, and without conscious volition on my part I’d find I had returned to my form and my usual cruising pace. But I’d have dodged a mental bullet.

Sometimes, evidently, a change is as good as a rest. Sometimes it’s better.

The loop course had never been what you’d call crowded, but it thinned out considerably as the night wore on. The end of the twelve-hour race removed 62 entrants from a field of 167, and as the hour grew later, some of the twenty-four-hour crowd decided that enough was enough. Others slipped off for a nap.

I’d been told that a flashlight would be useful out on the course, but of course I neglected to bring one. Ollie had a spare, and gave it to me, and that was reassuring until I had occasion to dig it out of my fanny pack and switch it on, at which point I discovered that, unless I pointed the beam directly at my face, I couldn’t determine whether or not the damn thing was on. I guess the batteries had wasted their fragrance on the desert air, because what power remained was barely enough to enable one to locate the thing in a dark room.

That was all right, I knew the course well enough by then and there weren’t that many stretches where I’d have needed the light anyway. But between the darkness and the dropouts, I felt a good deal more alone out there; there were fewer people, and it was harder to see them.

This was something I was aware of, but that’s not to say that it bothered me. There were plenty of people at the start/finish line, counting my laps, repeating my number when I called it out (as I did each time, to make damn sure my lap got counted), providing food and drink as desired. I’d call it out again as I passed the smaller tent where Bruce Leasure was keeping his own tally of walkers’ laps — and standing guard over Dave Daubert’s shoe collection. He’d tell me I was looking good, and I’d advise him that I still had a pulse, and off I’d go on another lap. On past the double row of individual tents, where runners could stow their gear and food and stop for a quick nap, on to that first little wooden bridge, and on into the darkness.

All I had to do was keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, and I was going to break my record. In fact it looked as though I’d smash it to bits.