Lawrence Block - Step by Step

My back might be another story. I didn’t know what to expect from it.

It was fine the next morning.

I got up, packed, had breakfast, drove to the airport. I didn’t racewalk down the concourse, but I walked at my usual pace and in my usual fashion, and my back never gave me the slightest twinge. It felt fine.

Back home in New York, I took a couple of days off, then eased back into light training. My feet were mending nicely, as I’d expected they would; more to the point, my back didn’t trouble me at all. At Lake Nokomis, it had crippled me up and made every step a nightmare. Now it was as if I’d never had any trouble with it at all.

I couldn’t make sense of this, and still can’t. I’ve walked miles without number since then, and that pain has never returned. I’m not complaining, believe me. I’ll be perfectly happy never to go through it again. But what was it? And where the hell did it come from?

It hadn’t revealed itself until I’d spent upward of eighteen hours walking more than sixty miles. Until then I never got so much as a twinge of back pain, but once it started it made walking virtually impossible. I can only assume I’d been holding tension in my lower back, somehow clenching something there unwittingly and certainly involuntarily. It would have been handy to know what it was I’d been doing, so that I could try to avoid doing it again.

But it was gone, whatever its source, and that was cause enough for rejoicing. And I’d gone more than seventy miles, and had stayed on the course until pain forced me off it, and then returned to push myself through a final three-quarters of a mile.

In less than two months it would be time for a third try at Wakefield. They didn’t know from minilaps there, and only counted full ones. I’d gone twenty laps in 2005, twenty-one a year later in the heat. I’d be sixty-nine years old this time, and Lap Twenty-two would give me my age, and one more after that would give me a new record. After that, each lap was a significant milestone: Lap Twenty-four — 75.84. Lap Twenty-five — an even 79 miles, and a triple marathon. Lap Twenty-six — 82.16 miles.

First, though, it was time to fly to Alaska and pick up another state.

I had to pee.

Well, that was only to be expected. I’d made my usual trips through the Porta John line at the marathon’s staging ground, but I’d walked several miles since then, and it was time to answer nature’s call. That could be awkward in a race through the crowded streets of a large city, but there was really nothing to it when you were out in the country. And we were on the outskirts of Anchorage, racing along an asphalt path through parkland that was pretty close to wilderness. Take a dozen steps off the pavement and the only witness to your peeing would be the songbirds and the rabbits.

And the moose, and the bears — and that was the problem, because a dozen steps was farther from the path than it was advisable to be. The woods began perhaps half that many steps away, and one really didn’t want to be an uninvited guest at the Teddy Bears’ Picnic.

At Athens the previous year — that’s in Ohio, you’ll recall, not Greece — we’d been on a similar path through parkland, and it had been a small enough race so that privacy was never an issue. There just weren’t that many others in the race, and they were all out in front of me. And the slow ones were too busy contending with the course to pay attention to an old guy watering the flowers.

Not so in Anchorage.

For several years, the Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon had drawn great quantities of America’s slowest runners, and some of them couldn’t properly be described as runners at all. Almost six hundred men and eight hundred women completed the race, and a substantial proportion of them were running it as a part of Team In Training, a national organization raising funds to combat leukemia and lymphoma, and I have to say its purpose was as laudable as its acronym was unfortunate. All of the Team In Training entrants were decked out in purple shirts, and the staging area before the start was an ocean of purple. There were entrants from every state, except for West Virginia. I don’t know what happened to West Virginia.

For most of the Purple People, this was a first marathon, and the race organizers went out of their way to encourage first-timers, keeping the finish line open for a very generous eight and a half hours. It is always a challenge to complete a marathon, but it is rather less formidable a challenge when you’ve got eight and a half hours available to you. You can still go all out, of course, but you don’t have to. You can relax. You can slow down. You can take time to sprinkle the flowers, or even to smell them.

The ranks of the Purple People included more than a handful of flower-smellers. Some of them had binoculars around their necks, so that they could get a good look at the flowers — or, if they were lucky (or unlucky, depending on the outcome) at the moose and bears. More had cameras, and stopped occasionally to take pictures of the glorious landscape, or, less gloriously, of each other. They were in no hurry, many of these purple-clad warriors, and what was wrong with that? They were exerting themselves in a good cause, and when it was all over they’d have finished a marathon.

So there I was, a step or two off the path, facing away from the stream of runners flowing slowly behind me, and staring vaguely off into the distance. And a cheerful young woman in a purple T-shirt interrupted her running to hurry over and position herself next to me, eager to find out what was commanding my attention.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you looking at something wonderful?”

You can imagine the several responses I considered and rejected. What I said, sternly, I’m afraid, was “Go away.” And she did. And, a moment later, so did I.

When i registered for the Anchorage race, I did so without knowing if I’d actually be up for it. It was held just three weeks after FANS, and there was no way to guess how much that race might take out of me, and what kind of shape I’d be in three weeks later. I decided it was worth the risk. I had to get to Anchorage anyway, where Lynne and I would embark on our Bering Sea cruise, and, as that Fifty Stater had pointed out after the Mississippi Marathon, as long as I was in the neighborhood I might as well give it a go. If it turned out I wasn’t up for a marathon, all I’d lose was the entry fee, plus whatever it cost me to rebook my flight. (If I wasn’t racing I really didn’t need to arrive ten days early.)

Recovery, as it turned out, was rapid and easy, and I reached Anchorage in decent shape for a marathon. It was late June, and midnight sun was no exaggeration, but I still thought it was curious that they’d hung that tag on the race. When they call something the Midnight Sun Marathon, you expect to be out there in the middle of the night. Instead we had the typical morning start, and the slowest Purple Person of the bunch was eating postrace pizza a good eight hours before midnight.

The event was well organized. School buses chartered for the occasion picked us all up at our hotels and conveyed us to the start, then scooped us up at the finish and took us home.

I took my time. I didn’t stop to take pictures, but neither did I set out to break any records. I’d had only three weeks since my seventy-mile effort in Minnesota, and I thought of this marathon more as a long recovery walk. I took it at cruising speed, and enjoyed the fresh air and the surroundings. Because I don’t wear my glasses during races or training walks, my appreciation of the scenery was limited. What I saw was not all that sharply focused, but no less enjoyable for it; viewing the passing landscape without my glasses was rather like looking at Monet with them, and what’s so bad about that?