Lawrence Block - Step by Step

When I was ready to get back to writing, I left the memoir alone and went to work on a novel. And for the next several years I didn’t even look at the pages that had poured out of me at Ragdale. My publishers never raised the subject, and why should they? There are books that have bestseller written all over them, and my memoir was not one of them. They’d have been happy to publish it if I ever finished it, but if I didn’t, well, that wasn’t anything likely to impact adversely on their bottom line. Eventually we negotiated another contract, and applied my advance for the memoir to the new agreement, and the memoir no longer served as a source of guilt. It was by no means the only piece of writing I’d started and never finished, and maybe I’d get back to it someday, and maybe I wouldn’t, and who cared?

And here I was in Anchorage, in a writer’s colony of my own making, writing another memoir with no guarantee that I’d ever finish it, or that anyone would want to read it if I did.

So what? I was having a good time.

I got up every morning and worked at a measured pace — cruising speed, we ultrawalkers call it — until it was time for lunch. I walked a mile to the seafood restaurant, where I had salmon once or twice a day. (Now and then I’d make one of the day’s meals halibut, or king crab. But by and large it seemed too great a sacrifice to have anything but salmon.) Then I walked back to the hotel, and did a little more work, and read something, and went out for a salmon dinner, and came home and read until bedtime.

The memoir surprised me. I had never anticipated writing about my childhood and adolescence. My earlier effort had been about as impersonal as a thoroughly self-centered narrative could possibly be; I’d taken as my model Erskine Caldwell’s Call It Experience, in which he announced at the onset his intention to write solely about his life as a writer. His personal life, he announced, was none of anybody’s business. I’d decided that was what I wanted to do, and I sat down and set out to do it — not because I wanted to spare the reader anything extraneous, but because I was temperamentally disinclined toward that sort of revelation. It was not for nothing that I had chosen a career as a novelist. I was perfectly happy to tell you everything you might care to know about figments of my imagination, but if you wanted to know something about me, well, too bad.

I guess I’d changed some in the intervening years. Age, I suspect, had more than a little to do with it. And, too, it seemed to me that age made this memoir more appropriate. The first time around, I’d wondered if it mightn’t be presumptuous, or at least premature, for me to be writing a memoir. (That was before American letters worked its way into the Age of Relentless Reminiscence, wherein graduate students earn MFA degrees by writing down their life stories, some of them even factual.)

Now if anything I was a little long in the tooth to be getting into the memoir game, and I couldn’t afford to wait too much longer. If I was going to do this, I’d best do it while I still had a memory to draw upon. My times, especially in shorter races, were evidence that I was slowing down, at least out on the pavement. If the same was not yet noticeable at the keyboard, well, it was something to which I could look forward, and not with great enthusiasm. So if I intended to share my memories with the world, now was the time.

It was a less frenzied business than what I’d experienced at Ragdale. I produced three to four thousand words a day, fueled by fresh air and salmon, and my training was largely limited to the two daily round-trips I made to the restaurant, and a couple of longer walks in the other direction to a supermarket. I did suit up a couple of times for an hour of racewalking at a nearby park, but the rest of my walking was in the interest of getting from one place to another.

While I might not be training all that intensely, the work kept my mind on walking — and the laptop plus the hotel’s wi-fi capability made it easy for me to plan the coming months. I’d already signed up for Wakefield, and now, flushed with success after FANS, I worked out the rest of my schedule for the year.

There were more twenty-four-hour races available in the fall, including one in Wisconsin on a 400-meter track and another around a lake in North Carolina. Then there was the Ultracentric, set this year for Grapevine, Texas. They’d have a walkers’ division with Centurion judging there, that’s where Marshall King had qualified, and I was pretty sure I wanted to go.

I could conceivably fit in Wisconsin or North Carolina before the mid-November Ultracentric — there were even moments when I imagined myself walking all three — but my enthusiasm stopped a few steps short of mania, and I settled on a less ambitious schedule. We’d return from our cruise in mid-July, and I’d do Wakefield the last weekend of the month. That would leave me five weeks before a marathon in Albuquerque. I have a niece in Albuquerque, my late sister Betsy’s daughter, and hadn’t seen her in years. I’d also get a chance to see one of my stepbrothers. And I’d always liked northern New Mexico, and the race description was inviting — a small field, a user-friendly course, plus the opportunity to add another state to my collection.

So I signed up for Albuquerque for Labor Day weekend. Afterward I’d have six or seven weeks before the Ultracentric, where I’d see what I could do. I was hoping for seventy-five miles at Wakefield, and dreaming of eighty; if all went supremely well, I could set a high mark there and improve on it in Texas.

Once again, I was entitled to enter the New York City Marathon. The ten-mile Hot Chocolate race in December had been my tenth NYRRC event of 2006, one more than I needed for guaranteed entry. But I’d already decided to skip it. I’d waited twenty-five years between my first and second efforts, and I could certainly wait a few years before I took a third shot at it.

It was while I was in Anchorage, writing about old walks even as I planned new ones, that I received an email from my cousin Micah Nathan, whose father is my first cousin, David. (That makes Micah my first cousin once removed, or my second cousin, depending on who was holding forth at my grandparents’ dinner table. This topic would surface every couple of years, long before Micah was born, and was discussed each time with intensity and conviction. I’m pretty sure Micah’s my first cousin once removed, and that any progeny he might sire would be my first cousins twice removed; my daughters, on the other hand, are Micah’s second cousins, while my granddaughters... oh, never mind.)

Micah lives in Boston, and works as a personal trainer when he’s not writing novels and screenplays. I’d let him know how I’d done at FANS, and he was writing to congratulate me, and to let me know that what I was doing was at odds with the ordinary course of things. “You’ve done four of these all-day events,” he pointed out, “and each time you’re a little older, and each time you improve on the previous mark. I’m not sure I should tell you this, but that’s not the usual order of things.”

Lynne flew out on Sunday, and as soon as she got in I whisked her off for a salmon dinner. The next day we met up with Steve and Nancy Schwerner, our friends and frequent travel companions, and the day after that the Spirit of Oceanus set sail for two weeks in the Aleutians and the Russian Far East. I got a little writing done during the cruise, but no training to speak of. The ship had a small gym, with a couple of treadmills, but a treadmill’s no great pleasure when the ship’s cruising, and when it was docked we were off looking at things.

By the time we got home it was the middle of July, and I had just over two weeks before I’d be making my third attempt at Lake Quannapowitt. I don’t know what training I did in those two weeks — I didn’t make any notations on my calendar — but I’m sure I didn’t walk too often, or too far.