Lawrence Block - Step by Step

There’s not much point in training within two weeks of a long race. The conventional wisdom holds that nothing you do that close to the race is going to help you, but it might hurt you. That’s the time when runners and walkers taper off on their training, cutting back on the miles and taking them at an easier pace.

In a sense, I’d been tapering ever since FANS. I hadn’t walked much in the weeks before the Anchorage marathon, and I’d walked very little since. FANS and Wakefield were eight weeks apart, and except for the 26.2 marathon miles, I’d scarcely walked at all.

Well, there was nothing I could do about it now. I’d just show up and do the best I could.

The good news was that wakefield wasn’t going to be so brutally hot this year. The bad news was that it was likely to rain.

We drove up on Thursday and had dinner that night with Larry Levy, my boyhood friend and companion at the Boy Scout jamboree. We’d be dining with Micah and Rachel Nathan Saturday, and that way Micah would have the chance to be astonished at my having successfully negotiated my fifth twenty-four-hour race and broken my record yet again.

It was good to be back at the Lord Wakefield, good to see some familiar faces when I picked up my T-shirt and number. Beth was back, and Andy, and a few others with familiar names or faces.

One lap an hour, Beth and I told each other. All either of us had to do was manage a single 3.16-mile lap every hour, and we’d break seventy-five miles and sail past our previous record marks. The trick, then, was to stay on the course. The trick was to keep moving.

I got a good start, not too fast and not too slow. I suppose there must have been something that hurt early on, because there always is, but I can’t remember anything specific. I kept walking, and drank plenty of water — Wakefield was humid, as it always seems to be, whether it’s hot or cold, fair or raining. The course was reassuringly familiar, and I didn’t even mind the short patch of downhill cross-country that came right after the start of each lap. Each time I hit it I was three miles and change farther from the beginning and closer to my goals.

The first five laps took four hours.

That struck me as a reasonable pace, one I ought to be able to sustain almost indefinitely. If I were to keep it up for the duration of the race, I’d finish with thirty laps, and break ninety miles — but I knew that wasn’t on the table. A slower pace and more frequent breaks were inevitable as the day wore on.

But if I held my pace for the first half of the race, if I managed five more laps in each of the next four-hour segments, I’d have just over forty-seven miles in the bank with twelve hours to go. I could average twenty-minute miles for the rest of the race, a stroller’s pace, and it would work out to the one-lap-per-mile formula Beth and I had discussed. Fifteen laps in the first half of the race, twelve in the second, added up to what? Twenty-seven laps for 85.4 miles.

Was that really possible? I didn’t see how it could be, especially the way I’d been forced to skimp on training. It was, in any case, mathematically possible. Whether or not I could make the numbers come out right was something I’d get to find out.

Meanwhile, the night wore on. A salty film coated my skin as Wakefield’s humidity took its toll, and I was grabbing two cups of water at each station, one to drink and one to pour over my head. I’d had five laps at eleven o’clock, and four hours later it was three in the morning and I was up to ten laps. I’d passed the marathon mark and rolled up fifty kilometers, and I still had a full sixteen hours to go.

And the bottoms of my feet were starting to feel warm.

If I had gone straight to our room when I first noticed the tell-tale warmth, if I’d responded immediately by taping the soles of my feet — well, maybe it would have saved the day and maybe not, and I’ll never know. Because I stayed on the course, and when there was no getting around the fact that I’d worked up blisters on both feet, I kept on walking, perhaps hoping I could crush the damn things into submission. That more walking would somehow toughen my feet, that the liquid in the blisters would be magically reabsorbed, even as the blisters themselves morphed into calluses.

Fat chance.

I guess it must have been shortly before dawn when I returned to my room and took off my shoes and socks. Lynne was sleeping. I opened the blisters, expressed the fluid, ducked under the shower to rinse off the caked sweat, then bandaged my feet the best I could.

I put on clean socks and fresh shoes, and went out and pushed myself through a couple more laps, each slower and more painful than the one before. If I’d been able to continue the pace I’d maintained so easily for the first eight hours, I’d have finished my fifteenth lap around seven in the morning. It was in fact just 9:03 a.m. when I completed that fifteenth lap, for a total of 47.4 miles. The sky was overcast, and a light rain was falling. And I was finished.

I went to the room and fell on the bed. Maybe an hour or so with my eyes closed would refresh me, maybe my feet would be better if I stayed off them for that long.

I slept for a couple of hours, and when I woke up it was raining hard. My feet had somehow failed to experience anything in the way of miraculous healing, and the drizzle had become a downpour that washed away any thoughts I might have had about getting back out there.

It must have been around two in the afternoon when I went downstairs to see how everybody was doing. The rain had abated, and I may have thought I could fit in a few more laps, but I ruled that out before I was fifty yards from the hotel entrance. My feet were in no condition for any serious walking.

I did walk through the parking lot, though, and got to the scorer’s tent just as they were dismantling it. I’d realized that the deluge had been an electrical storm, but hadn’t known that the race organizers had become concerned enough about lightning strikes to cut the race short and clear the course somewhere around noon. (The last runner to finish a lap did so at two minutes after one.)

Nobody clocked a hundred miles, though the winner came close, hitting 97.96 miles in seventeen and a half hours. Beth and Andy both had to stop after twenty laps; each had been on pace to clear 80 miles, and had to settle for 63.2. All of this must have been quite dramatic, but it was all over before I knew the first thing about it, and virtually everyone had gone home. One of the remaining handful of volunteers presented me with a full carton of PowerBar gel packs, seventy-two of the things. I stowed it in the trunk and went back upstairs.

Though the mood was less triumphant than I’d envisioned it, we enjoyed our dinner with Micah and Rachel, and in the morning we drove back to the city, telling each other how fortunate I’d been. Suppose I’d pushed on, fighting my way past the pain of the blisters, somehow forcing myself to go on, only to leave the course anyway because they’d closed it. Wouldn’t that have been infuriating?

Or say I hadn’t been troubled by blisters to begin with. By noon I’d have been somewhere around the twenty laps Beth and Andy logged. Upward of sixty miles down with seven hours to go — sheesh, I’d have had a fit if anybody tried to pull the pavement out from under me. I’d have felt like killing someone.

The weather had presentenced the event to an inglorious end, and in my own case two wrongs had somehow made a right; my insufficient preparation got me off the course early, sparing me both a soaking and the frustration of a forced withdrawal.

So why didn’t I feel lucky?

I dismissed any thoughts I might have entertained about the twenty-four-hour race in North Carolina. And I didn’t even look to see what short local races might be on offer at New York Road Runners. There were just two races on my personal calendar for the remainder of 2007 — the Labor Day marathon in Albuquerque, for which I’d already enrolled, and the Ultracentric in Texas.