Lawrence Block - Step by Step

I felt like that woman in the cartoon: “Ohmigod, I forgot to have children!” Except I hadn’t been unaware of what I was doing, or not doing. I realized throughout that I was neglecting my training, and the effect this neglect was almost certain to have. And, a day at a time, I persisted in neglect. I was, as far as I could tell, quite powerless to do anything about it.

So why go? I knew I wouldn’t walk a good race, and I didn’t see how I could possibly enjoy myself. I might not be able to get my money back for the flight or the hotel, but did that mean I had to waste my time and energy, too?

Why not stay home and watch college football? I’d been following it closely this season. Did I really have to be rubbing up a new crop of blisters while Ohio State was playing Michigan?

I did. And I blame Werner Heisenberg.

Not the man. The principle.

Which I grasp but dimly and metaphorically, if at all. But you’ll remember I cited Heisenberg’s principle earlier to explain what we’d discovered while hunting Buffalos. That the towns were like subatomic particles, that the mere act of searching for them brought more of them into existence.

Observe an experiment, we are given to understand, and you inevitably affect its outcome. Your presence as observer alters the results.

So why did this impel me to head for Grapevine, Texas, in mid-November? Why, because I was headed there not merely as a reluctant walker but, God help me, as a writer.

The book made me do it.

This book, the one you’re reading, the one I so enjoyed writing in Anchorage, after the marathon, before the cruise. The book I added to aboard ship, and took up again back home. Holed up in my daughter’s house on Fire Island, assiduously avoiding my training, engulfing three meals a day and snacking between them, I’d written the whole section on our great walk across Spain.

By now it was more than half done, this book of mine. Another month or two would recount how I’d started training on the treadmill in 2004 and resumed racing at the start of the new year. Then all I had to do was bring the story up-to-date, noting my persistence through adversity at FANS, my disappointment in my third try at Wakefield, and, finally, my performance in Grapevine at the Ultracentric. That was the race I’d been aiming at for the whole year, and it would be a fitting closer for the book, however it might turn out. All I had to do was show up and give it my best shot, and whether I broke my record or the race broke my spirit, I could write honestly about it and wrap up the book.

All of this, though, absolutely required my presence in Texas. I could go there and walk a magnificent race, soaring past eighty miles as if on the wings of angels, and that would furnish the book with a spectacular ending. Or I could give it a brave try and be felled by weather or blisters or stomach cramps or the heartbreak of psoriasis, and the book would have an ending of quite another sort, but one that might be every bit as effective if I wrote it well.

Or, well, how’s this? “And so when the fateful Friday came up on the calendar, I decided the hell with it, and stayed home instead. I let them run the race without me, so we’ll never know how I would have done. That’s all. The End.”

Impossible. I couldn’t do that. I had to get on the goddam plane, had to show up at the goddam race.

The book made me do it.

The race was every bit as bad as i feared.

On the Friday before Thanksgiving, I took a cab to Newark Airport and boarded a plane to Dallas. When it landed I collected my wheeled duffel bag, picked up my rental car, and let its GPS guide me to my hotel. I walked into a lobby shrouded in plastic, the air thick with the smog of renovations in progress. I checked in and went to my room, where more renovations were proceeding apace. The cheerful fellow on the desk was quick to give me another room. Not surprisingly, they had plenty of them.

I drove to the race site, picked up my number, had a look around. I went back to my hotel, got a pizza delivered, ate it, and went to bed. I got up in the morning, put on my running gear, and showed up at the start in plenty of time. There were quite a few walkers, with several of them good prospects for qualifying as Centurions, but the only one I knew was Ollie, and it was good to see him again.

I told him I didn’t have much hope for a good performance, and he was sympathetic when I recounted the abrupt manner in which I’d aborted my training. We agreed that the weather would probably be all right, with not much chance of rain. The midday heat would be a burden, and it might get colder than we’d like during the night, but all in all we should be okay.

The course was simple enough, and comfortingly flat. You went out for a mile, turned around, and came back. A lap was an even two miles. Do fifty of them and you were a Centurion. Nothing to it.

I knew I wasn’t going to do fifty of those laps, or forty, either. If I did thirty-six I’d break my FANS record. If I did thirty-five I’d walk my age. Twenty-four laps would be a little more than I’d managed in July’s Wakefield debacle, and even that seemed out of the question. How could I possibly stay on my feet that long? How could I hope to cover that much ground?

How long did I have to do this before I could give up and drop out and go home?

From the first lap, my legs didn’t feel right. What I felt couldn’t have amounted to more than the usual aches and pains, but I was overly conscious of them. Any stiffness and soreness served to confirm what I’d already decided — that I couldn’t expect to do well, that I was going to be forced to drop out, that the best I could hope for was to do enough to quit gracefully.

There’s a TV boxing commentator who’ll sometimes describe a fighter as “doing enough to lose.” He means that the fellow’s not making the kind of effort he’d need in order to win the fight, but managing to look as though he’s trying. I was out there walking my laps, and I was doing enough to quit.

At one point Ollie and I were walking together, and I was singing some version of the blues, lamenting that my future as a racewalker lay largely in the past. I’d come to terms with the idea that I’d never improve on my best marathon performance, that I’d be lucky ever again to get within half an hour of the 5:17 I’d done in New Orleans. I’d only get slower with age.

And, I went on, what made me think I could ever top my 70.24 miles at FANS? I’d never be a Centurion, and I’d never reach eighty miles, either. I’d been on pace for that distance a couple of times, at FANS and at Wakefield, but each time something had gone wrong, and I could expect more of that in the future.

Ollie told me I had an eighty-mile performance in my legs. Age might continue to slow me, and I was probably right that I could never improve my personal best in the marathon, but one of these times in a twenty-four-hour race I’d manage to put it all together, and I wouldn’t be stopped by blisters or a bad back, and neither rain nor heat would take me down. And I might never go a hundred miles, but there was no reason why I couldn’t get eighty. Maybe not today, but in some race down the line, when everything went right and, for a change, nothing went wrong.

Well, maybe, I allowed. But not today.

After two or three laps, I began to entertain the thought that this might be a good day after all. I looked at my average lap time, multiplied it out, and wondered if I could put together a respectable total. Maybe I could even set a new record, maybe I could have a shot at eighty miles, maybe—

Then again, maybe not.

It was in the sixth lap that the bottoms of my feet began to bother me. They felt hot, the way they do before blisters form. This time, though, I remembered the lesson I’d learned at Wakefield, and at the lap’s end I went straight to my car, where my first aid supplies were waiting. I affixed moleskin pads to the soles of my feet and returned to the course.