Lawrence Block - Step by Step

As the weekend wore on, I realized something else, too. What I needed to do was get a book finished, and I had one book — this one — that was much closer to completion than anything else I was working on. Why not return to the memoir?

If I could put in two hours on it each morning before I went to my meeting, I could be done with it in a month or two. Anything else I might write would take longer. More to the point, anything else would be essentially a way of avoiding what I really needed to do, which was finish the memoir. Ever since I stopped working on it, it had been the elephant in the room. I had to deal with it or I could never really deal with anything else.

We flew home Tuesday afternoon. I went to the gym first thing the next morning, and then to my meeting, and spent the afternoon reviewing my work on the memoir and preparing myself to get back to it. That night I set the clock an hour earlier, and at five the next morning I got up and prepared for work. I was at my desk by six, and at the meeting place by eight-thirty, and by then the memoir was a thousand words longer.

I’d had no re-entry problems. I had picked the book up right where I’d left off at the end of my Fire Island stay, somewhere after the end of the Spanish pilgrimage. It was so easy getting back into the flow of the book that I wondered why I’d ever stopped in the first place.

I’m not proud of this, but it took several days before it dawned on me that there just might be a connection between the fact that I was hitting the treadmill every day and my sudden renewed ability to write about my experiences as a walker. It does seem obvious, doesn’t it?

I kept to my schedule with the zeal of a convert. I was up every morning at five, at my desk by six. I added a minimum of a thousand words to my work in progress, went to my meeting, went to the gym.

It occurred to me from time to time that it wouldn’t kill me to take a day off once a week. I didn’t rule it out, but neither did I feel moved to risk any change in my routine. It was working, and I liked the rhythm of my days, with all the afternoon and evening hours at my disposal. Keeping it up seven days a week didn’t feel like a strain. I could certainly go on this way until the book was finished.

My treadmill workouts usually ran an hour, but once or twice a week I stopped after forty-five minutes, just for the sake of variety. The weather was cold enough so that I was never tempted to substitute an outdoor training walk, and I didn’t get bored on the treadmill. I’d alternate days when I pushed the pace with days when I took it easy, and once in a while I added incline work.

After a few weeks of this, I found myself thinking about racing. There were NYRRC races in the park, there always are, and the Brooklyn Half Marathon would be coming up soon. I could probably handle five miles in Central Park, or even 13.1 miles through the streets of Brooklyn, but when I thought about it I remembered how I’d stopped enjoying shorter races. They were all about time, and my times were not going to improve, and what did I need with more T-shirts?

I could try FANS again.

The thought came unbidden, and I entertained it and didn’t find myself cringing at the prospect. But was I out of my mind? Could I really face the prospect of endless counterclockwise circuits of Lake Nokomis, each of them punctuated by an ascent and descent of Mount Nokomis? Well, maybe I could. Oh, really? Had I forgotten how my back felt in those final laps? Well, no, but neither had I forgotten how it felt afterward, with a new record of 70.24 miles.

Hmmm.

When the FANS flyer had arrived in the mail back in January, I’d dismissed it without a second thought. Not only had I quit walking, apparently forever, but I was scheduled to be in Budapest that week promoting the Hungarian editions of my books.

Now I was actually considering the race, calculating that I had almost three months to get back in shape. And, while I was thinking it over, the Budapest trip washed out.

So the date was open. But did I have enough time to prepare myself?

I saw a way to find out. I could try a marathon sometime in late April. If that didn’t work, I’d know better than to attempt FANS.

I got on the Web and found the Salt Lake City Marathon on April 19. Everything about the race sounded good to me, and I’d be adding Utah to my marathon list. I was all set to enter it when, quite out of the blue, I was invited by my Spanish publisher to a literary conference in León. Lynne and I had spent a few days in León during our long walk, and I remembered it as a charming city, and worth another visit. The conference would take place two days before the marathon, so it was one or the other.

I accepted the invitation, with two conditions: that it include Lynne, and that they fly us in business class. (They don’t pay you for these things, so why do them if you’re not able to do them in comfort?) My publisher replied immediately that he was sure that would be all right, and I got online again and looked for a race a week later. I found one in Vancouver, Washington.

Then I heard again from Spain. The sponsoring university wouldn’t spring for business-class airfare. I felt relief and disappointment in equal parts; on the one hand, I wouldn’t get to go to León, and on the other hand I wouldn’t have to. Now all I had to do was decide between Utah and Washington.

While I was weighing the merits of the two races, my cousin Micah showed up in New York. I hadn’t seen Micah since the aftermath of the Wakefield rainout, had told him in a January email exchange that I’d gotten away from racewalking, and now was able to inform him over dinner that reports of my retirement from the sport, like those of Mark Twain’s death, seemed to have been exaggerated.

“I honestly thought I was done with it,” I said, and explained how I’d always been a man of intense but impermanent enthusiasms. Micah was such a creature himself, and offered a suggestion. Did I think I might have overtrained? I said I’d thought of that, with all of those high-mileage weeks that had preceded the race in Texas, but that I hadn’t manifested any of the physical symptoms of overtraining.

“It’s an interesting thing about overtraining,” he said. “In the West we think of it in physical terms. Stress fractures are signs of it, along with other evidence of physical breakdown. But the Eastern Europeans see it differently. Over there, the symptoms of overtraining are all mental and attitudinal. An athlete loses his edge and doesn’t have his heart in the game anymore.”

We went on to talk about other things — Micah’s own writing, and how to keep one’s heart in that particular game, among other things. Later I thought about what he’d said, and my October — November efforts at self-sabotage came closer to making sense. I hadn’t had stress fractures, or plantar fasciitis. There were no inexplicable pains when I started walking, no muscles in rebellion. Nothing went wrong physically. But something in my mind shifted, and whatever had always put me on the track and propelled me forward was all at once out of commission.

The damned book had got me all the way to Texas anyway. Without it I’d have skipped the race, as I’d skipped the marathon in Albuquerque. The book led me to the starting line, and got me around the two-mile course ten times. But that was as much as it could do, as much as I could do.

Salt Lake City was a conventional marathon, and looked to be a well-run event. The offering in Vancouver, just across the river from Portland, looked to be something different, a three-day program of walks of varying distances. These walks weren’t really races, although some entrants would be trying to get to the finish line as quickly as possible. The majority, though, would just be enjoying the walk, which the sponsors called a Volksmarch .