Step by Step

16

life, it’s been said, is a series of choices, and to choose one action is to choose not to undertake another. For every road taken, one leaves no end of roads untraveled.

I’ve known a few people who realized early on precisely what life they were destined to lead, and who followed a single clear-cut path to the end of their days. One of my closest friends was endowed with this sort of self-knowledge, and he’ll be the first to tell you that he hasn’t changed much over the years. He hasn’t lived in New York for twenty-five years, but still roots passionately for the Knicks and the Giants. He still gets his hair cut the same way he did fifty years ago, still wears the same sort of clothes, still listens with devotion to the same music, and still holds pretty much the same political views. You might think this would make him dull company, or at the very least that he’d have had a routine and predictable life. You’d be mistaken; he’s a great companion, and enjoys a rich and satisfying life.

My life, too, has been rich and satisfying, but it hasn’t stayed the same over the years. Enthusiasms have come and gone, passions have waxed and waned.

You’ll recall that I’d completed five marathons in 1981, along with thirty-five shorter races, and that within a year I’d quit racing entirely. And, while we never deliberately abandoned the Buffalo hunt, it had pretty much stalled out by the time we moved back to New York in 1990. Our lives had changed, we weren’t driving around much and in fact no longer owned a car, and after the Spanish walk we found ourselves more interested in adding new countries than unearthing new Buffalos. We had just picked up Andorra and Portugal, and in the years that followed we spent a good deal of time traveling, and reached some fairly remote parts of the planet.

Sometimes walking was involved. We spent two weeks with my three daughters on an escorted walking tour of Tuscany, with our bags transported from inn to inn and each day’s walk interrupted by a splendid picnic lunch that would materialize magically in front of us when we rounded a bend in the path. Another walking tour on another summer, with a daughter and a granddaughter in tow, consisted of more rigorous hiking in the Alps, and added Switzerland and Liechtenstein to our country list.

A couple of years before that, in 1993, I was thinking about taking another crack at the Camino. I’d go by myself, and I’d cross the Pyrenees in September, and I figured I could cover the route in five or six weeks. But I had time to mull it over, and before I booked a flight or went shopping for a better backpack, I realized with a mixture of relief and regret that I didn’t really want to go. I didn’t much like the idea of being away from Lynne for that long, and the more I pictured myself sleeping in refugios and foraging for bocadillos de queso, the less appealing the prospect became. And, dammit, I’d been there and I’d done that, and maybe once was enough. Either it wouldn’t be as I remembered it, in which case I’d resent the changes, or it would be exactly the same — so why go through it all over again?

It’s not as though I let my legs atrophy after we flew home from Lisbon. A New Yorker typically walks a couple of miles a day without giving it much thought. That’s how one gets around, and it’s why Lynne, without any advance preparation, was able to acquit herself capably as a peregrino.

I continued to go to the gym, though my attendance was inconsistent; sometimes I got there three times a week, and sometimes it was more like three times a month. Gyms come and go, and when mine closed it sometimes took me a while to find another and join it.

At one point Lynne responded to some pretty broad hints and bought me a stair climber. We installed it in my office, an apartment two flights up from our residence, and I used it daily at first, the way everybody does who gets one, and then I stopped — like everybody else. When I tried to get back to it, the machine sputtered and quit working, and it was easier to use it as an extra clothes rack than to find somebody who’d make a house call and fix it. It’s a good thing we didn’t have a garage, or it would be there to this day, but instead we found a building employee who was willing to take it off our hands. I suppose he fixed it up and sold it, or else it’s in his garage, because I haven’t noticed that he looks any fitter for owning it.

At the gym, I mostly worked with weights, but now and then I’d hop on a treadmill and work up a sweat for twenty minutes or so. I would walk, to save my knees, and my gait was a racewalker’s, with my arms swinging at my sides. I couldn’t do this without being reminded of the year when I’d been a marathoner, but I never gave any thought to returning to those golden days.

If I’d thought about it, I probably would have told you it was impossible. I’d been having a little trouble with my feet lately, and my right foot in particular tended to go partially numb now and then, and to ache from time to time. Sometimes I’d be walking along on the street and I’d get sharp pains in my foot; they’d bother me for a while, and then they’d go away.

A doctor told me it probably had something to do with my sciatic nerve, and that I should try stretching. That’s not what it was, and while stretching didn’t do me any harm, neither did it do any good. I didn’t know what was wrong, and didn’t really want to find out. I got on the Internet and read about intermittent claudication and diabetic neuropathy, and the symptoms sounded about right, but I didn’t think either of those was what I had.

And it wasn’t that bad. My foot would feel a little numb and tingly in the morning, but that passed as the day wore on. And I was still doing what I always did, and getting around as much as ever. All it really meant was that my marathoning days were over, but they’d been over for years, and I didn’t really miss them. And it probably meant, too, that I wouldn’t be able to walk the Camino again, but I’d already decided I didn’t want to do that, either.

Well, hell, I was getting older. I was past sixty. Pretty soon I’d be lucky if I could walk at all. Or remember how to find my way home.

My eldest granddaughter, Sara Reichel, has a pronounced and longstanding affinity for penguins. Accordingly, in December of 2001 Lynne and I celebrated Sara’s bat mitzvah by taking her and her Aunt Jill to Antarctica, to see her totem animal in its natural habitat.

Then in the spring of 2004 I was scanning the Earthwatch catalog. That worthy organization provides opportunities for volunteer travel in aid of some environmental goal; for a not-too-steep fee, one might join an expedition to count the endangered red pandas in the Trobriand Islands, or distribute free flyswatters in a malarial swamp, or build a dam somewhere to take the burden off the beavers. Lynne and I had been getting their catalogs for years, and had reluctantly begun to conclude that we just weren’t sufficiently high-minded to sign up for one of their trips; if only we were better human beings, we’d be eager to inoculate villagers in the Cameroun against dengue fever instead of, say, knocking back on a cruise of the South Pacific. But I always made myself take a quick look through the catalog before throwing it out — I felt it was the least I could do — and the next thing I knew I’d signed up Sara and myself to rescue penguins in South Africa.

I hadn’t even known they had any. But they did, in great profusion, until an oil spill a couple of years earlier decimated the population and threatened its ultimate survival. Robbin Island, the prison colony where Nelson Mandela had been the most famous inmate, was home to many of the birds, and as Earthwatch volunteers we’d be joining an ongoing project designed to monitor the little guys.

We’d be flying to Cape Town in August, and I got a rude awakening when I started packing for the trip. It would be their cold season, which meant long pants. I’d been wearing shorts all summer, and when I tried on my long pants I found they didn’t fit. I’d put on weight without quite realizing it, having bought shorts at the start of the summer, and... oh, never mind. I was fat and my pants didn’t fit.

All that meant was a trip to our basement storage cupboard, where a box of my fat clothes filled a large carton, waiting patiently for me to grow into them. But it certainly didn’t make me feel very good about myself, and the day before we left I ran into a friend and found myself carping about the whole business.

“Hey, so you’ll do something about it when you get back,” he said. “Remember when we first knew each other? One day you went into the Attic Gym on Twelfth Street, and you didn’t come back out for three years. You’ll do the same thing again.”

And it turned out he was right.

The trip itself was mostly good, though much of the day-to-day activity with the penguins was tedious. There were several chores we shared, one of which involved dividing up into twos and threes and going from nest to nest, duly noting whether a particular nest had a chick present, and, if so, estimating the maturity of the chick. (“Well, she was cute, but I don’t think she was old enough to drink.”) Some nests had been abandoned, and we’d note that, too. All of the nests reeked to the heavens, but we didn’t have to write that down.

We also did roadside surveys, during which we would spend an hour standing at the side of the road, counting penguins. The birds would walk to the ocean in the morning, and every afternoon they returned to the land and crossed the road to their stinking nests. We’d wait for them and make pencil marks in our notebooks. We’d watch two penguins cross the road, and make two marks. Then a single penguin. Then four would cross, but then one would go back. Then another penguin would cross the road, and then—

Back at our shared lodgings, Sara would enter all this data into the computer. She was a whiz at data entry, which earned her big props from the other volunteers, all of whom were at least a couple of years older than her, while being upward of a generation younger than I. I took great pleasure in being Sara’s grandfather, but there in Penguin Heaven I felt like everybody’s grandfather, and that wasn’t all that much fun.

The program one day called for picking up a penguin from its nest, holding it upside down by its feet, and causing it to vomit. (I forget how this end was achieved. If it had been up to me, I’d have made them watch Eight Million Ways to Die in Spanish.) Then the regurgitated stomach contents were sent off somewhere to be analyzed.

But it wasn’t all penguin puke. We spent a busy afternoon walking the beaches and filling trashbags, and another riding around taking a survey of local wildlife. The best part of the experience, as far as I was concerned, was the chance to spend some time with Sara, and we managed to fit in a couple of days on our own in Cape Town after we were done herding penguins.

Then we flew home, and I went to the gym.

I was already a member, but now I was determined to use the place in a disciplined fashion. I decided I’d go every day, and I determined that my first order of business would be a half hour on the treadmill. After that I’d do some weight work three or four times a week, but the treadmill was going to be the core of my program. I wanted to burn some calories, and I only hoped my feet wouldn’t stop me.

Early that July, a freak accident with a rubber sandal tore the pad of the big toe on my right foot, and I’d had to limp over to St. Vincent’s to get it stitched up. It had healed perfectly, but that foot continued to give me grief. It was often numb and tingling in the mornings, and I had a long-standing touch of arthritis in that same toe that I’d torn open. I could live with all that, it was part of being an old man, but I was concerned that it might interfere with my treadmill regimen.

To my surprise, the walking seemed to help the foot. I don’t know why this should have been the case, it’s not as though I hadn’t been walking a fair amount before I got anywhere near the treadmill, but I wasn’t going to argue with this particular success. I kept on keeping on, and I hit the gym every morning, seven days a week.

I’d been doing this for about a month when I got my first actual job in almost forty years. Two friends of mine, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, hired me as a staff writer and assistant story editor for a dramatic show about the world of big-time poker that they were developing for ESPN. All of a sudden I had an office in Midtown to go to five days a week, and regular hours to keep.

That would have been a perfect excuse to give up the gym, or at least reduce my visits, but I was getting too much gratification from the routine I’d established, and all I had to do was hit the gym before I went to the office. The gym opened at five, so how hard was it to fit in an hour or so before I showered and dressed and caught the E train uptown? Not hard at all, as it turned out, and working on Tilt! never made me miss a single session at the gym.

At first I put in a daily half hour of racewalking on the treadmill, capped by a five-minute cooldown. After a few weeks I started extending occasional sessions to an hour, with a ten-minute cooldown.

Treadmills allow you to choose your pace, and I started out at fifteen-minute miles, kicking it up a notch every five or ten minutes. I worked out a formula for increasing the overall speed of my workout by almost imperceptible increments, and within a couple of months I’d be finishing each daily session around the twelve-minute-mile mark. I kept a water bottle handy and drank water at regular intervals, and it was a good thing, because these sessions were sweaty work. I was always dripping by the time I was done.

I would see other people reading a book or newspaper while they used the treadmill, and I couldn’t figure out how they managed it. It seemed to me that if you were able to read at the same time, you weren’t working hard enough. And I was working as hard as I could.

And it was paying off. I was seeing results — on the scale and in the way my clothes fit. My fat pants returned to the basement storage bin, where they are even now biding their time until I need them. I was in good shape and I felt terrific, and, if I still had arthritis in my toe and some neuropathy on some mornings, on balance my foot was a good deal better.

Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone.

It was on the last day of the year when everything changed dramatically. Lynne and I took the easy way out for New Year’s Eve, spending the evening at home after an early dinner in the neighborhood. Later we’d turn on the TV and watch the ball come down, but first we found ways to amuse ourselves, and I sat down at the computer and Googled my way into trouble.

A couple of days earlier, I’d finished a long session on the treadmill, an hour plus a ten-minute cooldown, and one of the machine’s dials helpfully pointed out that I’d gone 4.8 miles, or 5.2 miles, or whatever the hell it happened to be. I think it must have been just over five miles, because the thought that came to me was that I’d just gone the equivalent of a five-mile race.

Race. A dangerous word, that.

Well, was there any reason I couldn’t enter a race? I wouldn’t be very fast, but then I’d never been fast, so what difference did it make? I dismissed the idea, but I guess it must have decided to hang around, because what I Googled on New Year’s Eve was NEW YORK ROAD RUNNERS.

That was the club I’d belonged to in my racing days. I hadn’t renewed my membership when it expired back in 1982, and I’d certainly had no contact with the organization, but I knew it was still going strong. Fred Lebow, the inspired monomaniac who’d essentially created the modern urban marathon singlehanded, had lost a long battle to brain cancer some years ago, but the organization he’d spearheaded now owned the East Eighty-ninth Street brownstone where it was headquartered, and still ran the New York City Marathon over the same course I’d covered almost twenty-five years earlier. It stood to reason they’d have a website, and indeed they did, and twenty minutes later I was a member and had signed up for two races.

Now that’s the trouble with the damned Internet. It makes everyone an impulse shopper. Just a few years ago, if I read about a book that sounded interesting, I had to remember to look for it the next time I was in a bookstore, and by then I may have already determined that I could live without it. Or they might be out of stock, or I might sport-read a few pages and decide the hell with it.

But now in an instant I’m on Amazon or Alibris, and in another instant I’ve bought the book, and before I’ve had time to think it through I’ve bought two more books I don’t want or need just to save on shipping charges.

Now all of that is fine when it happens to somebody else, and they’re buying my books. So I suppose it evens out, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

If I’d had time to think about it, if I’d had to make out a check and write a letter and address an envelope, and then go hunt for a stamp, well, maybe the outcome might have been different. But all I had to do was tap a few keys and click my mouse a few times and suddenly I was a member in good standing of New York Road Runners, with my registration prepaid for a five-mile race on January 9 and a tenmiler three weeks later. And, because I was over sixty-five (though evidently not old enough to know better) I joined as a senior member, and got a reduced senior rate on my race entry fees. Such a deal!

Lynne was very supportive. She thought it was a great idea, and asked if they’d be giving out shirts. I said it seemed likely, and she said that was terrific, a free T-shirt. I told her there was no such thing as a free T-shirt.

Nor was my investment going to be limited to what I’d spent online. I’d been walking up to five miles at a clip, but I’d been doing every bit of that training indoors, on a treadmill, and they weren’t going to be so considerate as to hold the race in my gym. I’d be walking in Central Park, with its renowned hills, and it was January, which meant it would be cold and there might well be snow on the ground. I had to go to a sporting goods store and pick out things to wear, high-tech gear that would keep me warm while allowing perspiration to escape. I could have stocked up on T-shirts for what I shelled out.

I emailed my kids with news of my upcoming adventure, and my daughter Jill surprised me by signing up for the five-mile race; she lives near the club’s headquarters, and offered to pick up my number bib and T-shirt. I met her at her apartment on Sunday morning, and after I’d spent ten minutes getting my number pinned on just right, we walked over to the park in time for the race.

And it went fine. It was cold, but it turned out I was dressed fine for it, and my legs were up to the challenge of the park’s hills. I hit the big hill at the northern end of the park about a mile into the race, and it was challenging, but I was pleased to note that I passed a lot of back-of-the-pack runners on the long steep ascent. They found themselves forced to break stride and walk, and as a racewalker I was able to breeze right by them.

Breeze may not be the word I’m looking for here, as it suggests a degree of effortlessness that was not at all in evidence. The race took all I had to give it, and when I was done Jill was waiting at the finish line, having run across it a few minutes ahead of me. We went out for breakfast, and back at her place I changed into street clothes, and put on the shirt I’d just earned. The race was the Fred Lebow Memorial, and the shirt bore a likeness of the man himself, and I wore it with pride.

Then I went home, and without having to think about it I went right to the very bookshelf where my copy of Joe Henderson’s Run Farther, Run Faster had been waiting all this time. (Well, actually, it had been waiting in that spot for a mere eleven and a half years, because that’s how long we’d been living in our apartment. Before that, it had followed me from place to place.)

I took it from the shelf and flipped to the once-blank pages at the back, where I’d logged all of my old races. The final entry for my last event in 1982 read: 8K Halloween—58:05—racewalk—#1265.

One line down I wrote 2005, and on the line below that I printed 5 mile Fred Lebow—9 Jan—1:00:21—racewalk, then added my bib number (#5203) and my pace per mile (12:04).

Wow.

The weeks went by and the list began to lengthen. Ten miles in Central Park on January 29. Five kilometers in Las Vegas a week later. Another race in the park, 15K, on February 13, and then a 5K in the streets of Washington Heights the first week in March.

Two weeks later came a race I’d completed once before. It was the Brooklyn Half Marathon, and I’d been in its inaugural edition in 1981; it was my fifth race as a walker, and my final race before the London Marathon. The course was as I remembered it, starting with an out-and-back couple of miles on the Coney Island boardwalk, then following Ocean Parkway through the borough to Prospect Park, where Lynne was waiting to greet me. Coming home, they let us all on the subway for free. A free shirt, a free ride home — how could you beat that?

But when I logged the race in my book, I compared my time of 2:36:04 to my 1981 time of 2:22:25. I was a little more than a minute a mile slower, and I couldn’t understand it. Back then I’d just been learning to racewalk, it was only my fifth race, and my form these days was greatly improved, and—

“Honey,” Lynne pointed out gently, “you’re twenty-four years older now.”

“Oh,” I said.

Now I knew well enough that age, all by itself, was enough to knock the edge off any athlete’s game. It takes a few miles per hour off a pitcher’s fastball, it keeps a wide receiver from racing clear of a cornerback, and on the golf course it shortens tee shots and even makes putts a little less likely to find the cup. And of course it slows runners down. That’s why they award prizes by age groups, and why runners with milestone birthdays can draw some consolation from their new status. On the day you turn forty, you stop competing with the thirty-five-to-thirty-nine crowd and set your sights on the forty-to-forty-four year olds. Cold comfort, perhaps, but better than no comfort at all.

I knew all that, but evidently shrugged it off as one tends to dismiss mortality; yes, sure, everybody dies, but I’m different.

While I wasn’t quite ready to abandon the notion that I was going to live forever, I had to acknowledge that an additional minute per mile after a quarter of a century was only to be expected. In fact, all things considered, it wasn’t that bad at all.

Besides, I was improving, wasn’t I? Training longer and harder, working on my form. It stood to reason that I could trim a few minutes off my half-marathon time. I might not quite get it down to what it had been in 1981, but I could at least move in that direction, couldn’t I?

Not that speed really mattered all that much to me. It was a way to check on how I was doing, but it wasn’t important in and of itself.

What I really cared about was being able to finish a marathon.

This time I couldn’t even blame the Internet. It was in a copy of Running Times that I learned about the Fallsview Casino Marathon, scheduled for the 23rd of October. The race would begin in Buffalo, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and after a few miles in a neighborhood I knew intimately it would cross the Peace Bridge into Canada and skirt the Niagara River all the way to the Falls.

The race was on a Sunday, and the following weekend members of the Bennett High School Class of 1955 would be celebrating their fiftieth reunion. Lynne and I were planning to attend, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and how would it feel to walk into the reunion after having just days before completed a marathon right there in Buffalo?

By the time I found out about the race and signed up for it, I had a good six months to prepare for it. That seemed as though it ought to be ample time — if in fact a 26.2-mile race was within the realm of possibility for me. I didn’t know that it was, not at this stage of my life, not on these feet and legs. And as far as I could make out, the only way to find out if I could go the distance was to try.

During the cold months, I’d continued to do all my training on the treadmill. Come spring, I discovered Hudson River Park. I went on using the treadmill a couple of days a week for speed workouts, but most of the time I went to the park instead, and gradually increased my weekly long walks — ten miles, twelve miles, fourteen miles, sixteen miles. I walked to the Battery and back, I did lap after lap on the piers, and the miles began to add up.

And I kept entering races and picking up T-shirts. Five kilometers on Randall’s Island, ten in Central Park. Eight in Washington, D.C., with my daughter Alison keeping me company. (My eldest daughter, Amy, has thus far managed to avoid all of this, but lately has begun walking home from her job in Astoria to her home in Forest Hills, and taking multihour walks around town, often accompanied by her sister Jill.)

Two four-milers in Central Park, on consecutive weekends, and five miles in Summit, New Jersey. (Along with the inevitable T-shirt, every entrant received a TheStreet.com baseball cap, courtesy of Summit native Jim Cramer, the guy who does all the screaming on CNBC.)

A 5K race on Rikers Island, with the prisoners calling out to us from their cells; we had our hands stamped before the start, so that they could make sure nobody slipped out of jail and escaped in our midst. A half-marathon in Queens, starting in College Point, in which I clipped five minutes and change off my time two months earlier in Brooklyn. I was elated, my time in Queens was just eight minutes slower than my Brooklyn time in 1981, and maybe I could actually become as fast as I’d been back then. Who was going to tell me I couldn’t?

Three more races in Central Park, a 10K and two five-milers. Then the Bronx Half Marathon, two minutes slower than Queens, but the course was hillier and the July heat a factor. Then three weeks without a race.

And then, the last weekend in July, Lynne and I rented a car and drove to Wakefield, Massachusetts, just west of Boston, for my first twenty-four-hour race.

Well, I’d always wanted to try one. When I first heard about it I’d told myself there’d be time enough for that sort of thing when I turned sixty. Now, seven years past that marker, I was ready to give it a shot.

I did wonder at the wisdom of attempting a twenty-four-hour race before I’d managed a marathon. I thought of the fellow who apologized for writing a long letter, explaining that he hadn’t had time to make it a short one. It was a nice turn of phrase, but I’d always figured the guy was full of crap, because I’ve written short and long letters, short and long stories, short and long novels, and in my experience the long ones take more time. And more thought, and more energy, and more out of you.

And wasn’t the same true of races? And, if I was by no means certain of my ability to finish a marathon, what was I doing signing up for something that — if you were doing it right — amounted to four marathons?

“Except I won’t be trying to do four marathons,” I explained to Lynne. “I’d love to go a hundred miles someday and make my bones as a Centurion, but it’ll be a long time before I reach that level of proficiency, and it may never happen. I won’t be shooting for a hundred miles at Wakefield, or even half of that. But I ought to be able to cover 26.2 miles, especially if I’ve got twenty-four hours to do it in.”

That’s how I looked at it. If I could do the equivalent of a marathon, no matter how much time it took me, I’d leave the course knowing that the October marathon in Niagara Falls was within my reach. And, if I had to quit before I got that far, I’d know just how much I needed to improve in order to show up at my reunion as a marathoner.

All I can say is it made perfect sense at the time.

The wakefield course is a 3.16-mile clockwise loop around Lake Quannapowitt, an Indian word for You’ve got to be kidding. The start is in the parking lot for the Lord Wakefield Motel, which did make life easier. We got there on Thursday, with our room booked for three nights, and at seven Friday night they got us started with an informality that made a refreshing change from the horns and gunshots that begin most races. “Okay,” said the woman in charge. “Five, four, three, two, one. Go.” And we went.

The organizers stage two races at once, the twenty-four-hour event (which can be entered individually, as I did, or as a relay team) and a standard marathon. The marathoners begin with a short out-and-back run so that eight circuits of the lake will bring them to precisely 26.2 miles. Then, after three or four or five hours, they pick up their medals and go home, while for the rest of us the real race is just starting to get interesting.

Except for the very beginning, when each lap begins with a steeply downhill thirty-yard cross-country run, the Wakefield course is scenic enough, with the unpronounceable lake forever on one’s right. One stretch consists of an asphalt path through parkland, while the rest is city sidewalks, mostly concrete, running through an attractive town. For several hundred yards in the latter portion of the loop there’s a cemetery between the course and the lake, but you don’t have to hold your breath on your way past it.

They had a food tent near the start, and a drinks table with water and Gatorade, and a little more than halfway around the course they’d placed a second drinks station. Volunteers staffed these posts, and others sat at tables recording your number whenever you completed a lap. Since an unrecorded lap would be an uncounted lap, I made a point of calling out my number loud and clear as I came across the line. “Three-oh-four,” I’d cry, and someone at the scoring table would echo me for confirmation, and I’d drink the cup of water Lynne handed me and head out on my next lap.

In the early going the course was cluttered with marathoners, some of them reeling off six-or seven-minute miles, and the slowest of them still much faster than your average geriatric racewalker. I bore them no ill will, but it was a pleasure to see the last of them.

They all finished their marathon long before I finished mine, which I did somewhere in the course of my ninth lap. But here’s what I wrote the week after the race, in a report I posted on a marathon walkers Internet board:

17

it was not quite three months later when Lynne and I drove up to Niagara Falls and checked into a hotel on the Canadian side. On Sunday morning, a fleet of buses carried the entrants across the border to Buffalo’s Albright Knox Art Gallery, perhaps a mile from the apartment where my mother spent the last twenty-some years of her life. A few hundred men and women in shorts and singlets spent an hour looking at abstract paintings, pausing now and then to tie their shoes or dash to the bathroom. Then we went outside and lined up in the cold rain, listened to two national anthems, and began the running of the Fallsview Casino Marathon. The course looped around one of the city’s more attractive neighborhoods for a couple of miles before taking us across the Peace Bridge to Canada; then it hugged the shore of the Niagara River all the way to the Falls.

I crossed the start line, and in due course the bridge, and, after five hours and forty-five minutes, the finish line. It was an ordeal; I pushed myself, hoping to come in under six hours, and the wind and rain took a lot of the joy out of the day. But I was never in any doubt that I’d finish. It was, after all, just a marathon.

Why would anyone be masochist enough to take part in an ultramarathon? Why put in the interminable hours of training, only to punish oneself for still more hours over fifty or a hundred kilometers, or fifty or a hundred miles? Why trace endless circles around a lake for twenty-four hours?

(Or even longer. There’s another whole category called multiday races, and the meaning of the term is easier to make out than the motivation of the participants. Forty-eight-hour races, seventy-two-hour races. A six-day race in a park in Queens. A 3,100-mile race — yes, you read that correctly — also in Queens; a friend of Andy Cable’s participated one year, and Andy reported to me that although the winner had already crossed the finish line, his friend still had a little over five hundred miles to go. Think about that, will you? The race is over, the winner’s lying down with his shoes and socks off, and this chap’s still got to run from St. Louis to Kansas City and back again.)

Why subject one’s body and soul to this sort of thing? Ultramarathoners have tired of the question, but if you get one to respond he may tell you that the requisite discipline gives direction to his life, that pushing beyond his own barriers expands his sense of the possibilities, that the long hours on the course are a veritable spa session for his spirit. Flowery and/or cryptic explanations are commonplace; the loneliness of the ultrarunner does seem to put one in touch with one’s inner poet, one’s inner philosopher, one’s inner Hallmark card.

You need a reason? Here’s one. Complete one ultra and you can drop this three-word phrase into conversations for the rest of your life:

Just a marathon.

The wakefield race gave me a lift unlike anything else I can recall. I have never in my life had a greater sense of accomplishment. A friend gave me a look when I told him as much. I’d published all those books, he reminded me. I’d traveled all over the world. Those, it seemed to him, were real accomplishments, and I actually thought a night and a day walking around an unpronounceable lake somehow put them in the shade?

Well, yeah, and I think I know why. I had vastly exceeded my own expectations, had done considerably more than I believed I was capable of. I’d expected to cover marathon distance, intended to go fifty kilometers, dreamed of somehow covering fifty miles. But I never even entertained the fantasy of a hundred kilometers, and yet I’d somehow reached and passed that distance. I told him as much, but I’m not sure he got it.

But he was by no means the only person I told. You know the story about the elderly man in the confessional, reporting in vivid detail about his affair with a young woman a third his age? “Excuse me,” the priest says, interrupting, “but from the way you express yourself, it’s my impression that you are Jewish.”

“I am,” says the old man.

“Then why are you telling me this?”

“Father, I’m telling everybody!”

I too was telling everybody, partly out of pride, but as much out of a need to tell myself. Because my mind kept doing what it could to minimize the accomplishment. An inner voice kept telling me that I hadn’t really done what I thought, that I’d stopped to sleep, that I’d quit the course when I still had time for another lap, that I’d just gone through the motions. I had in fact gone through those motions for 63.2 miles, but the voice remained unimpressed. If I’d done it, how hard could it be? And what could it possibly amount to?

I came home from Wakefield with sore muscles and blistered feet, but nothing that didn’t mend in fairly short order. I eased back into training, and entered two half-marathons as a run-up to the marathon, one in Jersey City in September and another in Staten Island a week before the Niagara Falls race. The Staten Island race was just a long training run as far as I was concerned, my last before the marathon, and I took it at an easy pace.

After the marathon, Lynne and I hung around in Buffalo for my fiftieth reunion. I don’t suppose I hid the fact that I’d completed a marathon a week earlier. I might even have dropped the phrase just a marathon into a conversation or two. It wouldn’t surprise me.

My wakefield race report notwithstanding, I didn’t give serious thought to the November Ultracentric race in Texas. That same weekend, New York Road Runners was holding a 60K race in Central Park, and I decided to take a shot at that instead.

I showed up for it on a cold Sunday morning, and the crowd at the start provided a pretty good indication of the difference between ultramarathons and shorter races. The club holds races in the park all through the year, most of them ranging between four and ten miles, and there are always several thousand men and women who show up for the challenge and the T-shirt. Just three weeks before the 60K, some thirty thousand people had massed at Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island for the New York City Marathon, and they constituted the mere fraction who’d either qualified for the race or won the lottery; there’d have been well over a hundred thousand runners if they’d been able to accept all applicants.

There were perhaps fifty hardy souls gathered at Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth Street for the start of the Knickerbocker 60K.

Isn’t that remarkable?

Granted, the New York Marathon has a lot going for it. It’s an important race with an international reputation, held on a scenic course that traverses the five boroughs and draws enthusiastic spectators throughout its route. The Knickerbocker, in contrast, consists of nine four-mile loops of the Central Park course, plus a brief out-and-back at the start to make up the 37.2-mile distance. There was no press coverage, no TV cameras at the start, no crowd support, no band playing. A drink table at the start and another halfway around the loop provided water, Gatorade, and the ultrarunner’s favorite, flat Coke.

You didn’t even get a T-shirt.

Still, wouldn’t you think that a few of the tens of thousands denied entry to the marathon would have chosen to run eleven miles farther for a tenth the entry fee?

For me, the Knickerbocker was more of a challenge than I would have preferred, because time was a factor. The crew would cease manning the finish line after eight and a half hours, and if you took longer than that, you wouldn’t get your time officially recorded. It’s a little difficult in retrospect to figure out why this mattered to me, but it did at the time, and I was determined to get in under the wire.

Now that’s not a terribly stringent time limit for a runner. If you’re in shape to run the distance, you can certainly do so in the allotted time. For a walker, and a geriatric one in the bargain, covering that many miles at a 13:30 clip takes some effort. My pace had been faster in all the year’s previous races, and was 13:10 at Niagara Falls, but this race was almost half again as long, and the colder weather meant more clothes, which ate up time whenever I stopped to pee.

The result was that I had to push myself more than I would have liked. The most pleasant part of a long race is the time spent at cruising speed, when you can just relax and go with the flow. I couldn’t allow myself to do that, I had to walk at the leading edge of my comfort zone, and that took the joy out of it. But I crossed the line at 8:21:50 — and, remarkably, there were a few souls who took even longer than I did.

A week later I was back on that same park loop for a four-mile race. That wrapped up 2005, and my records indicate I took part in twenty-five races, with a total distance of 277.2 miles. On the second Sunday in January I returned to the park for the Fred Lebow Memorial five-mile race, the same race that I’d started off walking a year earlier. Then my time had been 1:00:21; now I was able to cut that by almost three minutes, to 57:36. And a week later I flew to Mobile, Alabama, for what promised to be an interesting race... even though it was, after all, just a marathon.

18

Why mobile?

Well, what I read about the race sounded good. And it came at the right time, three weeks before the Mardi Gras Marathon in New Orleans. And it was in Alabama, and if I intended to rack up a marathon in every state, I’d have to include Alabama sooner or later. It was, after all, first alphabetically. I couldn’t start there, I’d already logged three states (all of them beginning with N) a quarter of a century ago, but I could certainly kick off 2006 with Alabama.

And did I intend to knock off marathons in all fifty states?

There was, I had to admit, a certain appeal to the notion. I’d read about runners in the grip of this particular obsession, and I have to say they sounded like my kind of people. They’d organized a club, which promptly schismed itself into two clubs, one for runners trying for fifty states, the other adding the District of Columbia to the mix. (Most of the Fifty-Staters seem to belong to both clubs.)

Here’s one thing these folks managed a couple of years ago. Frustrated by the lack of a marathon in Delaware (The First State, according to the license plates) they drummed up local support and managed to organize one. At its first running, a handful of Delaware residents turned up, and so did a vast crowd of maniacs from all over the country, thrilled at the opportunity to add this elusive state to their list.

How could a man who’d spent a couple of years driving from Buffalo Gap, Saskatchewan, to Buffalo Corners, Pennsylvania, by way of Buffalo Springs, Texas, and New Buffalo, Michigan, fail to be moved by all this? I found their pursuit a laudable one, and in fact I seemed to recall that it had occurred to me back in my first marathon year of 1981, when along with England and Spain I’d nailed North Dakota, New York, and New Jersey. I’d thought then that I might add other states until I had them all — but instead I gave up the pastime altogether.

I don’t know how committed I felt now. Was the goal realistic for me? Could I hang in there long enough to get all the states? If I managed five races a year, I was looking at a ten-year project. Would I still be capable of covering twenty-six miles in my late seventies? Would I feel like trying?

There was no way to answer those questions. In the meantime, though, if I was going to be entering marathons anyway, why not pick ones in different states? And why not start in Mobile?

Mobile had another thing going for it. It was one of a handful of marathons with a racewalking category. In both of the day’s races, the marathon and the half-marathon, judges would be stationed on the course to make sure that entrants in the racewalking division adhered to the rules of the sport, and the fastest male and female walkers would be awarded prizes.

I’d thus far been careful to avoid racewalker contests in New York, suspecting that my form would get me disqualified in a dedicated walking event. For all I knew, that might happen at Mobile, but if it did I’d simply be bunched with the runners in the scoring, and it would still be a marathon, and I’d still get the T-shirt. And I had the feeling the judging wouldn’t be as strict as it might be in a race exclusively for walkers.

It was a very enjoyable race; the weather was good and the course an attractive one. Some people complained about the hills, but I found them manageable after all those races in Central Park. My performance pleased me; I’d wanted to trim a little time off Niagara Falls’ 5:45, and had wistful hopes of breaking 5:30. I finished in 5:21:10, good enough for second place in the male racewalker division... but there were in fact only three walkers, two men and one woman, so it’s not as though I actually beat anybody. (A dozen or more walkers participated in the half-marathon.)

I didn’t have to beat anybody to feel elated with my accomplishment. I went home in triumph, and eventually my award arrived, a sort of abstract collage of colored paper. It came framed, but the glass was broken by the time it arrived, because it had simply been tucked into a manila envelope and dropped in the mail.

“What kind of moron would do that?” Lynne wondered.

“A bona fide one,” I told her, explaining that the awards had been handmade by the residents of a home for the retarded, one of the race’s beneficiaries. She felt awful. I, on the other hand, felt proud, and found a spot on a shelf for my prize.

A week after Mobile, I walked a ten-mile race in Central Park, and followed that a week later with the Manhattan Half-Marathon. Then Lynne and I flew to New Orleans for her first look at her hometown since Hurricane Katrina... and for my first shot at the Mardi Gras Marathon.

Katrina had severely reduced tourism in the city, but you wouldn’t have known that from the turnout for the race. Like Mobile, it recognized walkers with a separate section, and at registration I received not one but two numbered bibs; racewalkers were to wear them fore and aft, so that they could be readily distinguished from runners by the officials and judged accordingly.

I didn’t expect to win anything this time. There were more entrants, so I couldn’t pick up a prize just by showing up and reaching the finish line. Nor did I expect to beat my time in Mobile. Everything had gone right at that race, and I’d somehow managed to clip fifty-five seconds per mile off my Niagara Falls time, and I doubted I could do that well again.

Still, the course here was flatter than Mobile. So maybe I could stay under five and a half hours.

When I try to remember the race, what I recall most is how often I had to stop to pee. I greeted the dawn, as I often do, with a cup of yerba maté, and I didn’t have any breakfast, and consequently for the first two hours of the marathon I had a tougher time passing a tree than a German shepherd with a kidney ailment. They had Porta Johns set up along the course every mile or so, but during the first half of the race there were always a couple of people waiting in line, and that struck me as an insupportable waste of time.

I mean, this is a race, isn’t it? Do you see anybody standing in line for the trees? Like, do the math.

In a line for the Porta Johns at the staging area for a race in Staten Island, I heard one young man announce expansively to his companion, “The whole world is my urinal.”

When I remember the races I ran a quarter-century ago, I can’t seem to recall a single occasion when I paused somewhere between the start and the finish line to relieve myself. To be sure, memory is a selective process, and it’s certainly possible that I’ve simply forgotten the pit stops my early marathons required.

But I remember the imperative need to pee in the minutes before a race. That was something everybody evidently needed to do, even more urgently than we all had to tie and retie our shoelaces. Much of that was probably attributable to anxiety, and whatever its cause, the starter’s pistol put a stop to it. Once it went off, I was done tying my shoes, and no longer noticed that they were too loose, or too tight, or whatever I’d decided they were a moment before the gun went off. And, as far as I can remember, I was done peeing, too.

But is it possible that I ran and walked whole marathons without being interrupted by a call of nature? London, Madrid, North Dakota, New York, New Jersey — I’ll tell you, I’m pretty sure I finished them all without once stopping for a pee.

Actually, the length of the race hasn’t got that much to do with it. There’s a point in the course of a long race when that particular system seems to shut down. The dehydration resulting from perspiration may have something to do with it. Even now, I’m generally able to sail past the Porta Johns during the second half of a marathon.

But by then I may already have christened any number of trees.

Ah, the special pleasures of the golden years.

For all the stops, I was making good time on the streets of New Orleans. I was very much aware of the racewalkers who were my competitors, and pushed myself to keep pace with this one and edge ahead of that one. It was frustrating the way I would gain ground by pressing and give it back when I made a pit stop. There was one walker I kept overtaking time and time again.

More than half of the walkers were entered in the half-marathon, and left the field after 13.1 miles, upon returning to the Superdome. The rest of us kept going, pushing up Prytania, circling Audubon Park, then backtracking on Prytania to the finish line. On my way up Prytania, I spotted one walker who was already on his way back. There were a couple of others out in front of me, and in the final quarter of the race I began to overtake them. I wasn’t going faster, but their pace had slowed more than mine had, and I was now able to pass them.

In the final mile, I caught sight of a walker a little ways ahead of me. I pressed, and picked up speed, and drew even with him, whereupon he kicked it up a notch. We raced side by side for fifty or a hundred yards, and then I surged and pulled away from him, and somehow knew I wasn’t going to see him again that side of the finish line.

I finished with a net time of 5:17:26, almost four minutes faster than Mobile. Once again I’d taken second place in the male racewalking division, but this time around I was second of eight or nine, not second of two. (To keep things in perspective, the winner was a young man from the Florida panhandle who beat me by about forty minutes.)

It had been a wonderful race, and I came home suffused with a sense of accomplishment and great hopes for the future. My last marathon in 1981 was the Jersey Shore; that, you may recall, was the one I had to finish in five hours in order to be sure of a jacket. I’d racewalked the whole distance in four hours and fifty-three minutes, a mark I never expected to hit again.

But who was to say it was forever out of reach? If I could reduce my time by a minute a mile, I’d get all the way down to 4:51 and change. A minute a mile was a lot, and might well prove impossible, but it seemed to me I had room for improvement. My pace at New Orleans was 12:07 minutes per mile, and back in June I’d managed a pace of 11:18 in a five-miler in Central Park, and my pace in the Queens Half Marathon was only ten seconds a mile faster than that. I’d finished that Queens race with a time of 2:30:22, and the same pace would put me less than a minute over five hours.

Maybe I could break five hours, maybe I could even break 4:53 and set a new personal record for the distance. It seemed impossible, but less so than it had before New Orleans.

Why, the pure deep-down recognition of one’s potential makes possible the realization of that potential. Consider the four-minute mile, an impossible barrier until Roger Bannister broke it. And then, almost immediately, no end of other runners found themselves breaking that impossible barrier. Because they knew it could be done.

5:21 in Mobile, 5:17 in New Orleans. I might never break 4:53, or even five hours, but I could certainly get closer, couldn’t I? I could certainly keep on improving. I could train harder, concentrating on both speed and distance. And I could skip the yerba maté on race mornings, and put something in my stomach. Something salty, say, that might encourage my system to hang on to water instead of sprinkling it on every convenient tree.

I could keep my weight down, and maybe even trim it a little. I’d read somewhere a marathoner’s rule of thumb: one pound equals one mile. Lose ten pounds and you’d shave ten minutes off your time in the marathon. Obviously this only works up to a point, you can’t drop a hundred pounds and challenge the Kenyans, but it’s hard to argue with the premise that the less weight you carry, the more rapidly you can carry it.

There’s a notion that marathoners are thin, and you’d subscribe to it if you should limit your marathon-watching to the first group across the finish line. The winners range from fashion-model lean to anorexically gaunt. Stick around for a look at the back of the pack and you’ll see men and women a lot closer to the national average. There may not be anyone morbidly obese, but a good number of runners will qualify as chunky, and you’ll see Fifty State T-shirts on some of them. Some races even have separate categories for heavier runners, with prizes to the fleetest. (The men are identified as Clydesdales, the women as Athenas, and you have to wonder who thought that one up. A heavy man’s a plow horse, you say, and a heavy woman’s a goddess? Well, okay, I guess. Whatever you say. But who knew the original Athena was a porker in the first place? Sprung full-blown from the brow of Zeus, wasn’t she? Must have been a load off his mind. Rim shot!)

Running can take off pounds, but eating can easily balance the equation, and it’s possible to knock off a couple of marathons a month without ever losing an ounce. Run a few miles, eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Hey, no problem.

But if I knocked off the miles and skipped the Cherry Garcia, I could show up a few pounds lighter and walk a few seconds per mile faster. Age was supposed to be a factor, but I’d continued to grow older since I’d resumed racewalking a little over a year ago, and my times were dropping in spite of it. I was already down to 5:17, so who’s to say just what my limit might be?

Ah well. The mark I set in New Orleans, as it turned out, was one I would never surpass.

19

when i flew home from New Orleans, I was delighted with my performance even as I dreamed of trimming my time. But when I flew to Texas three weeks later, I wasn’t thinking about time. This race was all about distance.

The Houston Ultra Weekend consisted of a whole menu of races, all taking place on a comfortingly flat two-mile asphalt loop in Bear Creek Park. In addition to the twenty-four-hour race, there were six-, twelve-, and forty-eight-hour events, as well as a 100K run. I was signed up for the twenty-four-hour, scheduled to start at eight Saturday morning, and when I got to the course Friday afternoon to pick up my number, the forty-eight-hour race was already under way, and its eight intrepid participants were dutifully putting in the miles. They’d pitched their tents in the infield, so that they could take periodic sleep breaks. I had a hotel room, and went to it.

Saturday morning I met my fellow twenty-four-hour entrants, and there were seven of us — six walkers and a solitary runner. Two certified racewalking judges were on hand to make our race a Centurion event, and Jens Borello had come all the way from Denmark in order to qualify as an American Centurion. (He’d already achieved this distinction in the UK and on the European continent, and has since managed the feat in Australia.)

I knew three of my fellows, although I’d only met one of them before in person. That was Beth Katcher, whom I knew from an online message board, and who’d been on a family trip to New York the last weekend in January. We met by arrangement Sunday morning for a walk along the Hudson, and shortly thereafter she signed up for Houston. I knew Andy Cable and Ollie Nanyes from the boards, too, but was meeting them for the first time.

Just as the forty-eight-hour race hit its halfway mark, ours began.

An hour or two later, so did the rain.

It would have been a perfect race without the rain. It was cool, but not cold enough to require extra clothing. The course was as flat as the North Dakota Marathon, and the park was an ideal setting, private and scenic and entirely free of traffic. The relative abundance of walkers made us feel like full-fledged participants, not like curious slow-moving drones in a hive of runner bees.

I hadn’t had any races since New Orleans, and my legs and feet were in good shape. I got off to a good start and set a fairly brisk pace, on the high edge of my cruising speed. If nothing went wrong, I stood a good chance of achieving two of my three goals.

My first goal was to win an Ulli Kamm award, the designated prize for any walker who reached one hundred kilometers within twenty-four hours. I’d done better than that at Wakefield in July, and if I did it again I could get a plaque for it. My second goal was to circle the track thirty-two times, log sixty-four miles, and thus improve on Wakefield’s 63.2 miles.

My third goal was the same as Jens Borello’s, the same indeed as every walker’s. I wanted to go a hundred miles. I wanted to become a Centurion.

Did I have any realistic hope of going that far? It seemed to me that the question could only be answered out there on the course. I’d need an average pace of just under fifteen minutes a mile, and a good cruising speed for me was somewhere between thirteen and fourteen mpm. Mathematically, then, it seemed feasible, until you took into account the extent to which fatigue would take its toll in the latter portion of the race.

I didn’t really think I stood much of a chance. And any hope I might have had was quickly washed away.

The previous day, a race official had warned me about rain. It was a perfect course, he said, or would be except for one small flaw. Rain pooled up on it instead of running off. If it rained hard or long, standing water could become a problem.

It rained long, and some of the time it rained hard, and believe me, the standing water was a problem. It formed puddles several inches deep, and there were places where they blocked the path completely. You had no choice but to splash right through them.

My shoes and socks got soaked. It’s a good deal more enjoyable to walk with dry feet than with wet ones, but that’s the least of it; enjoyment, after all, doesn’t really enter into it in a twenty-four-hour race. More to the point, it took longer for my wet feet to carry me around the course.

I found this out almost immediately, once I’d sloshed through a few puddles. My leg speed stayed the same, as far as I could tell, but my stride was shorter, and I was thus taking more steps to cover the same distance.

And how, you may ask, did I know this? Well, see, I was counting my steps.

It pains me to admit this. Back in the fall of 2004, when I was starting each day on the treadmill at the gym, I got in the habit of counting my steps. (More accurately, I was counting my breaths. Ever since those mid-1970’s sessions in Washington Square Park, I’d synchronized my breathing with my stride, six steps to a breath — inhale left right exhale left right left right. And so I would keep a running tally in my head — in-hale one-thir-ty-two in-hale one-thir-ty-three. And so on.)

I’m not entirely sure why I took up this clearly aberrant behavior. I was on a treadmill, for God’s sake, with a set of gauges to keep me constantly informed of my time and distance. It seemed to give my mind something to do, and yet the process soon became sufficiently automatic to allow my mind to entertain other thoughts without losing track of my count. There was an exception; if I became caught up in some sort of arithmetical computation, that new set of numbers might knock me off my step count. Otherwise, though, I could hang in there with Rain Man himself, able to tell you when it was five minutes until Wapner.

When I moved from the treadmill to the streets, my curious habit actually served a purpose, acting as a built-in pedometer. When my count reached three hundred, I knew I’d gone a mile. On long training walks over an unfamiliar course, I was able to estimate how far I’d gone, and to know when I’d reached my goal for the day. Admittedly, a glance at my wristwatch would have given me an adequate ballpark figure, and eventually I was to abandon the step count, forget about distance, and concern myself only with the time I spent training.

In races, my step count started as I strode across the starting line. Courses typically have mile markers to let you know where you are, but my count let me know how close I was getting to the next mile marker. Once, in an eight-kilometer race on Randall’s Island, I knew the markers had been misplaced when I reached a count of 350 between two of them; others were worried about their pace, but my count provided reassurance. Another time, in a longish race in Central Park, the volunteers began closing up shop while some of us were still on the course and snatched up the mile markers before we reached them. My count let me know where they used to be. I can’t say it got me across the finish line any faster, but it was a comfort to know where I was.

I counted in long races, but modified my approach. In marathons, I started my count anew at each mile marker. At Wakefield, I stopped keeping a total and just counted each lap. That’s what I was doing in Bear Creek Park, and that’s how I knew my stride was shorter with my feet soaked. My feet were sliding around in my shoes, and my shoes were getting less traction on the wet pavement. I was using something like twenty or thirty more six-step paces to the two-mile loop.

Either my watch or the official clock would have told me it was taking me a little longer to circle the route. My count told me why.

I’d brought an extra pair of shoes, and a couple of pairs of socks, but I couldn’t see the point of changing them. There was no avoiding the puddles, and dry shoes would be waterlogged before I’d gone a mile.

I kept going. Until the rain changed things, I’d been on pace to hit fifty miles a little before the twelve-hour midpoint of the race. That didn’t mean I had a shot at a hundred miles, because I couldn’t possibly sustain that pace through hours thirteen to twenty-four, but it suggested that the Ulli Kamm award was a sure thing and I might improve on Wakefield to the tune of fifteen or twenty miles.

The rain continued. Night fell, and so did my pace and my spirits. My wet feet slid around in my wet shoes, and my two big toes bumped up against the front of the toe box, and when I took off my shoes and socks I didn’t like what I saw. The nails on both big toes were loose, and had turned a shade of gray rarely seen on anything living. I had brought a Swiss Army knife along, and I used the saw blade to cut away the first couple of inches of the upper portion of each shoe, put them back on, and got going again.

Everything hurt. I had blisters, surprise surprise, and I had aches and pains, and it was awful. I began stopping in the food tent every two laps, and instead of pausing just long enough to grab a sandwich or a fistful of M&M’s, I’d sit down and rest for a few minutes. I was forcing myself through the laps, I was covering the miles, and in fact it was somewhere around two o’clock when I finished the thirty-second lap. That gave me 64.26 miles — the loop was a few yards beyond an even two miles — and that meant I’d earned an Ulli Kamm award and had passed, though just barely, the 63.2 miles I’d managed in Wakefield.

And I had five or six hours left, plenty of time to add to my total. It might take me upward of twenty minutes to go a mile, and I might have to stop every two miles in the food tent, but even if I only managed two miles an hour, I could hit seventy-five miles. That would be a huge improvement on Wakefield, and a number to be proud of even in good weather.

It didn’t happen. After Lap Thirty-two, I sank into a chair in the food tent and couldn’t seem to rise from it. I stayed put for fifteen or twenty minutes, and that was much too long; it gave my muscles a chance to tighten up, allowed my feet to shake off their protective numbness and report eloquently on their condition. When I stood up and hobbled back onto the course, every step was insupportably painful.

It would have become less so if I’d forced myself to start walking. That’s how it works, as I’d discovered back in July at Wakefield. Taking a break gave the pain a chance to flower; walking through the pain forced it to recede.

But this time I couldn’t make myself do it. Besides the pain, I was profoundly fatigued. I didn’t want to walk anywhere. I wanted to be in bed. I wanted to sleep.

I got in my rental car, drove to my hotel, and called it a night.

When i left, Beth and Andy had also both packed it in after thirty-one laps and 62.25 miles. (There were a couple of cots in a rear section of the food tent, and Beth crawled onto one of them and passed out. After a couple of hours she woke up, went back onto the course, and circled it twice, edging me by a lap. If I’d known she was going to do that... well, never mind.)

I got a shower and a few hours’ sleep, returning to the park a few minutes after Jens hit the Centurion line at 7:15. That left him with plenty of time for another full lap, but he didn’t even want to walk the several hundred yards from the hundred-mile mark to the start/finish line. He’d set out to go a hundred miles, and he’d paced himself with that goal in mind, and he’d done it — and as far as he was concerned, that was that.

It was a glorious morning, cool and crisp and clear, and if they’d held the race a day later it would have been vastly different. It occurred to me that I had time for another lap myself. Ollie was out there, finishing a lap that would bring him to 76.3 miles. I could join him on the course, and join Beth at 66.26 miles.

I never seriously considered it. I was wearing jeans, but even if I changed to running shorts I wouldn’t be in any kind of shape to get back out there. My race was over.

When i flew home the following day, I had an Ulli Kamm award in my suitcase. It was a handsome wooden plaque, eight inches by ten inches, with the effigy of a bear carved into it. (For Bear Creek Park, of course; that the bear is my totem animal is coincidental.) houston ultra weekend, the inscription reads. in recognition of walking 100 kilometers within 24 hours, the ulli kamm award is presented to — And then there’s a blank space, with two screws on either side of it to affix the brass nameplate, which I was to receive in the mail.

I’m still waiting for the nameplate, but that’s okay. It’s a fine trophy, and I don’t need my name on it to know whose it is. Nor am I in any danger of forgetting what I went through to earn it. I was happy to have it, proud to show it off to Lynne.

But it was never quite enough to offset my disappointment.

At Wakefield I’d gone 63.2 miles and felt an unprecedented glow of accomplishment. In Houston I’d gone a mile farther, and had slogged through puddles to do it, and I felt like a failure.

I could have done better, rain or no rain, toenails or no toenails. I could have stayed on the course, could have gone around a few more times. Three more laps would have taken me past seventy miles. Instead I’d lingered in the food tent long enough to make it truly painful when I tried to resume walking, and I’d embraced the pain as an excuse to give up.

The pain had been real enough, and so had the fatigue. But pain and exhaustion are inevitable in that long a race, and I knew it, and knew how to push on through them.

And didn’t.

20

The souvenir t-shirt from the athens marathon is one of my favorites. It’s long-sleeved, and the cut is good, and the color a good warm brown, but that’s the least of it. athens marathon, it says. 2006. And, within a classic laurel wreath, there’s the representation of a helmeted Greek warrior, running.

You’d never guess they meant Athens, Ohio.

The race was held April 2, and I flew to Columbus the day before and drove to Athens. The field was small, with 135 finishers, and the course was beautiful — a flat asphalt path through the countryside, closed to bike traffic during the race. The finish line was in the Ohio University football stadium, and the final quarter-mile was a lap around the oval track.

My time of 5:41:08 was a good deal slower than Mobile or New Orleans, but I hadn’t expected to break any records that day. I went back to my hotel and ate pizza, and the next morning I put on my new shirt and went home happy.

I continued walking local Road Runners Club races while I worked out my schedule for marathons and ultras. Between Houston and Athens I raced twice, a 5K in Washington Heights and a return engagement in the Brooklyn Half Marathon. My time in Brooklyn was almost four minutes slower than it had been in 2005, and I found that surprising; with all the training and racing I’d done in the intervening twelve months, you’d think my time would have come down a little. But I chalked it up to lingering effects of the Houston Ultra.

After Athens, I had three more local races leading up to my next marathon, coming up the first weekend in June in Deadwood, South Dakota. The longest of the three was the Queens Half Marathon, and my time of 2:37:55 was seven and a half minutes slower than the previous year’s.

Hmmm.

Lynne and I made a real trip out of Deadwood, enjoying the town before the race, then spending the following week driving around the state. During the Buffalo hunt we’d taken Polaroid snapshots of each other, wearing Buffalo T-shirts and posing in front of pertinent signage, and now we took photography to another level by inaugurating a virtual photo collection. In front of some suitable attraction — our favorite was the World’s Largest Pheasant, in Huron, South Dakota — one of us would strike an appropriate pose, while the other would aim an invisible camera, frame the shot perfectly, and click an invisible shutter. The best part of this was the baffled reaction of onlookers, but the aftermath was almost as good; back home, we had no film to develop, no prints to frame, no digital images to bore our friends with.

The race itself was challenging. It was a point-to-point race on the Deadwood-Mickelson Trail, an old railroad right-of-way that had been converted for recreational purposes. (Rails to Trails, they call this sort of thing, and I’m all for it.) Buses took us to the start, where I stood in the Porta John line until I reached my goal, peed, and then, recognizing the inevitable, got right back into line again. I’d made the round-trip several times before it was time to get in line for the start.

If the Athens course had been an out-and-back, Deadwood was an up-and-down. We started out at around five thousand feet, had a straight shot uphill for the first fourteen miles, then went downhill all the way to the finish. Overall, there was a net loss of altitude of around a thousand feet.

The mile-high altitude and the relentless uphill march made the first half of the race demanding, and the first part of the downhill was steep enough to make it hard for a walker to keep from breaking stride. Early on in the downhill I bowed to the inevitable and tried switching to a jog, but that was so hard on my knees I gave it up after fifteen or twenty yards.

I knew my time wasn’t going to be anything special, and I didn’t really care. I was enjoying the vistas, and I cruised to the finish, getting there with a net time of 6:08:08. Nothing to brag about but nothing to be ashamed of, and I now owned a shirt with Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok on it. And I’d added South Dakota to my marathon list.

21

there were plenty of races in and around New York during June and July, but I passed them up. I eased back into training after we’d returned from Deadwood, and upped my mileage along the Hudson, hoping for a good performance at Wakefield. The Houston race, my disappointment notwithstanding, had carried me from 63.2 to 64.25 miles, and I felt I ought to be able to manage at least one more lap than I’d walked a year ago.

And was it only a year since I’d been unable to dream past fifty miles? Now I was dreaming of eighty. It didn’t seem out of the question. I’d have reached eighty in Houston, if the puddles hadn’t gotten in my way. I’d have still gone well over seventy, rain or no rain, if my own will hadn’t failed. The Wakefield course was less user-friendly, with its little patch of cross-country downhill and its long stretches of concrete, but it wasn’t all that bad, and it had the virtue of familiarity.

We rented a car on Thursday, drove up, checked into the Lord Wakefield. This time we took along a folding chair for Lynne and a card table for all the supplies I hadn’t thought to bring the first time. (The one thing I forgot was a table knife. The food tent at Houston, besides providing me with an all-too-comfortable place to dawdle, had shown me what a food tent ought to be, and how short Wakefield fell in that department. Aside from a lot of sugary crap, the best thing on offer was peanut butter. You had to make your own sandwiches, and you couldn’t, because all they gave you to dig the peanut butter out of the big jar was a dinky little white plastic knife. It barely reached far enough into the jar to get to the peanut butter, and bent and sometimes broke in the process. You couldn’t even hijack a plane with a knife like that, let alone make a sandwich. I had promised myself I’d pick up a couple of thrift-shop knives and donate them, but it slipped my mind.)

The poet Randall Jarrell famously defined the novel as a long work of prose fiction with something wrong with it. Well, a twenty-four-hour race is a long run — or walk — in which something goes wrong. And in this case, as in Houston, it was the weather.

It was warm and humid on Thursday. That seems to be the default setting for Wakefield that time of year. It was no different Friday morning, but the forecast advised that a thunderstorm was on its way, and as the day wore on the sky darkened and the winds picked up. And you could smell the rain that was coming. A Dust Bowl farmer on the parched central plains would have fallen to his knees and given thanks to God. I did not.

It began raining lightly around the time I picked up my number at the sign-in tent. Now there’s nothing wrong with a light rain, and in midsummer it’s often more help than hindrance. I had a hooded Gore-Tex windbreaker along; it had served me well in Texas, although it couldn’t do anything for my feet, and I wasn’t worried about a light rain. But a light rain wasn’t what we got. We got a downpour, and by the time we should have been massing at the starting line, we were instead diverted to a meeting room in the adjacent motel. It wasn’t just a storm, it was a full-blown electrical cloud burst, and they didn’t dare send us out onto the course until it had passed through.

The start was postponed a half-hour to 7:30; at 7:15 they announced a further postponement, to 8:00. Any delay beyond that hour would cut into the time of the race, because they were required to close down by eight Saturday night. So if we got under way at nine, say, we’d be starting a twenty-three-hour race. That sounds as though it ought to be long enough for anybody, but it’s not, and we were not a happy bunch.

Beth was there — her home was a half hour’s drive from Wakefield — and so was Andy. It was good to see them again, and good to recognize faces I’d seen the year before; it was nice to have my own face recognized by the people who were putting on the race. Or trying to, if the storm would only move on through.

Lynne heard two young runners griping about the delay. “Like I’m gonna get struck by lightning,” he said. “I mean, what are the odds?”

The storm, as it turned out, was no problem. It passed overhead just in time for the race to begin at eight o’clock. A light rain continued to fall for the first hour or so, but it really wasn’t anything to complain about. It cooled things off after a hot day, and spared us the swarming gnats I’d had so much fun aspirating the previous year.

Remember the spiritual?

Houston was water. Wakefield was heat.

For the first ten hours or so, the race was as idyllic as something that effortful can be. There were no large puddles to step in, and the course was virtually dry except for the fifty-yard cross-country downhill plunge near the start. That was pretty soggy, but there wasn’t that much of it and it wasn’t that hard to skirt the watery spots. That stretch was going to be a minor nuisance anyway, and the rain hadn’t made it that much worse.

I walked side by side with Andy Cable for most of the first six hours. Because Wakefield wasn’t a judged race, and didn’t have a walkers category, he felt free to mix in a sort of shuffling jog (or a jogging shuffle, as you prefer) on the downhill stretches. He’d pull away from me at such times; then he’d deliberately slow down when the course leveled off, and I’d catch up with him on the uphill. And so on. Between shuffles, we talked — and the laps mounted up, and the miles accumulated, and the hours passed.

For four hours or so, Lynne sat at our table and rose to greet me at the completion of each 3.1-mile lap. Then around midnight she pleaded exhaustion and went to our room. That would have been fine, except a lap later I discovered she’d never retrieved the two big bottles of Coca-Cola from the trunk of the car, and had taken the car keys to the room with her. I drank some water and got under way, concentrating on thinking instead of all of the woman’s good qualities.

On the ninth or tenth lap, I remember remarking to Andy that I knew I was starting to tire when the Gatorade began tasting good. He told me I didn’t look tired, and I said it didn’t taste good yet. “But it’s not as bad as it was a few laps back,” I admitted.

As far as I know, Wakefield’s the only twenty-four-hour race that starts in the evening. The rest, like most marathons and ultras, get under way in the morning. The starting time’s a plus for Wakefield’s marathon contingent; the summer heat is a lot easier to bear when the sun goes down, and the marathoners can wrap up their race, gobble their pizza, and still make it home at a decent hour.

But is an evening start good or bad for the twenty-four-hour participants? That’s hard to say. One very obvious disadvantage is that, barring a prerace afternoon nap, the entrants have already been awake for twelve hours or so by the time the race gets started. When their usual bedtime hour rolls around, they’ve still got three-fourths of the race in front of them.

On the other hand, one is psychologically disposed to be most tired during the hours of darkness. With an evening start, ten hours on the course will carry you through to dawn, and the rest of the race will be in daylight, when you’re programmed to be awake. In contrast, consider my own experience in Houston; after eighteen punishing hours on the course, it was two in the morning, and everything in me yearned to be in bed. Would I have been better able to shrug off the fatigue if it had been 2:00 p.m. instead of 2:00 a.m.?

Maybe. Or maybe not. Because ultimately one returns to that definition of the race derived from Randall Jarrell. What was it again? Oh, right — a long walk in which something goes wrong.

When dawn broke, I could see what it was going to be this time.

When i first learned of the existence of twenty-four-hour races, I remember being struck by the delight to the spirits I was sure would occur when darkness gave way to dawn. One would be quite literally running to daylight, and wouldn’t that give you a wonderful feeling?

Well, no, not really. A sunrise, like a sunset, is a phenomenon I don’t tire of viewing. And, because I ordinarily see fewer of the former, they’re that much more special. I mentioned one in Spain that I still recall — Lynne and I, reaching the top of a hill, and turning around just in time to see the sun break the horizon. I’ve witnessed others on cruise ships, and they’ve never failed to give me a lift.

But during a race dawn is a very gradual thing, a glow in the distant sky, then an incremental lightening, as if someone’s got a very slow hand on a celestial rheostat. I can’t recall seeing the sun come into view. There’s just a moment, after the sky’s been light for a while, when it’s suddenly up there, a few degrees off the horizon. One may or may not be pleased to see it, but it’s not likely to rank high on one’s life list of peak experiences.

My first time at Wakefield, the first lightening of the sky took place while I was in my room with my eyes closed. By the time I returned to the course, dawn was already upon us. This time I didn’t take a break during the hours of darkness, and I was out there for the return of daylight.

And I looked up, and saw not a cloud in the sky.

It was, no question, an absolutely beautiful morning. It’s a few minutes past seven on a similarly beautiful morning as I write these lines, with the sun up and no more than two or three tiny clouds to be seen against the blue of the sky, but the present morning is in late February, and at this time of year the sun is unequivocally one of the good guys.

Not so in Wakefield in July. Not so when one’s faced with the prospect of spending the whole day under it.

The temperature had been just fine all through the night. The rain had cooled things down, and it was a shame it hadn’t been able to do anything about the humidity. By dawn I was coated with a layer of salty perspiration residue, and the lack of cloud cover suggested it was all going to get a lot worse.

By six you could feel the sun, and by seven it was already strong. An hour later I’d been on the course for twelve hours, and I wasn’t far off Centurion pace. That didn’t mean I had a shot at a hundred miles, but it meant that eighty was well within reach, and eighty-five or even ninety wasn’t entirely out of the question.

If only they could do something about the sun. Hang a cloud or two in front of it, say.

Around nine I left the course for the first time. I wanted a few minutes out of the heat, and I was even more anxious to get under the shower and wash the caked sweat from my skin. After my shower, and after I’d put on clean socks and pinned my race number to a clean pair of shorts, I went out again. I had a cup of coffee and something to eat and got back on the course.

I needed another break around noon. I went to the room and stretched out on the bed. I can’t recall if I slept, or how long the break lasted, but eventually I was out on the course again.

It just kept getting hotter and hotter. That weekend was the summer’s hottest, with temperatures throughout the area reaching ninety-five degrees. That’s in the shade, and shade was in short supply on that course. For the remainder of the race, I had to take a break after every three-mile lap, just to get out of the sun. That meant ducking into the food tent and drinking water for five to ten minutes, then walking around in the sun for the forty-five minutes it took to circle the course, then retreating once again to the shelter of the tent.

I had gone twenty laps the previous year, and I was determined to go twenty-one this time around. It was still mathematically possible for me to hit eighty miles, there was plenty of time left, but the heat was unbearable. I did my twentieth lap, and I treated myself to five or ten minutes in the shade, and then I knocked off my twenty-first lap. That brought me to 66.36 miles, an improvement of just over two miles on my performance at Houston.

And I decided that was going to have to be enough. My feet and legs felt fine, and I had a few more laps in me and over four hours to fit them in, but the heat had taken too much out of me, and I was concerned that it might be genuinely dangerous to spend more time under that sun.

I had very nearly run my age: I was sixty-eight, and one more lap would have taken me past that mark. I thought of that after I had well and truly retired form the race, and if it had occurred to me earlier, I probably would have stayed out there and pushed myself through Lap Twenty-two. And if I had done so, I’d have noted that I was within a lap of breaking seventy miles, and I might very well have managed a twenty-third lap on the strength of that.

It was probably just as well I didn’t.

Beth, who’d started the race with an injured calf muscle, left the race after twenty laps. Andy had a good race, twenty-four laps for 75.84 miles, but quit early because of the heat. Two runners managed thirty-nine laps (123.24 miles); one finished three minutes ahead of the other, and was therefore the winner.

I felt all right the next morning. My legs were sore and my feet knew I’d spent a lot of time on them, but I was otherwise intact. We packed up our card table and folding chair and drove home, stopping en route to visit an old friend in southern Columbia County. A few years ago, after an angioplasty, he’d begun going out each morning for a brisk half-hour walk. It was, he’d confided, an easy enough regimen for him. “On a flat surface,” he’d said, “I could walk all day long.”

Oh?

22

During the summer I’d entertained thoughts of entering another marathon in September. There were several good candidates, but in the end I decided to pass them all up and wait for the New York City Marathon, scheduled as usual for the first Sunday in November.

I’d earned guaranteed entry. There are several ways to avoid being one of the fifty thousand applicants who get turned away each year. You can be an elite runner; you can be from another country, enrolling through one of the official marathon tour groups; you can essentially buy your way in, contributing a certain amount to a particular charity; you can win a place via the lottery; you can enter the lottery unsuccessfully for two successive years, in which case the third time is the charm, bringing the consolation prize of automatic acceptance.

Or you can start and finish nine New York Road Runners Club races in the course of the previous calendar year. That gets you in.

And that’s what I had done. In 2005 I’d qualified twice over; my ninth NYRRC race, the four-mile Thomas G. Labrecque, was in the record books by late April, and in December I closed out the year with number eighteen, another four-miler in the park. So when the time came I sent in my entry for the marathon, and on the Saturday I picked up my number (#44464), and before dawn Sunday morning I boarded one of the designated buses in front of the main library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and in due course got off it at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island.

The hardest part of the race was the four hours before it got under way. It was a very cold morning, and most of us showed up wearing whatever sweatshirts and warm-up clothes we were willing to see the last of. I have a real Depression Era mentality when it comes to old clothes, and find it curiously difficult to part with them. I knew I was going to toss what I was wearing, and I’d accordingly picked out garments I’d owned for ages and hadn’t worn in years. For a hat I’d grabbed the remarkably ugly yellow baseball cap that had been included in the bag of goodies given to all registrants; the minute I saw it I couldn’t wait to throw it away.

I was dressed in layers, and I had gloves on, and I was still freezing. There were bagels and coffee available, but the bagels ran out, and I knew I didn’t want to drink too much coffee, as its effects are not all that different from the yerba maté that had made me hydrate all those live oaks in New Orleans.

They’ve done a brilliant job getting things going, with several corrals shuttling the runners toward the starting line at the Verrazano Bridge. I was careful to position myself way at the rear of my group, and even so, there was only an eleven-minute difference between my gun and net times. That’s how long it took me to reach the start, and there was something positively surreal about those eleven minutes, in that I spent them striding, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, along a stretch of pavement that made its way through a veritable sea of old clothes.

It was a hell of a sight. Piles and piles of sweats and T-shirts and gloves and stocking caps, enough discarded garments to clothe the impoverished multitudes of the underdeveloped world. (And that, as I understand it, was their destiny; all of our discards were collected and shipped off, and somewhere in some famine-raddled corner of the planet, some indescribably lucky chap is even now wearing my buffalo: city of no illusions sweatshirt. With pride, I can only hope.)

While I’m sure there had been a number of slight modifications, the marathon route was essentially unchanged from the course I’d followed in 1981. There may have been more spectators on the course, but maybe not; the turnout was pretty good back in the day.

Long after I’d left the bridge and hit the streets of Brooklyn, I continued to see discarded clothing at the curb. And by the time I was about to quit Bedford-Stuyvesant for South Williamsburg, I took off that ugly yellow cap and handed it to a very small boy.

It was not unusual for me to start a race wearing a baseball cap I’d decided I was willing to toss. Nor was it unusual for me to finish the race with the cap still on my head, or tucked into the waistband of my shorts.

I mentioned the cap I got in Summit, New Jersey; it advertised the website of Summit’s own Jim Cramer, who evidently had more baseball caps than he needed. I can’t tell you how many races and long training walks that cap survived. The damn thing had more lives than a cat. I would have worn it in the New York Marathon, and would surely have come home without it, but it was like the biblical sacrifice of Isaac, with a ram providentially appearing as a substitute. In this instance the Lord sent not a ram but a crappy yellow cap, and TheStreet.Com lived to fight another day.

It’s gone now. I can’t recall where or when, but the day did come when I took it to a race and heaved it halfway through. I can’t say I miss it, and I took a little satisfaction in seeing the last of it, but I’ll say this — to this day, it feels a little wasteful.

Walking New York after twenty-five years was like rereading a novel after a similar length of time; I remembered each part of the route as I came to it. There were sections I was able to anticipate — the curve in Greenpoint when you reach Manhattan Avenue, the Queensboro Bridge, the move from Fifth Avenue to the hills of Central Park — but other portions had faded from my memory, and only lit up when I reached them.

I had covered the course the first time by a combination of running and walking, switching to walking when my knee complained around the midway point. This time, of course, I walked all the way. My net time of 6:05:20 meant I’d spent almost an hour and a half more on the course than in 1981, but you couldn’t really compare the two; I’d run half of it the first time around, and I’d been twenty-five years younger. My 2006 time also was a good deal slower than Mobile and New Orleans and Athens, but the nature of the course accounted for at least some of that. All things considered, I was pleased with my effort and satisfied with my time.

After I’d crossed the finish line and had the chip removed from my sneaker laces and a medal hung around my neck, I had a job finding Lynne; there was an area set aside for family reunions, and I’m sure the layout would have been more immediately comprehensible to someone who hadn’t just pushed himself through 26.2 miles of New York streets. But we did find each other, and I did a little stretching, and we walked down to Columbus Circle and caught the A train home.

23

Three weeks after the New York marathon, I’d have another shot at the Knickerbocker 60K. I didn’t even consider it. That same weekend they’d be holding the Ultracentric near Dallas, with a program that would include a twenty-four-hour race with Centurion judging. Marshall King, whom I knew from one of the message boards, had made his Centurion bones there in 2005, and there were sure to be ultrawalkers showing up for this year’s event.

But it didn’t seem like a good idea for me, not three weeks after New York. I’d wait for Houston in February, and meanwhile I’d make my next race the Las Vegas Marathon, December 10, a proper five weeks after New York.

I don’t know that the Knickerbocker was the only local race on offer between the two marathons, but I found I was no longer all that keen on the shorter races. I had entered only one, the Staten Island Half, between Wakefield and New York, and I’d done so because of an NYRRC incentive. The club held five half-marathons a year, one in each borough, and if you entered four of the five and finished in less than three hours they gave you an iron-on patch. I’d done this in 2005, and hadn’t ironed the patch onto anything, but tossed it in the box where I keep all my race numbers. I figured I’d do the same with the 2006 patch.

I’d used the Staten Island race as a premarathon training walk, and just made it in under the three-hour limit. It was my ninth NYRRC race in 2006, which meant I had just earned entry into the 2007 marathon. But by the time I’d completed the 2006 version, I was fairly certain I wouldn’t want to do it again the following year. It was a race with many pleasures and satisfactions, but I wasn’t sure they outweighed the chilly tedium of those prerace hours in Staten Island.

(Incidentally, nine NYRRC races alone will no longer assure you of guaranteed entry. In early 2008 they announced a rules change; from now on, in addition to running the nine races, you have to serve as a volunteer in at least one race. Too many people were qualifying.)

Las Vegas has been home to my cousin Petie ever since he quit practicing law and settled into a second career as an advantage gambler, devoting himself to blackjack and poker tournaments. He’s grand company, and Lynne was glad to join me for a weekend at the Mandalay Bay while I added Nevada to my marathon list.

The course sent us several miles down the Strip and through the Fremont Street Experience before bringing us the long way home through an unappealing commercial stretch of discount furniture stores and strip malls. It was the Las Vegas the tourist never sees, and advisedly so, and we were bucking a relentless headwind all the way, and those of us at the back of the pack wound up sharing the street with unregulated traffic for the last half-hour or so. Not my favorite marathon, and not my best performance, either, with a net time of 6:03:34, but it was by no means a disaster, and I finished it uninjured and not much the worse for wear. And I got a T-shirt out of it, and logged another state. Nothing wrong with that.

I raced in Central Park a week after Las Vegas, in the ten-mile Hot Chocolate Run, so-called because that’s what they served us at a nearby school afterward. That brought me to the end of my second year as a reborn racewalker, and compared to the previous year I’d covered far more ground (375.41 versus 277.2 miles) in considerably fewer races (18 versus 25).

It was the longer races that mattered to me. My eighteen 2006 races included six marathons and two twenty-four-hour events. For over twenty years I’d regarded my record of five marathons in 1981 with awe that verged on disbelief — how could I possibly have accomplished all that in a single year? Now I was older and slower, and I’d racked up more marathons than I had in 1981, and a pair of twenty-four-hour races besides. I’d already had New York and Massachusetts on my marathon life list (along with New Jersey and North Dakota), but this year I’d added Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Ohio, South Dakota, and Nevada. If I could keep on picking up five new states a year, well, maybe reaching fifty states wasn’t entirely out of the question.

So I set about planning my marathon schedule. The Internet has made that infinitely simpler than it ought to be, and once I’d discovered marathonguide.com I no longer needed the listings in Running Times or Runner’s World: I could choose from a complete menu of races here and abroad, could check descriptions and reviews of each race right there on the site, and could follow links to the race’s own website and sign up with a few mouse clicks. After all that, having to get out and walk the race by the time-honored method of putting one foot in front of the other seemed curiously primitive.

I picked out my races, starting with the Mississippi Marathon on January 13, then two marathons in February, Surf City in Huntington Beach, California, on the first Sunday and a return to New Orleans on the last. (I hadn’t planned on repeating New Orleans this year, because they’d scheduled it before rather than after Mardi Gras, and I didn’t want to miss the Houston twenty-four-hour walk. Houston, alas, was quietly canceled; the weekend had always been organized by a society of ultrarunners in Kansas, and I guess they had tired of it. A twenty-four-hour race, you’ll recall, is a very long walk in which something goes wrong, and what went wrong this time was that there wasn’t going to be a race.)

Once New Orleans had replaced Houston in my schedule, I scrapped my plans to spend the month of March at a writers’ colony in Illinois and decided to stay in New Orleans instead until my book was written — to come back with my shield or on it, as it were.

And there would be other twenty-four-hour races. A couple of years ago, Ollie Nanyes had reached a hundred miles on the quarter-mile track at Corn Belt; he didn’t earn Centurion recognition because there were no judges on hand, but the accomplishment was his all the same. Corn Belt in May was a possibility, and so was FANS in June in Minnesota.

A third try at Wakefield loomed on the horizon at the end of July. Earlier that month Lynne and I would be on a Cruise West voyage among the Aleutians and on the Bering Sea to the Russian Far East. Just a week before we were to set sail from Anchorage, that city would host the Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon.

Oh, why not?

Mississippi was first. I flew to Jackson the day before, drove to the motel I’d booked for its location, and discovered I’d chosen well. Not only was it a short drive from the race’s starting line, but it was adjacent to a Waffle House. I have come to regard that particular mostly southern chain as the embodiment of the phrase guilty pleasure, difficult to resist and impossible to justify.

Unless, of course, one has the rationale of loading carbohydrates before a marathon, or replenishing one’s caloric reserves after one. I dutifully sucked up the carbs Friday night, went back to top off the tank first thing in the morning, and got to the starting line hoping to get under way before sugar shock kicked in.

Mississippi was another of the handful of races with a walkers section, and going home with some hardware looked like a safe bet, in that they were going to hand out ten trophies in that division. They also offered a seven o’clock start for walkers, an hour before the rest of the crowd got under way. (Some runners took advantage of an even earlier start, at six, so that they could get to work on time. It was, all in all, a remarkably user-friendly race.)

If the Internet made it easy to find a race and sign up for it, it also let you know what kind of weather to expect. The site I consulted the week before the race was quite unequivocal. It was going to rain in Jackson, probably starting on Friday, and certainly soaking us good on Saturday.

Well, they were wrong. Friday was overcast and Saturday was sunny. I think it looked like rain on Sunday, but I don’t remember if any actually fell, and wouldn’t have cared if it did; by then I was hunkered down in my motel room, watching the NFL playoffs and leaving only to answer the siren song of the Waffle House.

There were perhaps twenty of us, mostly walkers, who took advantage of the seven o’clock start. The flat course was a simple out-and-back on the Natchez Trace, a wonderfully scenic limited-access two-lane road that cuts northeast to southwest across the state. I took it easy at the start but upped my pace once I was warmed up.

The small field, virtually all of it walkers, acted as a spur. We’d covered five miles in that first hour, so it was easy to forget there were any others in the race.

I passed one fellow a couple of miles out, and he stayed close enough that I heard his breathing and his footsteps for miles. I’m sure I walked faster for trying to get away from him, even as he walked faster trying to keep up with me. Two miles from the finish he put the hammer down and surged, pausing long enough to hand me the baseball cap that had dropped from my waistband, then powering on to the finish line. I tried, but I couldn’t catch him, and finished fifty seconds behind.

In an out-and-back race, you get to see the leaders returning as you approach the midpoint; then, after you’ve made the turn, you get to see who’s behind you. My look at the leaders was unsettling, because some of them wearing walker bibs were not walking. One woman’s gait was about as legal as the Andy Cable Shuffle, and another was clearly mixing running and walking, which is a perfectly fine way to finish a marathon, but not if you’re competing as a walker.

My response mixed resentment and outrage, and it powered me at least as effectively as those syrup-soaked pancakes I’d had for breakfast.

After the turn, I got to see the people behind me — and there were dozens of them, and most of them were running. The entrants who’d started at eight o’clock, around 140 of them, were fast overtaking us, and we spent the second half of the race with runners — fast ones at first, slow ones toward the end — floating effortlessly past us.

This was a reversal of the usual order of things for me. Typically, I start slow, reach cruising speed five or six miles into the race, and hold that pace to the finish. As a result I tend to pass more people than pass me, especially in the last half of a long race when injured or undertrained runners are reduced to walking.

No matter. I hit the finish line with a net time of 5:26:33 — and, since there’d been room for every member of the seven o’clock contingent to toe the line at the start, my net time and my gun time were the same. That was a few minutes slower than Mobile a year ago, and slower too than New Orleans, but it wasn’t bad.

Because of the early start we’d had, the race for the runners had not yet reached the four-and-a-half-hour mark, and I had the unusual experience of standing around eating pizza while I watched middle-of-the-pack runners crossing the finish line. In the usual course of things, by the time I finished they’d have long since packed up and headed for home... after scarfing down all the pizza. There was much to be said, I decided, for an early start.

Maybe that’s what kept me hanging around the finish line. Usually I pause only long enough to collect my medal and catch my breath, but for a change I was in no rush to get out of there. As always, a good number of my fellows hurried to get into their cars and on their way, but the rest of the small field lingered for the presentation of awards.

I’d had some aches and pains during the last few miles of the race, and I was mildly fatigued at its end, but all in all I felt pretty good. The weather had held, the course had been a treat, and I’d performed better than I’d expected. This wasn’t quite enough to transform me into a contender for the Miss Congeniality award — it is not for nothing that my totem animal is the bear — but it did push me far enough in that direction to fall into actual conversations with strangers.

I chatted some with the walker who’d been decent enough to retrieve and return my cap, and relentless enough to beat me to the finish line. His name was John Buckley, he was from Bermuda, and he’d come specifically to add Mississippi to his been-there-walked-there list. Along with states, he was collecting countries and continents, and it seems to me — I wasn’t taking notes — that he’d chalked up marathons in all seven continents. I remember learning that he’d ticked off Antarctica.

He’d been ticked off in turn by the several competitors who’d entered as walkers and mixed in some light running. We agreed that such behavior was reprehensible, falling somewhere on the moral scale between jaywalking and serial murder, but that neither of us found it quite troubling enough to mention it to anyone. Truly strict judging, we acknowledged, would very likely disqualify both of us, so we figured the hell with it.

Aside from the local Mississippians, most of the runners seemed to be Fifty Staters, and some of them knew each other from other races. I overheard one man about my age explaining to a woman just how to get to Mobile. The First Light Marathon was coming up tomorrow, and she was thinking about running it. “You might as well,” he advised her. “I mean, seeing as you’re in the neighborhood.”

I talked to him, and it turned out he would be running Mobile himself, and urged me to drive down and join them. After all, I was in the neighborhood. I told him I’d walked Mobile the previous year, and he nodded, but I got the impression he didn’t think that was sufficient reason to deprive myself of a second shot at it.

Remarkable, I thought, as I returned to the pizza table. Here was a fellow unarguably old enough to load carbs before a game of shuffleboard, and he was going to run two full marathons on successive days, and evidently did this sort of thing almost routinely. He wasn’t the fastest creature on two legs, but that wasn’t really the point, and he got to the finish line before the pizza was gone, didn’t he?

Mississippi on Saturday, Mobile on Sunday. There was a man who could eat all the pizza he wanted.

And so, at least for that day, could I.

It took a while for them to process the results and hand out the awards, and by then there were just a handful of us left. When they read off the winning racewalkers, most of the plaques went unclaimed; they’d be mailed to recipients later. John Buckley stuck around long enough to pick up his award for coming in seventh, and I was right behind him in eighth place. I collected my award and drove back to my motel.

Later in the month, I had occasion to check the race results on the Web. I wanted to make sure my time was as I remembered it. It was, and I noted that I’d been moved up to fifth place, and my Bermudan friend to fourth. They’d evidently sorted things out and taken three nonwalkers out of the standings, allowing the rest of us to move up.

I just went into the living room and looked at the plaque they gave me in Mississippi. It’s on a shelf in plain sight, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I noticed it. I wanted to confirm that it said Eighth Place, and it does, and I’ll tell you, I can’t make myself believe that I’d treasure it more or display it more prominently if it had me in Fifth Place.

Looking at it, what struck me was how much I’d enjoyed that race. The memory had a bittersweet aftertaste to it, though, for I know how unlikely it is that I’ll go back to Jackson for another long walk on the Natchez Trace. Even if they continue to stage it, and I continue to enter marathons, the odds are against my returning.

Mobile, too, was a race I’ll always remember fondly. The two races are always on the same weekend, enabling the Fifty Staters to do them both in quick succession. I’d done them in successive years, and enjoyed them both, and in all likelihood neither of them will ever see me again.

Because I’m more inclined to choose, if not the less-taken road, at least the one that I myself haven’t yet trod. For me to walk marathons in fifty states would be a sufficiently Herculean task all by itself; I’d make it impossibly difficult if I insisted on entering the same races over and over. When I’d decided on Mississippi, I was at once deciding to forgo Mobile, a race I’d enjoyed and would have liked to repeat. (But not a day later; I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. Well, not that stupid.)

There were marathons I was just as happy to do once and once only. I hadn’t liked Las Vegas enough to walk it again, although I’d be glad enough of another visit to the city itself. I might want to repeat the New York Marathon, but not for at least a few years.

But I had good feelings about Mississippi and Mobile and Athens and Deadwood, and the impulse to return year after year to each of them was strong. I could choose to do so, or I could opt for the new and untried.

It is, I suppose, a choice one confronts over and over in life. I’ve known families who glory in vacationing in the same spot every year, returning again and again to the same hotel, delighting in the fact that the staff remembers them. If they run into the same fellow vacationers, so much the better. The more each year’s experience echoes the ones before, the happier they are with it.

And I understand the appeal, I really do. When I picked up my number at Wakefield, the race directors remembered me, and I walked away with the theme song of Cheers echoing in my head. No question, it was nice when everybody knew your name.

Another school of thought holds that the more enjoyable a trip is, the greater the imperative that you avoid trying to replicate it. You had an idyllic weekend in Charleston? Good for you — but don’t ever go back, because your second visit will never match up to the enhanced memory you have of the initial experience.

(And memory always improves on reality, highlighting the good, toning down the bad. Whatever we remember, we recall it as better, or at least less horrible, than it was. If it’s horrible enough, we forget it altogether. And all of this is just as well; otherwise we’d all kill ourselves.)

For my own part, I decided to look for a middle ground. There weren’t all that many twenty-four-hour races, and in my limited experience it seemed to me that my relationship to the course came second to the sheer challenge of the time and distance. And so I would have done Houston again, if the bloody Kansans hadn’t canceled the race, and I’d done Wakefield twice and was prepared to do it a third time.

And, while I’d lean toward those states I hadn’t yet checked off, I’d try not to let that particular goal keep me out of especially attractive races. I couldn’t repeat the North Dakota Marathon I’d run in Grand Forks in 1981, because they didn’t hold that race anymore — but what I’d read about the Fargo Marathon was appealing, and I’d like to enter it one of these years, even if it wouldn’t give me a new state. And the same went for a marathon in Brookings, South Dakota; I’d been to the town a couple of times and liked it, and would be glad of another look at the local university’s collection of Harvey Dunn paintings — and a long walk through its streets.

And I’d go back to New Orleans. That was Lynne’s ancestral home, it was a city we both enjoyed greatly, and I’d had such a fine time there in 2006. A trophy — second place! A time of 5:17! The good thing about the Houston cancellation was that it allowed me to go back to New Orleans.

Who knew it would be a disaster?

24

But you remember that part. For too many miles — slow, agonizing miles — a two-part mantra echoed in my head. It hurts too much to go on; I’m too stupid to quit.

You remember as well that I didn’t quit, and that eventually it stopped hurting, allowing me to push through to the finish. What you won’t remember, because I never mentioned it, is that I won another plaque for my accomplishment. It turned up in the mail a few months later, astonishing me with its acknowledgment that I’d finished in fifth place among male racewalkers.

I guess there were only five of us.

I wrote earlier about the aftermath of the race, how I stayed on in New Orleans to write a book, Hit and Run, and how I came home to depression, eventually signing up and training for a twenty-four-hour race in Minnesota in the hope that it would have a salutary effect on my mood.

And it worked.

I had two months to get myself in shape for FANS. The months were April and May, and there’s no better time to train. Except for the rare days when rain drove me to the treadmill, I did all my training in Hudson River Park, alternating long and short days, and grinding out the miles.

I thought I’d jotted down all of my training hours for that stretch on my calendar, but the calendar shows no entries before April 29. That week I walked fifteen hours, with the longest day Wednesday, May 2, when I put in four hours. The following week I logged twenty hours, or eighty miles, including a pair of four-hour days and one walk of five hours.

I was out there only three times the following week, but my long day extended to six hours, and the week’s approximate mileage came to forty-eight. Then I had a seventeen-hour week, with a long day of seven hours. I was focused on time, not distance, but estimated that I was averaging fifteen-minute miles; I trained without paying attention to speed, just going at whatever my cruising pace happened to be, and I know I was going faster in the second hour than the first, even as I’m willing to believe hour seven was slower than hour six. But no matter how conservatively I wanted to calculate, seven hours walking had to be the equivalent of a marathon.

It wasn’t a terribly interesting marathon, consisting as it did of endless repeat loops on the Hudson piers, and walking down around the foot of Manhattan and up along the other side of the island and back again, with another assault of the piers. I walked it on Sunday, May 20, two weeks before the big race, and I took the next day off, and walked an hour the following day and five hours the day after that, and took another day off, and walked four hours before taking another day off.

And then, the last week before the race, I walked three hours on Sunday and three more on Tuesday. And that was that. Now all I had to do was fly to Minneapolis on Friday and walk all day and all night.

I’d had only two short races so far in 2007, both of them in January, one a week before the Mississippi Marathon, the other a week after. The first was the Fred Lebow five-miler, which I was walking for the third year in succession. I walked through a lot of pain — it took me the first four miles to warm up — and my time, while a little better than 2005, was noticeably slower than 2006. The second race, also in Central Park, was the Manhattan half-marathon, and I really suffered during the three hours I spent walking it. I probably started out too rapidly, a fault I found it difficult to avoid in races shorter than marathon length, and it took me forever to warm up, and I never really got into a comfortable rhythm. I’d done the same race on the same course the previous year, with a net time of 2:36 and change, and now it was just one year later and my time was 3:03:40.

I walked off the course profoundly disappointed. My pace had slowed from 11:38 to a sluggish 14 minutes per mile, yet it wasn’t as though I’d been taking it easy and coasting. On the contrary, I’d been pressing all the way, trying to get to the finish line as quickly as possible, and well aware that those of us who took more than three hours might not get our times recorded. I’d expended a great deal of effort, and all I had to show for it was a bad performance — and another ugly long-sleeved white T-shirt.

It seemed to me that I could expect more of the same in any future short races. While I might have a better time of it if I managed to warm up more effectively and start slower, I didn’t stand much chance of improving my times, or even maintaining them. Because I was having to face up to the inexorable nature of the aging process, and the surprising realization that the universe wasn’t going to make an exception in my case.

No matter how diligently I trained, no matter how hard I pushed myself, the years were going to slow me down. This had been hard to see at first, because when I’d returned to racewalking three years earlier I had improved from one race to the next, as I got into shape, polished my technique, and learned pacing and race strategy.

And, of course, I had denial working for me. I’d reacted with surprise when it took me fourteen minutes longer to walk the Brooklyn Half Marathon than it had in 1981, and wound up telling myself I ought to be within reach of that earlier mark in another year or two. Why, all I had to do was shave a minute per mile off my time in 2005. How hard could that be?

But aging did seem to be real, and worse yet it seemed to apply to me. It seemed to me I could feel the two years since I resumed racing, that they’d already begun to take their toll.

Well, so what? The number of minutes and seconds it took me to cover 3.1 or 5 or 6.2 or 10 miles was, in the first place, of no interest whatsoever to anyone else in the world but me. And did I myself really care all that much? I would never be faster than I was now, but when had I ever been other than slow? As long as I got a sense of accomplishment out of my races, a feeling of satisfaction irrespective of the numbers on the clock—

And I did — but only in the long races. The sheer unforgiving distance of a marathon made it a triumph to get to the finish line, however long it took. Every time I finished one, I felt as though I’d done something worth doing. It was easy to feel good after the first Mardi Gras Marathon, when I’d been so pleased with my time, but my second go at New Orleans left me with a good feeling of another sort. I’d taken more than an hour longer to cover the same course, but no matter; I’d gone the distance.

That happened with every marathon. If it was in a state that was new to me, the finish line brought me one step closer to the goal of fifty states. (Plus, I suppose, D.C.) If I already had the state on my list, no matter; it was still one more marathon on my record. The ultras I’d endured might allow me to drop the phrase just a marathon into my conversation, but never without a drop or two of irony.

After my first race in New Orleans, after I’d seen my time drop in three successive marathons from 5:45 to 5:21 to 5:17, it had been easy for me to envision the improvement continuing — not forever, mind you, but for a while. A year later, it was harder to sustain that vision, and seemed rather more likely that 5:17 would be a high-water mark, that I’d never again cover that much ground in that little time.

I could, if I wanted, use one of a variety of formulae designed to measure one’s performance against one’s age; that way I could race not only the clock but the calendar as well, and there were enough different measuring sticks on offer so that I could almost certainly find something that would provide reassurance. This all struck me as a pop science take on I’m in pretty good shape for the shape I’m in, and I decided the hell with it.

And in fact I was in pretty good shape, and more likely to stay that way if I kept on doing marathons. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep at it, but I didn’t know how long I’d go on having a pulse, either. As long as I could, I’d go on walking marathons.

And twenty-four-hour races. There would be a point, of course, when I finished with a twenty-four-hour performance equivalent to my 5:17 in New Orleans. So far I’d been in three such events, and I’d done a little better each time. Someday that would no longer be the case.

But for now the twenty-four-hour race still offered room for improvement.

Late Friday afternoon in Minneapolis I drove to the park to pick up my T-shirt and number. At the prerace pasta party, I met some of my fellow walkers. Ollie Nanyes had come up from Peoria, and introduced me to Marshall King, the Texan who’d qualified as a Centurion a year and a half earlier at the Ultracentric. I loaded up on pasta and drove back to my hotel.

The goody bag included a parking pass; it would entitle me to park overnight in one of the lots adjacent to the course. Before I went to bed I put it where I’d be sure to remember it, and of course I forgot all about it. I was able to get a spare pass the next morning from one of the race directors, and left my car in a good spot.

The course was a 2.42-mile loop around Lake Nokomis, most of it on asphalt paths through the park. There were a few brief cross-country sections, where they routed you from one path to another, and one significant cross-country stretch that had us going over a significant rise. Someone had posted a sign identifying the thing as Mount Nokomis, with a mock elevation chart that showed the decimal point migrating to the right, depending on which lap one was on. A walker would be hard put to maintain good form while scaling Mount Nokomis, but no one expected you to.

There were other elements of the course that kept it interesting, including a small wooden pedestrian bridge over a trickling creek and a much larger bridge that was part of an automobile route; we didn’t have to contend with traffic, there was plenty of sidewalk, but it was what the organizers referred to apologetically as “one unavoidable stretch of concrete.”

The local racewalkers’ club had pitched a support tent near the start/finish line, manned by Bruce Leasure, who would be doing the judging. Walkers were encouraged to use the tent, and one local walker, Dave Daubert, kept all his shoes there. He’d brought eight pairs along — all the same make and model, as far as I could tell — and he went through them systematically, changing his shoes every three hours. That struck me as genuinely strange, but I guess it didn’t hurt his performance any. When the race ended, Dave had gone the farthest.

Before the race got under way, I was already impressed with the way it was organized. They made you weigh in before the start, and got you back on the scales every four hours; if you lost more than a certain percentage of your body weight, they gave you a chance to eat and drink your way back to normal; if you couldn’t manage that, they could pull you out of the race.

I wondered if this was one more goddam thing to worry about, and then I remembered the words of the ultrarunner who’d volunteered in the food tent at Houston, the one where I’d spent far too much time. He’d announced that he’d never been in an ultra without weighing more at the end of the race than he had at the start.

Fans had a food tent, of course, and a medical tent as well, where volunteers were on hand to provide first aid for blisters and, remarkably, massages. The whole enterprise was well thought out and efficiently organized, and that was a plus, but then they blew the whistle or sounded the horn or fired the gun, whatever the hell they did, and from then on we had to get out there and roll up the miles.

Typically, laps are run counterclockwise. That’s how milers do it on an oval track, or horses at the Churchill Downs. But circumstances alter cases. At Corn Belt they switch every four hours. At Wakefield laps are clockwise, to make that steep fifty-yard cross-country patch downhill; that way it’s no worse than a nuisance.

At FANS, the start is clockwise. Then, after we’d gone perhaps just over four-fifths of a mile or just past Mount Nokomis, they turned us around, had us scale Mount Nokomis a second time, and sent us back to the starting line. We crossed it and kept on going, and the rest of our race was counterclockwise.

(Incidentally, I wonder how long that phrase will remain in use, or even comprehensible. When all the world’s clocks are digital, how will we describe our progress around a track? I may have pondered this question while I circled Lake Nokomis. I had plenty of time for idle thought, and nothing all that important to think about.)

The point of the out-and-back was not to provide us with an extra turn on that hill, but to make a couple of key points in the race coincide with the start/finish line. So we would hit the fifty-mile mark at the completion of the twentieth lap, and five more laps would bring us to a hundred kilometers. (The hundred-mile mark would come a half mile before the end of the forty-first lap.)

The start was at 8:00 a.m., and as this was June the sun was already giving a good account of itself. There was a good amount of cloud cover, though, and this increased until the sky was largely overcast by noon. It looked as though we’d be spared the full heat of a June day, which was a relief, but the trade-off was a strong possibility of rain before the day was over.

It’s always something.

Meanwhile, though, I was doing fine. It was a pleasure to be in a race that was long enough to keep me from worrying about time. I found it maddening that I had to stop to pee as often as I did in the early miles of a marathon; here there was a john set up a little more than halfway around the loop course, and I didn’t resent my stops there. In fact, I made it a part of my routine to duck in every other lap, welcoming the brief break.

After the February 2006 race in Houston, Andy Cable had posted an interesting observation on the ultrawalking message board. He’d stopped when he reached one hundred kilometers, although he was sure he’d been capable of quite a few more miles. What took him out of the race, he decided, was that he’d set himself too few goals. His first goal, which he’d achieved, had been to go 100K and take home an Ulli Kamm award. His second goal was to circle that loop fifty times and qualify as a Centurion.

Fifteen hours into the race, it became inescapably evident to him that a hundred miles was out of reach that day. And so, once he’d walked his hundred kilometers, he had no real reason to keep going. It was late, he was tired, his feet were soaked, so why not go back to his hotel and get some sleep?

If he’d had some intermediate goals — seventy miles, eighty miles — he might have stayed on the course a couple of hours longer.

I’d read his post and took it to heart, and set my own goals accordingly. At a minimum, I wanted to win another Ulli Kamm award. After that, I wanted to extend my personal record beyond the 66.3 miles I’d managed last year at Wakefield. I’d been less than a lap short of walking my age in that second Wakefield race, and would probably have done so if I’d been thinking in those terms, so I added that this time around. I was still sixty-eight, with my birthday a couple of weeks away, so I’d be aiming at that many miles.

After that, 70 miles was a goal. Then 75. Then 78.6 — a triple marathon. And then, God willing an’ the creek don’t rise, eighty.

That didn’t mean I’d necessarily slam on the brakes at the eighty-mile mark. Anything beyond that number would be just fine. But eighty seemed like a good dream goal, not entirely unrealistic, not if everything went right, but — well, I won’t say it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, because that’s precisely what it was going to be. But it would be a very long walk in the park.

I had another goal, a goal of another sort. There was no number attached to it, and it didn’t have anything directly to do with distance.

I wanted to keep going for the full twenty-four hours. The secret to distance, it seemed to me, lay in staying on the course. Four miles an hour was the slowest setting I ever chose on the treadmill, and four times twenty-four is ninety-six; that easy pace would carry a walker to the very brink of Centurion status.

Which is not to say that I could become a Centurion by walking fifteen-minute miles. Everyone slows down in the second half of that long a race. But suppose you walked at that pace for the first twelve hours and slowed to a stroll of three miles an hour for the remaining time. You’d wind up covering eighty-four miles. Why, if you simply averaged three miles an hour, poking along at twenty minutes a mile, you’d go seventy-two miles in twenty-four hours — and that was better than I’d managed in my three previous attempts at the distance.

That was the answer, I told myself. Perseverance. Stay on the course, keep putting one foot in front of the other. No naps, because you won’t really need one. Just pretend you’re back in college, pulling an all-nighter, wired on pharmaceuticals and bad coffee, trying to knock off a term’s worth of studying before the sun comes up...

Maybe that wasn’t the best memory to draw on.

Still, no naps, no long breaks. There’d be plenty of time to sleep when the race was over. If I just managed to keep myself on the course, to go on walking, I didn’t have to worry about my pace, didn’t have to think about it any more than I did walking unmeasured miles for hours on end along the Hudson River. All I had to do was put in my hours — not five or six or seven of them this time, but twenty-four. If I took care of the hours, well, the miles would take care of themselves.

Nothing to it, really.

Race conditions were good. I can’t remember paying much attention to the weather during the first eight hours or so, and that’s what you want in a race, really: weather that doesn’t make all that much of an impression. The cloud cover increased as the day wore on, and by late afternoon it was raining, but never hard enough to be a problem. It went on raining off and on through the early evening, which wasn’t all that bad, and eventually it stopped, which was even better.

There were a lot of walkers on the course, 27 in a field of 167, but only 8 of us were signed up for the full twenty-four hours. (The other 19, along with 43 runners, would get to go home after twelve hours.) I was glad of their presence, but I didn’t see much of them as we all strode along. Once we’d strung out after the start, we were pretty much on our own. Marshall, whose cruising pace is much faster than mine, might cover five laps in the time it took me to do four — but that meant we’d only encounter each other once every couple of hours.

One person I did see with regularity was a young runner, Oz Pearlman. We’d exchanged a few words before the start, managing to establish that we’d both come from New York, and he had a cheerful greeting for me every time he breezed past me, which was something he did with astonishing regularity. I didn’t keep count, but it seemed to me as though he were racking up two laps to every one of mine, and if he wasn’t winning the race he was certainly among its leaders.

I kept walking, and the laps mounted up. There was a chart near the finish line with the mileage listed for the various laps — the out-and-back start made it impossible to keep track otherwise — so I could note, for example, that my thirteenth lap had brought me to 33.13 miles, and my seventeenth to 42.82.

That’s probably where I was around the time the twelve-hour race wrapped up, and you could tell you were in the last hour of the twelve-hour when you saw runners doing short back-and-forth minilaps near the finish line. At Wakefield, only complete laps are counted, and if you complete a lap with less time remaining on the clock for you to manage another 3.16 miles, then your race is over. At Lake Nokomis, they gave you the option during the last hour of walking back and forth on a measured eighth-mile strip, and you could zip back and forth, back and forth, until the clock ran all the way to the twenty-four-hour mark.

Or, from seven to eight that evening, the twelve-hour mark. I made my way through a batch of them as they tacked on their final fractions, and the next time I came by they were gone, and there were far fewer of us still on the course, and the daylight was pretty much gone.

“Hey, Larry! Looking good!”

It was Oz, passing me once again. He was still running. I was still walking.

Which is not to say that I hadn’t thought about stopping.

Not dropping out of the race, nothing like that. Because I was walking well and making good time, and my feet weren’t hurting and my legs felt fine. I had every intention of finishing the race, and it looked as though I’d achieve most of my goals with relative ease. A new personal record seemed likely, and a total in excess of eighty miles was by no means out of the question.

But I couldn’t help noticing that I was tired. Maybe I could just go lie down for a while, refresh myself with a little nap. A hundred yards or so off the course there was a building with cots you could lie down on, and it seemed to me they’d said something about showers as well. Or, if I didn’t want to go that far, couldn’t I just sit in a chair for an hour?

I said as much to Ollie. We ran into each other at the food tent, or somewhere on the course — I don’t remember where, but it was an hour or two before the light failed. I remember he said I was making good time, and I said in reply that I figured I was going to have to take a break soon.

“Just slow down,” he suggested. “Keep walking, but slow your pace. Do that for a lap or two, and then you can pick it up again.”

I said I didn’t think I knew how to do that.

“For starters,” he said, “stop racewalking. Quit swinging your arms. Just walk.”

It turned out to be excellent advice. I made myself do just that for the better part of a lap, and I don’t know that it slowed me much, probably no more than a minute a mile. I can’t say that it was the equivalent of eight hours of sound sleep, and maybe all it provided was the illusion of a break, but the point is that it kept me on my feet and on the track, and by the time I’d completed that lap I’d gotten past the feeling that I needed a break, that I had to have one, that I couldn’t just keep on walking like this forever.

Through the evening hours, I repeated this trick of Ollie’s whenever fatigue suggested the idea of a break. I let my hands drop to my sides, I reduced my hip pivot and let my stride shorten, and my pace slowed accordingly. I rarely did so for more than a few hundred yards, and without conscious volition on my part I’d find I had returned to my form and my usual cruising pace. But I’d have dodged a mental bullet.

Sometimes, evidently, a change is as good as a rest. Sometimes it’s better.

The loop course had never been what you’d call crowded, but it thinned out considerably as the night wore on. The end of the twelve-hour race removed 62 entrants from a field of 167, and as the hour grew later, some of the twenty-four-hour crowd decided that enough was enough. Others slipped off for a nap.

I’d been told that a flashlight would be useful out on the course, but of course I neglected to bring one. Ollie had a spare, and gave it to me, and that was reassuring until I had occasion to dig it out of my fanny pack and switch it on, at which point I discovered that, unless I pointed the beam directly at my face, I couldn’t determine whether or not the damn thing was on. I guess the batteries had wasted their fragrance on the desert air, because what power remained was barely enough to enable one to locate the thing in a dark room.

That was all right, I knew the course well enough by then and there weren’t that many stretches where I’d have needed the light anyway. But between the darkness and the dropouts, I felt a good deal more alone out there; there were fewer people, and it was harder to see them.

This was something I was aware of, but that’s not to say that it bothered me. There were plenty of people at the start/finish line, counting my laps, repeating my number when I called it out (as I did each time, to make damn sure my lap got counted), providing food and drink as desired. I’d call it out again as I passed the smaller tent where Bruce Leasure was keeping his own tally of walkers’ laps — and standing guard over Dave Daubert’s shoe collection. He’d tell me I was looking good, and I’d advise him that I still had a pulse, and off I’d go on another lap. On past the double row of individual tents, where runners could stow their gear and food and stop for a quick nap, on to that first little wooden bridge, and on into the darkness.

All I had to do was keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, and I was going to break my record. In fact it looked as though I’d smash it to bits.

Unless, of course, something went wrong.

My car was parked where I could get to it easily, and I had the keys in my waist pack. (They took up far too much space there, because the Hertz people, for reasons I’ve never been able to determine, put two or three copies of the same key on the little ring, along with the remote-control gizmo, and the ring holding them all together is fused, so you can’t disassemble it. The need for multiple keys would seem questionable, since to lose one is to lose them all. The only answer I’ve found is to cut through the ring, tuck the remote into a pouch or pocket, and leave everything else in the car. Think Alexander, and the Gordian knot.)

Sometime after midnight I went to the car, prompted by a sensation of heat on the bottoms of my feet. After sixteen-plus hours, I had blisters threatening to form. I put some tape where it was likely to help, changed my socks, laced up my shoes, and returned to the fray.

I managed another couple of laps, and stopped in at the medical tent. By this time I had substantial blisters on the forepart of each foot. A volunteer did a good job of bandaging them and got me on my feet again.

There are two ways to cope with a blister, aside from simply ignoring it altogether. You can puncture it and expel the fluid before dressing it, or you can leave it intact and protect it with the bandage. The former method relieves the pressure, and thus reduces the pain, but may bring the risk of infection. I probably would have run that risk, given the choice, but I figured the fellow on duty knew what he was going. He got me on my feet again, and while I remained well aware of the blisters, they didn’t keep me from walking. If they slowed me down, it wasn’t by much.

At least I could stay in the race. While I was getting my blisters seen to, another medical volunteer was having a look at Oz Pearlman’s knee, and I guess it didn’t look good. My fellow New Yorker was twenty-four years old, wearing bib number 24 in a twenty-four-hour race; you’d think all of that boded well, and he’d breezed through forty-three laps for 105.78 miles by the time he had to visit the medical tent, but that was as far as he’d go that night. That was still good enough for twelfth place. The fellow who won the race, Paul Hasse, reached 131 miles and change, and I suspect Oz would have gone farther than that if his knee had held up.

Well, something always goes wrong in a twenty-four-hour race. It was about this time that something went wrong for Marshall King, who’d hoped to repeat as a Centurion. He was on pace to do so for the first sixteen hours or so, but his energy levels dropped precipitously sometime after midnight, and he recognized that he just didn’t have it on this particular occasion. His twenty-ninth lap was his last one, and he left the course with 71.88 miles.

Something had gone wrong for me, and it had taken the form of blisters, and I was able to walk through them. I was doing well, though not quite as well as I thought — I got my count wrong, thought Lap Twenty-two was actually Twenty-three, and when I realized their count was correct I felt as though I’d just walked an entire 2.4 miles without getting anywhere. Still, I was on pace to make eighty miles, and I’d been able to walk well past midnight without leaving the course or taking a nap. The longest time I’d spent sitting down was the five or ten minutes it took me to get my blisters attended to. I was tired, no question, but I wasn’t by any means exhausted, and all I had to do was stay on my feet and keep moving for another five hours, and that was something I was confident I could do.

Shows what I know.

The twenty-fifth lap brought me just past the hundred-kilometer mark. I’d qualified for a second Ulli Kamm award, and there was more coming. One more lap and I’d improve on my race in Houston. One more after that and I’d break my own record set a year ago at Wakefield. A third and I’d have walked my age, and a fourth would put me past seventy miles, and, well, the numbers were there.

I ate something, drank something, paused a moment to receive Bruce’s congratulations on the 100K milestone, and kept right on going. And, just past the small wooden bridge, I first noticed that I was leaning forward and bending to the left, and that I was doing this because of pain in my lower back. When I tried to straighten up the pain got worse, and I’d adopted this awkward posture in order to keep walking.

But it’s not as though I could walk pain free that way. It was increasingly painful, it hurt with every step I took, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I stopped walking and tried to stretch it out, and that didn’t seem to do any good; it would feel better for a moment, and once I resumed walking it would be as it had been before, if not worse.

I couldn’t figure out where it had come from. I know I have a tendency to lean forward during the later portions of a race; I’m not aware of it while it’s going on, but I’ve been told about it, and have seen photographic evidence. It’s especially likely to occur when I’m pushing hard, racing the clock, trying to finish strong. In my best marathon, New Orleans 2006, the racewalker I’d surged past in the final mile made a point of criticizing my posture when we met up afterward. “You were really leaning forward,” he said. I responded with the benign smile of the man who’d just whupped his ass.

But I’d never had anything like this before. My lower back, a source of pain for so many people, had never given me trouble, certainly not when I was walking. And what leaning I’d done in the past, in races or training walks, had been entirely unconscious; if I’d became aware I was doing it, I stopped — and then very likely resumed doing it again, unconsciously.

And it had been a simple forward lean. This was more pronounced, and it had me bending to the left as well.

I couldn’t figure out what the hell to do about it. I kept walking, and tried everything I could think of to make it better. I put both hands in the small of my back and pressed against the pain, and that helped a little, but it was hard to walk at more than a snail’s pace in that position. A little more than halfway through the lap there was a park bench, a long one, that I’d passed twenty-five times already without ever giving a thought to it; this time I stretched out on it on my back with my knees slightly bent, and in that position I finally got some relief. I stayed there for a few minutes, and when I got up and resumed walking I was a good deal better.

But it didn’t last. I walked for a few minutes and the pain returned.

I finished the lap, stopped at the medical tent, and found there was a wait of fifteen minutes or so before I could get a massage. I couldn’t see the point in sitting around, and this didn’t really feel like something massage would help. I walked on to the walkers’ tent and sank into a chair. I could sit without pain, and I did, for a few minutes. Then I made room for myself among Dave’s shoes and eased myself down on the ground, lying there and letting my spine straighten out, as it had on the bench.

One more lap and I’d set a new record of 67.04 miles.

I got up and forced myself through another circuit of the course. I stopped two or three times to lie down and stretch, and I didn’t wait to do so until I reached that bench. I just tried to pick a few square feet of pavement where I’d be unlikely to get stepped on by another participant. Once or twice someone noticed me and asked if I was all right, and I didn’t really know how to answer that one. I wasn’t, but to say so would be asking for help, and how was anybody going to help me?

At the end of the lap I stopped again at the walkers’ tent and lay down again on the ground. Bruce found me a cup of coffee, and I drank that gratefully, and set out on the lap that would bring me past sixty-nine miles. That was my age and more, as I wouldn’t be sixty-nine years old for another three weeks.

Pushing through those 2.4 miles, stopping periodically to lie down and each time making myself get up and go on, I wondered what was such a big deal about walking a distance in miles corresponding to my age in years. It’s significant when an aging golfer is able to shoot his age, and it’s a goal that, but for the ravages of time, grows more attainable with every passing year — impossible under sixty, less so after seventy, and, if you can still swing a club, rather more likely in one’s eighties.

For a walker or runner, it was quite the opposite. Time kept raising the bar, even as age made it harder to get over it. Walking one’s age — no challenge at twenty, not much of one at forty — grew ever more difficult.

In another year, I told myself, I’d be one more year older, and have one more mile to cover. So I might as well do it now.

It was somewhere around four in the morning when I finished Lap Twenty-eight. Those last three laps had taken a long time, because I was incapable of moving at a decent pace. I’d now reached the goal one more lap would have given me in the heat of Wakefield, I’d walked my age, but one more lap now would put me over seventy miles, and I sat in the walkers’ tent and told Bruce how much I wanted that number.

He pointed out that I was a lot less than a full lap away from it. I had covered 69.46 miles, I was just over half a mile short of 70, and if I couldn’t manage another lap just now, well, I didn’t have to, not with almost four hours left in the race. I could go lie down somewhere and return to the course in a couple of hours. Ollie had gone off for a nap a while ago, and Dave was lying down, too. I could do that, and maybe my back would be better for it, but even if it wasn’t, a couple of hours rest might make it easier for me to push through one final lap.

“And if you wait until seven o’clock,” he added, “you won’t have to do a full lap, because that’s when they start doing minilaps, an eighth of a mile each, and you could just walk back and forth until you get up to seventy.”

It sounded like a good idea. I didn’t bother hobbling over to the building where they had the cots; it seemed like too challenging a walk just to get there. Besides, I was afraid if I let myself actually lie down in a real bed, I’d never make it back to the track in time. Instead I went to my car and sat behind the wheel. That doesn’t sound terribly comfortable, but I found a position in which my back didn’t hurt, and right then that was all the comfort I needed.

I slept until a little after six. At some point the rain resumed, but by the time I was up it had tapered off to a misty drizzle. I headed for Bruce’s tent, and within ten steps I could tell there’d been no miraculous sleep cure. My back wasn’t any better, and walking was no pleasure.

I got a cup of coffee and something to eat and sat down while Bruce brought me up to date. Dave Daubert and Ollie Nanyes were both back on the course after their naps, a fairly brief lie-down for Dave, a longer break for Ollie. Three local walkers, a man and two women, had dropped out earlier, with totals ranging from twenty-five to fifty-six miles. Marshall, who’d left the course after twenty-nine laps, had not returned.

Barb Curnow, a local walker a year or so younger than I, was still out there. She walked FANS every year, and she never showed much in the way of speed, but the woman never stopped. I’d passed her a couple of times over the hours, but there she was, as indefatigable as the Energizer Bunny, still going and going and going while all I could do was sit there.

At seven I walked over to the start/finish line. Most people who tacked on minilaps did so at the end of a full lap; a runner would complete a circuit of the course at, say, 7:40, decide the twenty remaining minutes wouldn’t be enough time for him to get around again, and switch to minilaps until time ran out. There were just a couple of us who began the final hour with minilaps, and our ranks swelled over time as others joined in.

The course for these short laps extended from the start/finish line for an eighth of a mile, at which point you turned around and headed back again. If I could run this particular fool’s errand three times, I’d add three-quarters of a mile to my tally, and that would get me over seventy miles.

It was surprisingly difficult. I walked as rapidly as I could, not because my pace mattered at this point but in an effort to be done with it as soon as possible. The pain was considerable. Here’s how unpleasant the whole business was: afterward, when I learned they were counting every eighth of a mile, I realized I could have quit half a lap earlier than I did, could have gone out and back and out and back and out, and left it at that. I’d have wound up with 70.09 miles, and I’d have saved 210 agonizing yards.

At the same time, it was hard to sit on the sidelines while the rest of the final hour played itself out. I don’t know when I finished my third and final minilap, but there’s no way three-quarters of a mile could have taken me more than twenty minutes at the outside. That left me with forty minutes to watch other entrants fitting in every bit of distance they could before the last minutes ticked away.

I was especially aware of Ollie, so invigorated by his couple of hours of downtime that he kept at it right up to the whistle. It was frustrating to watch him, not because he might overtake me — he’d finish with 66.11 miles — but because I felt I ought to be doing the same, pushing myself clear to the end. I was in no danger of doing so, I was able to recognize that my race was over, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

At the awards presentation, Dave Daubert took first place in the walking division, finishing with 80.76 miles. (That’s just slightly more than ten miles per pair of shoes.) Barb Curnow was second with 75.42, and Marshall’s twenty-nine laps put him third. I was fourth, Ollie fifth, and three others finished out the field.

Five of us had earned Ulli Kamm awards, and Bruce promised he’d ship them to us. And every entrant had received a finisher’s award at registration, a small wooden plaque with a bronze medallion inset; a metal tag inscribed with name and mileage would be mailed to us in due course.

Yeah, right, I thought. That’s what they’d told us a year and a half ago in Houston, and wasn’t I still waiting for the nameplate for that Ulli Kamm award?

I walked to my car, drove to my hotel, had a shower, and took to my bed. My back didn’t bother me, not now, not while I was lying down, and all in all I felt wonderful. I’d broken my record by almost four miles, I’d walked in miles an age I wouldn’t attain until a couple of weeks after next year’s FANS race, and I’d achieved almost all of my goals.

I hadn’t reached seventy-five miles, let alone the triple marathon or the eighty-mile mark. But I would have managed all of that if something hadn’t stabbed me in the back. As for my goal of staying out there for the full twenty-four hours, I’d fallen short by a few hours — but this time I hadn’t been driven off the course by fatigue or a failure of will. As far as my mind was concerned, I’d been ready and willing to keep on walking from the first minute to the last. It was my body that had given out, specifically my back, and I could no more castigate myself for that than Oz Pearlman could beat himself up for his injured knee.

Aside from my back, the rest of me seemed to be in pretty good shape. The first aid I’d received had helped my blisters, and one of them seemed in the process of reabsorbing the liquid and mending itself. I opened the other and expressed the fluid, and it looked all right to me. My feet weren’t 100 percent, but they weren’t all that bad for having gone that far, and I figured they’d be in good enough condition in three weeks’ time for the marathon in Anchorage.

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.

25

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?

Some runners reported sightings of bears and moose. I did see an eagle, perched on a dead tree and outlined against the sky, but I wouldn’t have noticed the bird if someone else hadn’t given a cry and pointed him out.

My net time was 6:22:06. I’d gone the twenty-six miles and change, and the usual aches and pains came and went during the race, but in the main I held up well enough and finished in decent shape. The horrible toe pain that I’d endured in two successive marathons, Huntington Beach and New Orleans, didn’t show up this time; I’d escaped it in Minnesota as well, and figured a change I’d made in footwear deserved the credit. I’d been more anxious about my lower back, and it never gave me a twinge.

I rode back to my hotel and stood under a hot shower for a while, and a few hours later I walked downtown and ate salmon.

I got up the next morning, booted up my laptop, checked my email, took a deep breath, and started writing.

More specifically, I started writing this book.

I’d been thinking off and on about writing some sort of book about my efforts at racewalking. One thing that held me back was the concern that no one but family members and indulgent friends would have much interest in reading it. It seemed to me that I couldn’t assign high priority to such a book, not when I had another book I was contractually committed to write, a book I was already late in delivering. A book I might have been able to deliver on time, if I wasn’t always out there walking day after day...

That book was Hit and Run, and I completed it in the course of my post-marathon stay in New Orleans. Once I’d turned it in, I realized there was something else I had an urge to write, and it was sometime in April that I began working on this book’s opening, actually reworking a message board report I’d posted on the New Orleans race. I got a little work done, but not very much; as my training for FANS picked up, I let the writing go. Now, though, I had a long week all by myself in a city where I didn’t know a soul. And training wouldn’t be a distraction, because my legs needed a rest at this point more than they needed more miles on them.

And my performance at FANS had me feeling genuinely good about myself as a walker, and my leisurely pace in Anchorage hadn’t changed that. So I’d brought my laptop along, and Sunday morning I got to work.

This was not my first venture at memoir. Sometime in the mid-1990’s I’d gone to Ragdale, a writers’ colony north of Chicago in Lake Forest, Illinois, to work on what would eventually take form as a Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery, The Burglar in the Library. I spent a week establishing that I wasn’t ready to write that particular book, then set it aside and wrote some other things — an introduction for the first hardcover edition of The Canceled Czech, and a pair of short stories which became chapters in Hit Man. It was a productive stay, if not what I’d had in mind when I booked the time, but I still had ten days before I was due to pack up and head home, and I got up one morning and started hitting computer keys, and it was the damnedest thing. I couldn’t stop writing.

I’d been toying with the idea of writing a memoir of my beginnings as a writer. I started young, while I was still in college, and spent those early years producing a vast amount of pseudonymous trash, along with my first efforts at crime fiction. I’d written a great deal since about writing, I had a monthly instructional column in Writer’s Digest from 1977 to 1990, and I’d certainly referenced some of my early experiences in that column and the several books for writers that had grown out of it. But I’d never really told my story, had never been inclined to do so, and had in fact made a point of brushing aside interviewers who wanted me to discuss those early days.

In the months before my Ragdale stay, I’d gotten to the point where I felt that recounting my beginnings was something I might want to do someday. But not yet, certainly. Not until I was ready.

Well, it was beginning to look as though I was ready. Because I batted out something like six thousand words the first day. I couldn’t drag myself away from the computer. I barely got to the dinner table on time, and it’s rare indeed for me to miss a meal.

I did the same thing the next day, and the day after that. And in eight days I’d produced something in excess of fifty thousand words.

It was an extraordinary experience. I’d start writing about some incident I hadn’t really thought about in decades, and almost before I’d finished exploring that particular chamber in my memory, another door would spring open, and I’d be remembering something else I’d forgotten entirely.

I’d had words come at this pace before. Some of us are apt to describe a book as having virtually written itself, but that’s not really what happens; if it did, one wouldn’t feel so utterly exhausted at day’s end. But, tiring or not, I’ve had books that were written very rapidly, and I don’t know that they ever suffered for the speed of their composition. Some of the work I’ve liked the best, and that was the most favorably received, had a very short gestation period and an easy birth.

But this was different. I found myself working all day and returning to work after dinner, because I seemed to be incapable of staying away from the computer. One memory would lead to another, and I couldn’t shut the process down.

I wrote a little over fifty thousand words in eight days. (If you’re not accustomed to thinking of length in terms of word count, this book you’re reading is, as I type these very words you’re reading now, just over 100,000 words. My daily stint, for the past four very productive weeks, has ranged between a thousand and twelve hundred words.)

I flew home from Ragdale with what I estimated at somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the projected volume. That didn’t mean it was anywhere near half done, as what I’d written was in rough form, and would require more work. It was, in fact, less polished than my usual first-draft copy, because I hadn’t taken the time to tweak it as I went along. I’d been too busy writing the damn thing.

But it was readable enough to include in a submission when my agent negotiated a four-volume deal with my publishers. It wasn’t by any means a key component, it was the literary equivalent of a player to be named later, but it was designated in the contract, with a specified portion of the advance earmarked for it.

That made it simpler a few years later, when I had to buy it back.

Because, curiously, I never wrote another word of that book. For the first month or so after I got back to New York I didn’t write a word of anything, or do much of anything else, either. I was exhausted, and shortly after I managed to get up each morning, it was all I could do to stretch out on the living room sofa, where I spent most of my time until it was late enough to go to bed. Lynne would pause now and then on her way by to dust me.

I’d known I was going to need some downtime after the effort I’d put in, but this was a lot more than I’d anticipated. I’d worked intensively in the past, it was in fact my preferred way of working, and I went to writers’ colonies because they facilitated this kind of total immersion in the work. This was vastly different, and when I thought about it — a few weeks down the line, when I was finally able to think about anything — I realized that the energy debt I’d incurred this time around was not only mental and physical, but emotional as well. You could argue that I’d been through a short course of do-it-yourself psychotherapy, and perhaps I’d turn out to be a better person for it, but in the meantime it was all I could do to chew my food.

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.

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.

26

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?

27

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.

The Ultracentric consists of a variety of races, all on the same weekend and over the same course. There are races lasting six, twelve, twenty-four, and forty-eight hours, along with a half-marathon. At one point back in June, carried away by Andy Cable’s example in the six-day event, I’d actually considered trying the forty-eight-hour Ultracentric, but if Wakefield accomplished nothing else, at least it relieved me of that particular insanity.

I gave my blisters time to heal, and then I began getting out and walking along the Hudson again, tentatively at first. I found the Ultracentric website and signed up for the walking division of the twenty-four-hour race. What I kept neglecting to do, though, was book my flight to Albuquerque, and the day came when I realized I didn’t want to go. It would be a fine opportunity to add New Mexico to my marathon list, and a chance to see my niece Jennifer, and meet for the first time her husband and their twin daughters.

But I didn’t want to get on a plane, and I didn’t want to walk a marathon for which I was imperfectly trained, and the fact that I’d paid an entry fee didn’t seem sufficient reason to force myself to go.

Some other time, I thought. And by the last days of August I got serious about training for Texas.

I walked fifty miles the last week of August. I know this because I entered each day’s walk in my calendar. Six miles Sunday, four Monday, a long walk of sixteen on Tuesday, four on Wednesday, twelve Thursday, and four miles each on Friday and Saturday. (The distances were estimates, as I made life simpler by counting the time I spent and figuring I averaged fifteen-minute miles.)

Most people who write about walking or running or just about any athletic discipline will stress the importance of keeping a training log. Logs range from a simple notation of time or distance — or, more often, time and distance — to elaborate journal entries in which one records the time of day, the weather, the route taken, and, I suppose, the flora and fauna observed on the trail. All of this data will presumably be of benefit later on to the person jotting it down, not to mention the role it might someday play in the lives of generations yet unborn.

Well, maybe, but I’m inclined to put it right up there with counting your steps. Why on earth would I want to know at some future date that it was threatening to rain at the beginning of a particular walk, but that the sun broke through the cloud cover three miles into my walk, and that I was averaging 14:21 minutes per mile when I spotted the ruby-throated hummingbird?

Nevertheless, I find it useful to keep track of my training, albeit in a minimalist fashion, with nothing noted beyond the time spent walking. If I’m preparing for a race, I may want to increase my mileage a certain amount each week, and then taper off in the weeks immediately preceding the event. A log makes it easy to keep track.

But it has another effect that I’ve noticed, and that’s that I find myself going an extra mile just so that I’ll have one more mile to record in my log. Now nobody else is ever going to see that log, nor will I myself ever look at it again — except now, of course, when I find myself referring to it in order to write about it.

Some years back I knew a fellow who was a man of many parts — a book editor, a ski instructor, and I forget what else. He mentioned that he was in the process of becoming a certified appraiser, something that had nothing much to do with any other aspect of his life as far as I could tell. “I asked a friend if he thought it made any sense for me,” he said, “and he told me I really ought to go ahead with it. It wouldn’t take too much effort on my part, he pointed out, and it might be interesting in and of itself, and there was one other reason to do it. ‘Pat,’ he said, ‘it’s the kind of idiosyncratic accomplishment that’ll really dress up an obituary.’”

During my training for the Ultracentric, I didn’t give much consideration to the look of my training log — or my obituary, as far as that goes. I rang up fifty miles that first week, and decided I could safely increase my total by 10 percent a week. I’d establish a pattern of alternate long and short days, and I’d keep the short days at an hour for the time being, while I gradually extended my long days. Accordingly I walked fifty-six miles the second week, then sixty-two, seventy, and seventy-eight — which took me to the end of September. Tuesdays were my longest days, and by the end of the month I’d upped my Tuesday walk from four to seven hours. One of those Tuesdays it rained, and I did my five hours on a treadmill. I had no problem with it, or with the seven hours I put in the last Tuesday of the month.

Twenty-eight miles. “I’ve done the Moron’s Marathon,” I told Lynne, after having spent those seven hours at the river’s edge, the first four doing repeated circuits of just two piers, the next three striding down to the foot of Manhattan and around the other side, then coming back again.

And I felt fine. My feet were holding up nicely, their bottoms toughening as planned. I’d be tired at the end of a seven-hour walk, but not completely exhausted; my legs would be sore, but not agonizingly so. I was right on schedule, and all I had to do was keep going.

Eighty-four miles the first week of October, with my Tuesday walk extending to seven and a half hours. That was thirty miles, I thought at the time, and all I had to do was throw in an extra fifteen minutes and I’d have completed a fifty-kilometer training walk.

Maybe next week, I told myself.

But the following week the rest of my life got in the way a little, with a Tuesday lunch date forcing me to readjust my schedule. Consequently the long walk for the week came on Wednesday, and only ran to six and a half hours. Still, that was a marathon, or close to it. And, when the week was over, I’d put in twenty-three hours for a total of ninety-two miles.

Ninety-two miles, and I still had five weeks before the Ultracentric. I could start tapering off now, doing a little less walking each week, and not really training at all the week before the race. And then, when I got to Texas, I ought to be fine.

Eighty miles seemed well within reach. Of course something could always go wrong out on the course, whether it was the kind of rain we’d had at Houston, the murderous heat of Wakefield 2006, or another race-ending electrical storm. Or something could go wrong with me: the kind of foot pain that had cropped up at Huntington Beach and returned with a vengeance in New Orleans, or the back spasms that had pulled me up short twenty hours into the race in Minnesota.

I was fitting in the occasional session at the gym, trying to build core strength as a preventive for back problems. And I didn’t think my toes would bother me this time around, because I’d done some extensive experimental surgery — not on my feet, God forbid, but on my shoes. I’d cut the fronts out of a pair of old New Balance shoes — I’d got the idea from Andy Cable, who’d turned up so attired at Wakefield, the fore portion of each shoe so neatly excised I thought for a moment they’d come that way from the manufacturer. I did all my training in those shoes, or in another similarly mutilated pair, and as a result my toes were never sore. So that was one problem area I could probably forget about, but that didn’t mean something else wouldn’t flare up.

The hell with it. There was no point in trying to foresee the unforeseeable. If something unavoidable went wrong, so be it — there would be other races. Until then I could relax, knowing I was doing everything I could by way of preparation. I’d be in great shape for the Ultracentric.

All I had to do was continue my training.

That was all I had to do, and I didn’t have to do it for that long, either. Just four weeks, really, because I’d be well advised to take the last week off altogether. And the fourth week wouldn’t amount to much more than stretching my legs, going out for an hour or so every other day.

Three weeks of real training, with the mileage dropping as I went along. I’d done ninety-two miles, so I could drop down to seventy the following week, say, and then to sixty, and finally to fifty. No speed work, no pushing, nothing but nice easy walking.

The first week, the seventy-mile week, I wound up taking three days off, and when the week was done I’d been out there eight hours, for thirty-two miles.

The second week was five hours. Twenty miles, not the sixty I’d scheduled for myself.

I went out for an hour the first day of the third week. And that was it.

How did this happen?

I can’t make sense of it. It’s not as though I made a conscious decision to sabotage myself and cut my training short. Early on, whenever I found myself skipping a day, I’d tell myself I’d make it up the next day. Before long, however, I didn’t even bother having the intention. My training had ground to a halt, and I dealt with it by not dealing with it. As far as I can recall, I didn’t even think about it very much. The calendar I used to log my training miles was on a hook in the bathroom, and I saw it every time I shaved or brushed my teeth, but it wasn’t that hard to avoid looking at it.

And, come November, I could turn the page.

The last week of October I’d planned to walk fifty miles, but managed all of four. I’d written a film with Wong Kar-Wai, the brilliant Hong Kong — based director, and while My Blueberry Nights had already opened the Cannes Film Festival, I had to furnish some additional voice-overs prior to its U.S. release. My work had to be completed before the Writers Guild strike commenced on the first of November. Still, that left me plenty of time for an hour or two a day at the river’s edge, and that sort of walking is good preparation for writing, giving the mind a chance to wander constructively. One day I sauntered down to the Weinstein Company offices in Tribeca, then walked back after my meeting. I suppose it was around a mile and a half each way, so I covered three miles that day, but I wasn’t racewalking and it didn’t amount to anything to mark on my calendar.

I spent the first week of November at my daughter Jill’s house on Fire Island, using the place as my own private writer’s colony. I’d stopped working on the book right before the part about the walk across Spain, and that’s what I wrote on Fire Island. I put in long hours, tapping away pretty much from dawn to dusk, but I could have managed a long walk every day, and couldn’t have asked for a nicer venue for it. I’d done a long training walk there a month earlier, in the course of a weekend visit, and it was even nicer now, with even fewer people around. I brought my walking gear along, unpacked it on arrival, and packed it up again, unused, for the trip home.

Well, nothing you do in the last two weeks helps anyway, I reminded myself. It was too late for training to do me any good, and there was always the chance it could hurt me.

It’s true, certainly, that heavy mileage right before a race is counterproductive, and that one is best advised to err on the side of caution. Still, it might have been a good idea for me to get out there for an hour a day during those last two weeks, given that I’d done so little in the three weeks that preceded them. Just getting out there and walking might keep my feet from going soft. They’d been soft at Wakefield, that’s why they’d blistered, and by putting in so little time in the month before the Ultracentric, I was courting the very same thing again.

I thought of this. But I didn’t act on it.

Having stopped training prematurely, I was able to devote myself wholeheartedly to another phase of prerace preparation.

Carbo loading.

There’s no real point in wolfing down carbohydrates before a race, not if you’re a slow runner, certainly not if you’re walking fifteen-minute miles. Still, most walkers and runners fit in a plate of pasta the night before racing, not because it’s likely to improve one’s performance but because it’s (a) traditional, (b) harmless, and (c) tasty. But even for those speedy marathoners for whom carbo loading might serve a purpose, it’s something you do for a day or two.

From the middle of October right up to race time, I made it a way of life. It wasn’t purposeful, but it must have looked that way. I overate consistently, and when I thought about it all I did was slide into depression and self-loathing, and that only served to make me hungry.

I don’t know how much weight I may have put on in that final month, because I certainly wasn’t fool enough to set foot on a scale, but my clothes were tighter and I felt sluggish. That’s never welcome, but it’s an especially unhappy state of affairs at a race.

Excess weight impedes performance. Whether you’re a slow walker or a fast runner, the more you weigh the slower you go, and the more energy you expend moving your body through the miles. The more you weigh, the greater the impact on your feet — and everything else — of every step you take. The more you weigh, the more the miles and the hours weigh upon you.

There’s a widespread assumption among those who don’t run or walk great distances that doing so is a guarantee of slimness, and it’s not hard to guess where it comes from. The most successful walkers and runners are a lean lot indeed, and it’s natural to infer that running made them so, and to take it a step further and assume that anyone who trains and races as they do is sure to wind up looking like them.

Even when one knows better, it’s easy to find oneself thinking along these lines. At Houston in 2006, I got a look at the list of forty-eight-hour entrants, and noted that one fellow had listed the T-shirt he wanted as 3XL. “Sheesh,” I told a friend, “he’ll probably be a Medium by the time he finishes.”

It doesn’t work that way. A volunteer at the food tent of that particular race, himself an ultrarunner, allowed as how he’d never finished an ultra without gaining a pound or two. It’s just not that hard to ingest more calories than you burn, no matter how long you keep on circling the track.

In my own case, I’ve always found it easier to keep my weight where I want it when I’m putting in my time on the road or the treadmill. And I’ve also found that doing so is no guarantee I won’t regain whatever I’ve lost. If exercise is a remarkable thing, appetite is every bit as remarkable, and more than equal to the challenge exercise flings at it.

The edge exercise sometimes provides lies less in the calories it consumes than in the motivation it provides. I got on the treadmill in August of 2004 out of profound dissatisfaction with the shape I was in. I started walking to lose weight, and — because I was also paying attention to what I ate — I was successful.

And after I’d been doing it for a while, after I’d gone from working out to training to racing, I found I was no longer walking to lose weight so much as I was losing weight in order to walk faster.

When I began training for the Ultracentric, I was not merely intent upon putting miles on my legs and toughening my feet. I was every bit as interested in bringing myself to the starting line in the best possible condition for the ordeal that awaited me, and that meant dropping a few pounds. So when I got into the swing of training that last week of August, I made sure my diet was appropriate. It wasn’t all that severe a regimen, and it worked just fine, providing sufficient fuel for high-mileage training while whittling away the pounds.

Until the month before the race, when all at once everything went to hell.

My flight was booked, my hotel reserved and paid in advance.

I wanted to stay home.

Because I knew there was no way I could give a good account of myself. I’d trained with great intensity for two full months, and then I’d somehow done everything I could short of chopping off a couple of toes to undo that training and render myself unfit for the Ultracentric.

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.

28

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.

That got me through two more laps, but I could tell I wasn’t going to be able to keep at it much longer. The sun was higher in the sky, the heat was mounting, and my feet were hurting me, moleskin or no moleskin. I sank into a chair after the eighth lap and had a chat with Glen Mizer, whom I hadn’t seen since we’d both struggled through the New Orleans race back in February. He lived in the area, and would be starting the six-hour race in a little while.

I forced myself back on the course, wondering when I could let myself give up.

Just now, writing this, I poked around online and found my lap times for the Ultracentric. I’d started off slowly, walking 15:32-minute miles, and I’d only gotten slower as the race wore on. By the tenth lap I slowed to a stroll, and at its end I’d taken five hours and thirty-eight minutes to go an even twenty miles. My feet bothered me during the seventh and eighth laps, and I’d really had to force myself through laps nine and ten, and when the tenth lap was finished, so was I.

I announced as much during my final lap to Ollie, and to Dave Gwyn, who was one of the four Centurion judges for the walkers. Both pointed out that it was in fact a twenty-four-hour race, and that if I was hurting I could certainly quit the course for a long break and come back later on. Why, I wondered, were they telling me this? What made them think I could possibly want to return?

I got in my car, drove to my hotel. I bought two liters of Coca-Cola from the vending machine in the lobby, called Domino’s from my room, and drank one bottle while I waited for them to bring the pizza and the other between slices. I turned on the TV, found a football game.

At some point I took off my shoes and socks and checked my feet. I decided they didn’t look too bad. And I realized they’d pretty much stopped hurting as soon as I left the course.

29

Six walkers qualified as american centurions at the Ultracentric that year, three from the Netherlands, one from Australia, and two Americans. A Belgian was seventh, at sixty-two miles; then an American at sixty, and two more, one of them Ollie, at fifty-eight. The sole woman walker in the race was an American who wins events of this sort here and in Europe almost routinely; this time she had an off day, and quit after eighteen miles.

I went home, tossed my dirty clothes in the laundry basket, and hung up my Ultracentric sweatshirt. It was a presentable garment, it even had a hood, and it made a nice change from all those T-shirts, but I couldn’t imagine what would prompt me to wear it. I didn’t want something to help me remember that race. I’d have been more grateful for help forgetting it.

First, though, I wanted to get it down before I did in fact forget it, and I spent a string of mornings pecking away at my computer. I’d left off writing the book — this book, that is to say — a little ways past the conclusion of the pilgrimage to Santiago, and now I skipped ahead and wrote about what I’d just gone through. It wasn’t much fun, and after a few days and a few thousand words, and hardly anything about the race itself but no end of lamenting the weeks preceding it, I gave it up. I told myself I’d get back to it in a while, and then I began to wonder if that was true. Maybe I was done with it.

Maybe I was done with walking.

It did look that way. I didn’t much welcome the thought, but it was impossible to dismiss it out of hand. Writing about my preparation for the Ultracentric — or, more to the point, my lack thereof — I’d been struck by the manner in which I’d deliberately (if unconsciously) sabotaged myself. After weeks of intensive training, high-mileage weeks marked by walks of marathon length and longer, I’d abruptly pulled the plug on training and made sure I showed up at the start of the race in the worst possible condition. Just as I’d walked through twenty miles looking forward to the opportunity to quit, so I’d spent the weeks leading up to the race working to guarantee myself such an opportunity.

When I looked back at the year, all I seemed to see was a mix of pain and disappointment and failure. I could find ways to regard my performances at Huntington Beach and New Orleans as heroic, simply for having persisted to the end in spite of the pain. That was one way to look at it, but in the end those were hard races, pain-filled races, and the only pleasure they’d held lay in their having finally ended. Wakefield had been a disaster this time, and the best I could say about it was that I’d been lucky enough to be off the course when it got rained out. And the Ultracentric, well, it had become a failure and a disappointment for me before it had even begun.

I’d resumed racing in January of 2005, and in three years I’d taken part in fifty-two races, including eleven marathons and seven ultras. My list of states in which I’d walked a marathon or ultra stood at fourteen, plus England, Spain, and Canada.

Maybe that was enough.

After all, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d stopped. My enthusiasms are often intense, but they tend to be impermanent. I throw myself into them, and they run their course, and the day comes when they no longer hold much interest for me. I could regret this trait, and sometimes did, but it seemed to be the way I was.

I had, after all, been a runner and walker years ago, and trained relentlessly, and entered races obsessively. And then I’d stopped, only to resume in time with as much passion and commitment as I’d ever brought to the sport. If my ardor cooled, I could stop; when the time was right, I could take it up again.

Oh, really? Another twenty-five-year break would have me lacing up my Sauconys at age ninety-four. The good news, I suppose, is that I’d generally win my age group. Assuming I could remember how to walk.

While the rest of 2007 ran out, I mostly sat around and watched it go. I wasn’t working on this book or on anything else. I wasn’t walking along the Hudson, or showing up at the gym.

What I felt, when I felt anything at all, was a sort of lingering sadness, backed with a measure of dread. That I was apparently discontinuing a practice of walking enormous distances was not alarming all by itself, but it became unsettling in context. Because I could then see it as the next item in a lengthening list of activities that no longer held much joy for me. And several of them were not the sort of transient enthusiasms one routinely picks up and sets down. They were lifelong pleasures that of late had ceased to be pleasurable.

Reading, for instance. I’d been a reader almost as long as I’d been a walker, and it was my strong response to fiction that did much to incline me toward writing it. Over the past decade or so, I’d discovered that it rarely worked for me anymore.

The work I’d been doing for a half century bore some responsibility. Spend your days making sausage and it will reduce your appetite for the product. I’d become overly attuned to how words and sentences were strung together and how stories unfolded, and that made it harder for me to get caught up in what I read.

Age, too, undercut one of fiction’s roles. In my youth, one of the functions of the novels I read was that of explaining the world to me; as I grew up, I required less in the way of explanation and resisted a worldview helpfully supplied by some bright young thing fresh out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

I could still immerse myself in a book now and then, but it was apt to be by some writer I’d been reading for years, and it helped if I was a captive audience — stuck in a hotel room or a ship’s cabin, say, with time on my hands and nothing much else to fill it with. Most of the time, though, I’d pick a book up and read a few chapters and lose interest. I’d know where the author was going with this, and saw no reason why I had to keep him company. Or I’d get halfway through the thing and set it down with every intention of finishing it, only to find that I never had the slightest interest in picking it up again.

I wasn’t that crazy about writing, either.

I could still do it. The book I’d written earlier that year in New Orleans, Hit and Run, got stronger than usual reactions from everyone who read it, and it had certainly absorbed me fully while I was working on it. I was in fact happy enough with all of my recent books, and my readers seemed content with what I was writing.

Yet it somehow seemed to me that I was done. I kept at it because it was, after all, what I did — and, not incidentally, because I still needed to make a living. Would I continue to write if I didn’t need the money? Maybe, but maybe not. It was impossible to say.

The list of books I’d written no longer fits on a single page, and it was pretty clear to me that I’d long since said everything I had to say, and written all the books I had any deep inner need to write. My Matthew Scudder series, sixteen books long, seemed to have found a natural stopping point, and the character to have earned a comfortable retirement. Bernie Rhodenbarr, my burglar, could probably go on, since he didn’t age or change from one book to the next, but I’d just be repeating myself in any further adventures I fashioned for him — and it seemed to me I’d done so already in the last book or two. Evan Tanner, my insomniac/secret agent, had taken twenty-eight years off between his seventh and eighth appearances, and I’d decided the fellow had the life cycle of a cicada, and could certainly wait another twenty-eight years before he showed up again.

And as much as I’d lately enjoyed writing about Keller, I had a feeling Hit and Run would be hard to follow. My characters were all apparently ready to hang it up.

Maybe they were trying to tell me something.

Ever since we’d met, Lynne and I had shared a passion for travel. And that was waning, too. We didn’t have any trips planned, and I’d found myself tossing out cruise and adventure travel brochures after no more than a cursory glance.

Reasons came to mind. Air travel gets more unpleasant all the time, for one thing. For another, we’d been to 135 countries, and there weren’t that many places left that we felt an urgent desire to visit. Finally, we’d had three trips in succession that, for one reason or another, had proven disappointing. We didn’t feel the need to pawn our suitcases or let our passports expire, but we could see travel playing a less prominent role in our future years.

And there were other pleasures that no longer provided much enjoyment. We hardly ever got to the theater these days, and the prospect of so doing felt almost like punishment. It was all I could do to go to a movie. My Writers Guild membership gets me invitations to no end of screenings, and in the pre-Oscar season my WGAE card gives me free admission to most movie houses. I hardly ever get to a screening, and rarely manage to card my way into a theater. Easier to stay home. Easier to find something on television.

One night not long ago we went to a party. It was a nice enough party, as parties go. We had a few conversations with some reasonably interesting people, and contrived to leave early. Walking home from the subway, I turned to Lynne and said, “I’ve got to remember never to leave the house.”

Of course I was joking. Sort of.

My concern went beyond walking. “When a man is tired of London,” Samuel Johnson observed, “he is tired of life.” I seemed to have tired of walking — and of reading, of writing, of roaming. Had I observed similar symptoms in a fictional character, I’d have supposed him to be not long for this world. There he was — walking through his house, turning off the lights. Shutting down, preparing for it all to be over.

Was that what I was doing?

The thought saddened me. I had always wanted a long life, if only to find out what happened next. But if I was no longer much inclined to turn the pages of a book to learn what happened next, or to make a similar determination in a book of my own, maybe that lifelong curiosity had run its course.

Sometimes i told myself that my life wasn’t ending, that it was merely changing direction, and doing so in a way that was not inappropriate for my years. I still had interests and pleasures, even passions. They were simply different from the ones I’d had before.

For Christmas, Lynne gave me the first two seasons of The Wire on DVD. I’d tried the show early on and had been unable to keep the complicated story straight or make out what the characters were saying. Now, watching one episode right after the other, and letting the subtitles clarify the dialog, I got completely caught up in the show. Within two weeks we’d watched both full seasons and ordered seasons three and four.

And my stamp collection continued to hold my interest. Like Keller, my wistful hit man, I’d collected as a child, and into early adulthood. I sold everything when my first marriage ended, and forgot about it, only to return to the hobby in the mid-1990’s.

I could spend hours poring over price lists and catalogs, sitting in auction rooms, working on my albums. It absorbed me completely.

Keller, who took up philately again when he contemplated retirement, elected not to specialize, collecting the stamps of the whole world from 1840 to 1940. (The hobby ate into his retirement fund, so he’s still working.) My collection was similar, though humbler; I lacked his discretionary income.

But didn’t stamp collecting serve as a substitute for the travel that had so obsessed me? Wasn’t this a more leisurely and less hectic way to collect all of those far-flung countries?

One way to look at it. Another was to note that my pleasures had become inactive, sedentary, and housebound. Instead of racing, I took my time. Instead of traveling, I stayed home. Instead of exercising, I watched young men play football. Instead of reading or writing, I looked at TV shows.

Wonderful.

I was depressed, of course, and I knew that sitting around and doing nothing was a recipe for perpetuating the depression — but I didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it.

Come the first of the year, I told myself, I’d force myself to get moving. For starters, I’d return to the gym. You don’t burn a lot of calories sitting in front of a television set watching more active chaps play football, or sell drugs, or shoot each other. The same thing goes for sitting at a desk and mounting postage stamps in an album. Since those were my pastimes, and since I was eating like an offensive lineman bellying up to the training table, well, I had better do something about it — and I decided I’d somehow find the will once the new year got under way. I’d get back on the treadmill, and I’d cut back on the carbs.

I needed to exercise, because my clothes didn’t fit. I needed to get something written because we were running out of cash. I didn’t wait for January to sit down at the computer. There was a short story I’d agreed to provide for an anthology, and they’d already paid me half the money in advance, the manipulative bastards, so I really had to write the damn thing. And it would be good to try something that would take days rather than months to finish.

I wrote the story in a week’s time, and it turned out okay. That was encouraging, it told me that those muscles still worked, and that I could rise to an occasion when I had to.

January came around, and on the morning of January 2 I got myself out the door and walked the block and a half to my gym. Remarkably, I still remembered which locker was mine, and the combination of my lock. I worked out that morning, and the next morning, and the morning after that.

And then I stopped.

Well, I told myself, I evidently wasn’t ready. Not yet. Besides, the exercise took time and energy that I needed for my work. So I returned instead to the computer, and plunged into work on a novel featuring one of my series characters. I thought of an opening, and wrote that, and then I remembered a plot element I’d thought of years ago, and incorporated that, and the words began to mount up. In a couple of weeks I’d produced around twenty thousand of them.

I wasn’t crazy about what I’d written. And I wasn’t at all certain what ought to happen next. So I stopped writing, waiting for it to clarify itself in my mind.

Maybe, I thought, I ought to write another short story. Maybe it would be good to write something that I knew I’d be able to finish. I had 75,000 words of a memoir lying around, and I couldn’t summon up the slightest interest in writing any more of that. And I now had 20,000 words of a mystery, and it seemed to have run out of gas. Finish something, I urged myself, and sell it to somebody, and bring a few dollars into the house.

So I started a short story. And wrote a couple of hundred words, and returned to it the next day, and wrote a couple hundred more. And a day or two later I realized that it didn’t want to be a short story, that what I’d actually written was the opening of yet another novel, about yet another of my series characters.

And how far would it go before it ran into a wall?

I asked myself that question, and pondered it some, and when it was time to get to work the following morning, I decided not to bother.

I’d been waiting hopefully for January, and it had come and gone. Depression, I’d learned over the years, was a self-limiting syndrome, running its course and moving on, but this time around it seemed to be renewing its own option and extending its reach.

I wasn’t going to the gym. I’d done some writing, but that had stopped, and I couldn’t see much reason to get back to it. I had twenty thousand words of one book that wasn’t going anywhere, and two or three thousand words of another. Neither one throbbed with life.

And, looming in the background, I had perhaps two-thirds of a memoir to which I no longer seemed to feel any connection whatsoever. That was a lot of work to no purpose. But there was a precedent for it. It wouldn’t be the first memoir I’d abandoned.

Then something happened.

30

Around noon on Sunday, the tenth of February, I was one of a few dozen people sitting in a room a few blocks from my apartment. When I stopped drinking thirty years ago, I began attending meetings of a group of like-minded individuals, and over the years this Sunday gathering had become my regular weekly meeting. Unless I was out of town — or racing in Central Park — I was apt to be there.

At some point during the meeting my mind wandered — hardly an uncommon occurrence — and I found myself reflecting on all of the things I wanted and needed to do, and seemed incapable of doing. I had to get to the gym. I had to return to the Atkins diet. I had to resume writing, and get something written.

This was hardly news. I would acknowledge these three imperatives several times a day, day after day, but acknowledgment seemed to be as far as I could go. The days would slip by, and nothing would happen. I sat around doing nothing, and yet I never found time for the things I had to do.

And a thought came to me, as now and then one does. I remembered something I’d heard in a similar meeting, very likely in that very room, almost thirty years earlier. “If you need to find a way to make time for the things you have to do,” someone said, “go to more meetings.”

How’s that for counterintuitive? When I first heard that bit of wisdom, I was reminded of the old story about the fellow who complains to his rabbi about his cramped living conditions. He and his wife and their four children live in a two-room shack, along with his wife’s parents and his old grandmother. There’s no room, and it’s driving him crazy.

“Hmmm,” says the rabbi. “You have chickens? Bring the chickens into the house with you.”

Guy goes back to the rabbi a few days later, says it’s even worse with the chickens. “Really? Hmmm. You have a goat? Bring in the goat.”

And so on. I think there was another animal. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a pig. A dog? A cow? Never mind.

Guy goes back again, says it’s worse than ever, no room to turn around, and on top of everything it smells from all the animals. “Hmm,” says the rabbi. “Go home and take all the animals out of the house.”

Guy does, returns beaming. “Rabbi,” he says, “you’re a genius. There’s so much room it’s like a castle!”

So. Go to more meetings? Sure, why not? Then when you stop you’ve got all this free time.

Except that’s not how it works. Go to more meetings, and keep on going to more meetings, and somehow you get more accomplished. I don’t know why this works. (I don’t understand non-Euclidean geometry, either. I mean, how can parallel lines meet? If they do, don’t they stop being parallel?)

What I’d learned, years and years ago, was that it worked. I might not know how it worked, or why it should work, but I don’t really know how electricity works, and this lack of knowledge doesn’t keep me from turning the lights on.

Tomorrow, I told myself, I’ll get up at six o’clock and go to the gym. After my workout I’ll go to the nine o’clock meeting. And after that I’ll come home and spend two hours at the computer. And, oh yeah, while I’m doing all this, I’ll eat in a way that would make Dr. Atkins smile with approval.

And that’s what I did.

Monday i put in an hour on the treadmill, and it was a daunting experience. I set out at what once would have been a very easy pace, four miles an hour, fifteen-minute miles, and found I couldn’t comfortably maintain it. I had to dial it down. By the hour’s end I had worked my way back to fifteen-minute miles. I spent ten or fifteen minutes lifting weights, had a shower, got some coffee, and went to my meeting. At ten o’clock I came home and sat down at my desk.

And did this again the next day, and the day after. I continued in this fashion through Friday, varying the length of my treadmill workouts, never exceeding an hour, and sometimes limiting myself to forty-five minutes. Every morning I went from the gym to the meeting, and from the meeting to my computer, where I worked a little on that short story that wanted to turn into a novel.

It didn’t seem to be all that eager, though. I got a little done for the first three days, and Thursday I took a nap instead. Friday I got home from the meeting in time to catch a cab to the airport; Lynne and I were to spend the weekend in Florida, visiting my Aunt Mim.

Mim’s the last surviving relative of the generation before mine, and I hadn’t seen her since before my Uncle Hi’s death several years ago. The previous fall, before the debacle in Texas, I’d planned a Florida visit at the time of the AIA Marathon, a small race beginning and ending in Fort Lauderdale, and passing right in front of my aunt’s apartment building in Pompano Beach. I never did sign up for the race, and abandoned racing altogether. Instead I picked a time when my cousin Peter would be visiting, and that turned out to be the same weekend as the marathon. (Its course did in fact go right past Mim’s building, and past the hotel we stayed in a few miles up the beach, and we thought we might get out in time to watch the runners. But by the time we were through with breakfast, they were on their way back to Lauderdale.)

I didn’t get to any meetings in Florida. I used the treadmill at the hotel one morning, and the walk to and from Mim’s was long enough to make each day a gym day. And I stayed with Atkins, and I relaxed and enjoyed the good company of my aunt and my cousin, and I thought about stuff.

I realized there was a change I had to make in my new regime. The components were all present, but in the wrong order. By the time I got to my desk, I was fatigued from my workout. The fatigue was not unpleasant, but it blunted the mental edge I needed in order to get good work done. If I made writing the first thing I did, and then went to my meeting, well, I might be mentally tired by the time I got to the gym, but so what? Quick wit and verbal agility were wasted on the treadmill, anyway.

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.

Still, one of the walks was of marathon length. And whether or not they kept track of finishers’ times, there would be a clock at the finish line, and, hell, I’d have a watch, wouldn’t I?

It might be an interesting experience. I’d been in marathons with people who didn’t seem to care how long it took them to finish — the Purple People in Anchorage, for example — but I hadn’t yet been in a race that wasn’t a race. With virtually all of the participants not runners but walkers, and with most of the walkers just out for a stroll, I might find myself up among the leaders, instead of at my usual spot in the back of the pack.

I could feel the notion settling in, like fog. I tried to keep it at bay, to will it to be gone, and that worked about as well as it does with fog.

Why not do them both?

Well, why not? Logistically, it made a certain amount of sense. I could fly to Salt Lake City for the marathon, then to Las Vegas for a few days with my cousin, then to Portland. And then home, flushed with triumph. Or just flushed.

But did it make any other kind of sense? Well, maybe. I would probably be ready for a marathon by the time Salt Lake City rolled around, if only to let me know whether I had any business entering the twenty-four-hour FANS race in June — and, in the process, helping prepare me for FANS.

I wouldn’t be pushing for a fast time in Salt Lake City. I’d seek only to finish the race at a comfortable cruising pace. They offered walkers an early start, so I could take it easy without worrying that they’d close the finish line before I got across it.

If I did take it easy, the race wouldn’t necessarily take all that much out of me. It’s not distance all by itself that takes a toll. I’ve been in short races that left me more exhausted than long ones, five-mile and ten-kilometer races that proved much harder to recover from than some marathons.

“This may sound crazy,” I said to Lynne, and went on to tell her what I had in mind. Let me just say that it’s unsettling when you’re prepared to listen to the voice of reason and hear instead from someone who’s as crazy as you are. I suppose I should have expected as much. This was the very woman, you’ll recall, who, in response to my gingerly suggestion that we might seek out some of those Buffalos, announced unequivocally that we should go to all of them.

“I think it’s a great idea,” she said. “If you take it easy, there’s no reason you can’t do two marathons a week apart. People do that all the time, don’t they?”

“Those clowns I met in Mississippi,” I remembered, “were going to do Mobile the following day. Twenty hours after they finished one marathon they’d be starting another.”

“I don’t know that you’d want to go that far,” she said. “But a week apart sounds reasonable” — reasonable! — “and you’ll enjoy spending a few days in Vegas with Petie. And if you don’t feel up to the second race—”

“I’ll say the hell with it.”

“Exactly.”

“If I can actually complete both races, I’ll know I’m in good shape for Minnesota in June. If one of them’s a disaster, I’ll know not to register for FANS. And whatever I wind up doing, I’ll just be doing it, you know?”

She thought for a moment, then nodded. “For yourself,” she said. “Not for the book.”

31

On Thursday, April 17, I flew to Salt Lake City, and Saturday morning I showed up for the marathon. I’d signed up for an early start time, and they got us off at 6:12, right after the bicycles. The bicycles weren’t racing, there were minimum and maximum speed limits for them, and I wasn’t ever quite sure why they were there, but then I wondered that about myself as well.

It was cool at the start, but not too cool, and it was bone-dry, with a strong wind blowing. The course was point-to-point, with a substantial net drop in elevation, but there were a couple of uphill stretches that took their toll. I looked at my watch from time to time, and my pace didn’t vary much; I covered four miles the first hour and every hour after that until the last, when I found an energy reserve and picked up speed. I don’t know how much the headwinds hurt — the elite runners complained about it, and their times were nothing special. I don’t know how much of a role altitude played. I know I had no trouble going the distance, and crossed the finish line with a net time of 6:26.

Nothing hurt. I took the TRAX train back to my hotel, took myself out for a good halibut dinner that night, and went back to my room to watch Joe Calzaghe beat Bernard Hopkins on HBO.

In the morning I went to the hotel gym and put in a half-hour on the treadmill. I did the same the next day, and later on I flew to Vegas, where my cousin Petie picked me up at the airport. I stayed at his house for three nights, and walked each morning on the streets of his gated development. They’d been very recently asphalted, and it was like walking on a rubberized track. I was out there for an hour each morning, getting ready for Vancouver.

Right up until Thursday, I gave myself the option of skipping the second race and flying straight home. I hadn’t even registered for the race, you didn’t have to sign up in advance, and I could change my ticket and cancel my hotel room if I wanted. But I felt fine, and if the Salt Lake City race had taken anything much out of me, I couldn’t detect the lack of it. Thursday afternoon Petie drove me to the airport, and I flew to Salt Lake City and on to Portland, took a cab across the Columbia River to Vancouver, Washington, and the next morning I put in a half-hour on the treadmill.

My event, slated for Saturday, was a marathon, but it wasn’t a race. The whole weekend was billed as a walking festival, and consisted of a whole medley of races that weren’t races, but walks of varying distances to be taken at one’s own pace. You started whenever you chose within a window of a couple of hours, and you finished when you finished, and nobody was there to record your time.

Or to keep you from getting lost. When you set out they gave you a map and a sheet of detailed instructions, telling you where to turn and what streets you’d need to cross with caution. There was no traffic control, and sometimes you had to wait for the light to change.

A Volksmarch, they called it. A German word, the translation of which would seem to be self-evident. It was more like hiking than racing, although one could certainly endeavor to cover the course as rapidly as possible, because once you did, well, you got to stop and go do something else.

Interesting.

To get a sense of what it was going to be like, and for something to do, I signed up for a 5K walk Friday afternoon. There was a 10K on offer as well, but I decided that might be a little too much the day before a marathon. I got my card stamped — you carried this yellow card with you and presented it at various checkpoints along the way, to prove you’d actually covered the route and not spent an hour or two in a saloon — and I started out, and at one point along the way the 5K walkers zagged while the 10K crowd zigged. The people immediately in front of me turned out to be 10K walkers, and I, alas, zigged when I should have zagged, and went the whole ten kilometers after all.

I figured that was probably stupid, but you could say as much about the whole idea of walking two marathons a week apart, so the hell with it. I got a look at the city — American Vancouver, the natives call it — and decided I liked it. And in the morning I put on my Salt Lake City shirt and a pair of running shorts and showed up at the desk to get my yellow card stamped.

And it was a strange experience, a marathon but not a race, with a follow-the-directions element that gave it points in common with orienteering. I used racewalking technique, and I moved at my cruising pace, and it was humbling to note how many people who wore street clothes and carried backpacks and walked in a very ordinary nonracing fashion somehow managed to move at a faster pace than I. They were just walking, for God’s sake, and they were leaving me in the dust.

The route they’d dreamed up for us was a 21K loop. If you’d signed on for the 21K event, you walked the circuit once and called it a day. For the marathon, you went around twice.

During my first walk around the course, the thought came to me that perhaps once around would be enough. I wasn’t making great time, what with having to consult the sheet of directions every couple of blocks, and dig the yellow card out of my waistpack every few miles to get it marked at a checkpoint. In addition to the directions, which were quite explicit, there were small signs posted every now and then on trees and lampposts, orange cardboard rectangles, with arrows on them to indicate the direction one was supposed to go.

Something tugged at my memory, and it took a few miles before I hauled it in. ¡Flechas! ¡Flechas naranjas! It was the Camino to Santiago all over again, and, sure enough, there was a point where I managed to get lost and start walking around in circles. ¡Ay, perdido!

It was around the time I got lost, which must have been just past the loop’s halfway point, that I began to entertain the idea of stopping after 21K. An inner voice counseled me not to be stupid. What kind of a wuss, it wanted to know, would fly all the way across the country to walk a half-marathon?

Probably someone only half as stupid as the fellow doing the whole marathon. But I knew I wasn’t going to stop. Not unless my legs failed me, not unless I got bad blisters, not unless something came along to take me out of the race. Or the hike. Or the Volksmarch. Whatever.

Nothing did. It took me three and a half hours to make it back to the hotel, but by then I’d begun to enjoy the silliness of the event — the map checking, the whole treasure hunt aspect of the thing. I got my passport stamped — that’s what people called the yellow card — and I set out again, and this time the route was familiar. I didn’t get lost this time, although I came close once or twice, and I relaxed into the walk and enjoyed the fresh air and the scenery. I was wearing my glasses — I had to, if I was going to make out street signs — and consequently I got a better look at the landscape than I normally do in a race or training walk.

No aches and pains, no blisters, no physical aggravation to speak of in the full 26.2 miles. I finished strong, and my unrecorded time was ten or fifteen minutes under seven hours. You couldn’t compare it to the time in a real race, you couldn’t really compare it to anything, but I was fine with it. I’d walked two marathons a week apart, and nothing hurt, and I wasn’t even particularly sore that night or the next day.

Sunday morning I hit the gym and walked a very leisurely half-hour on the treadmill. I’d gone to a meeting the day after the Salt Lake City race, and I found one in Vancouver, and when I got back to the hotel it was nine o’clock and I had time for a final walk. I had a choice, six or eleven kilometers, and I chose six and did the right sort of zigging and zagging for a change. I figured an easy walk of about that distance would ease any residual soreness out of my legs, and it turned out I was right.

Why did it go so well?

I’m damned if I know. I walked up to the starting line in Salt Lake City wondering if I’d prepared adequately. I’d trained every day for ten weeks, but every step of that training was in the gym on the treadmill, and there’d been no weekly long walk to prepare me for 26.2 miles. I’d gone two hours once and an hour and a half another time, and aside from that every day’s session had been an hour or less. I hadn’t kept track of my training — not doing so had been one of my new disciplines — but I’m pretty sure I didn’t rack up much more than twenty miles a week.

Well, that was evidently enough.

The shoes? I wore the same tired Sauconys I’d been wearing since they carried me around Lake Nokomis back in June. No, I don’t think it was the shoes that made the difference.

Attitude? I wasn’t trying to set a new personal record. At Salt Lake City and again in Vancouver, it occurred to me from time to time that I’d walked New Orleans the first time in five hours and seventeen minutes. It now seemed to me like an accomplishment I’d achieved in a prior incarnation. Yes, I’d done it, but the year was 1798, and I was a Wexford rebel serving with Kelly, the Boy from Killane, so things were different then.

Was it easier with the pressure off? Well, maybe, but I was still trying to get to the finish line as quickly as I could, and I was able to manage negative laps, doing the second half of each race in less time than the first.

The hell with it. For one reason or another, my body and spirit seemed to like the way I’d prepared for these races — walking every day, never for less than a half-hour, rarely for more than an hour. That’s what I’d done, and it had served me well, so that’s what I decided I’d keep doing.

This book set out to be an examination of a year of walking, and one thing led to another. It’s taken longer and run longer than I’d anticipated, and, like a race on an ill-marked course, it has occasionally wandered far afield. I never thought my childhood would find its way into this book, or my teen years.

Sitting in that hotel room in Anchorage, I’d known how the book would end — with that twenty-four-hour race in Grapevine, Texas. Triumphantly, I hoped, with another record-breaking performance; if that wasn’t in the cards, I figured I’d settle for bittersweet.

Go know. It ends instead in midstride.

And that, it seems to me, is as it should be. Because it’s the walking that’s important, not the time, not the distance. Not the medals, not the trophies, not the T-shirts.

You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

Right.

Acknowledgments

And with thanks to Rocky and the pooch.