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 twent
y-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.