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 ju
st 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.