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 extend
ed 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.)