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 tha
n 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 d
o 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.