(And what | learned from it) BY LAWRENCE BLOCK

all day Sunday.

Marathons are like football games. Weather’s not enough to cause their cancellation, unless it’s pretty dramatic. A hurricane will do it, but this was February of 2007, the weekend after Mardi Gras, and hurricane season was months away. So it would rain, and we would do what marathoners do when it rains. We’d get wet.

I don’t mind getting wet. When I was a boy my mother assured me I wouldn’t melt, and so far she’s been right about that. Though a year earlier I’d found myself wondering.

pated in a 24-hour race around a two-mile asphalt loop in Bear Creek Park. The race got under way at seven in the morning, and within an hour it started raining, and it didn’t entirely quit for eight hours or so. Sometimes it was a drizzle and sometimes it was a downpour, but the rain coming down was the least of it; what drove us all mad was the rain after it had fallen. The course didn’t drain properly, and great sections of our path were ankle deep in water. It slowed me down and shortened my stride and messed up my feet and did nothing good for my disposition, let me tell you. More to the point, it led me to retire from the race after 18 hours or so, with 64.25 miles to my credit. That was enough to top my one previous 24-hour race, but only by a mile. I don’t know how far I might have gone in Houston on a dry surface, but I’m fairly sure I’d have managed a few more circuits of the course.

So I really wasn’t looking forward to rain at the New Orleans race. But I’d show up rain or shine. I wouldn’t melt.

\ EW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, February 25, 2007—The forecast was rain

A sidebar on grammar

My wife, Lynne, and I flew down to New Orleans on Friday.

(Note, if you will, the commas before and after her name. The sentence would flow better without them, but they’re there for a reason. They indicate that Lynne’s my only wife. If I didn’t use them for Lynne, you’d have every right to suspect me of bigamy. Now this is one of those linguistic niceties like, say, the subjunctive, that seem designed chiefly to make people who are aware of it feel good about themselves. I’d love to leave out those commas, but I don’t want you thinking I’ve got more than one wife. One’s plenty.)

Lynne doesn’t usually accompany me to marathons—she has a life, even if I don’t—but New Orleans is her birthplace and remains very dear to her heart. We’d come down for the Mardi Gras Marathon the previous year, and planned a repeat, but with one notable difference: on Tuesday she’d return to New York, while I’d stay put for a month and get a book written. It was a book I’d gotten absolutely nowhere with for over a year, and I was dreading it, but nowhere near as much as I was dreading the marathon.

Three weeks earlier I’d walked the Pacific Shoreline Marathon, in Huntington Beach, California. It was held on a beautiful seaside course, and the weather was splendid, and I was just cruising along, not pushing the pace, until somewhere around the 16-mile point I got a sharp pain in the ball of my foot. It was bad enough that I might have stopped but for the fact that this was an out-and-back course and the only way to get back to my hotel was to keep walking. The pain was really quite intense, but I was able to walk through it and maintain my pace, and then after four or five miles, just like that it went away. I never knew why it vanished, but then again I never knew why it appeared in the first place. I finished the race, got my medal, ate eight or 10 oranges and anything else I could find, and went to my room to shower and put my feet up.

And they weren’t in such great shape. My right foot, the one that had given me trouble during the race, had nothing wrong with it where I’d had the pain, not as far as I could determine. But the little toe had taken a beating, and the outer layer of skin on it slipped off like a glove, taking the nail with it. It didn’t hurt all that much, and I was confident I could get along without that layer of skin, and without the nail as well.

Still, I’d had the thing for 68 years…

We can’t talk about what I’m not doing

A couple of days later I made a guest appearance on The Late Late Show. All 1 wanted to talk about was walking, but Craig Ferguson kept dragging the conversation back to my books. He wanted to know what I was working on, and of course I wasn’t working on anything.

That was the first weekend in February, and I spent the next three weeks back in New York, doing precious little to prepare for New Orleans. In 2006 they held the race the first weekend in February, before rather than after Mardi Gras, and it had been the scene of my greatest triumph in the sport. I’d completed the race in 5:17, the best time I’d ever recorded at that distance. (I’d gone faster back in 1981, when I’d done five marathons, but in three of them I ran part of the way. I did walk the 1981 Jersey Shore Marathon in 4:53, but I was 43 at the time, and I was 66 when I resumed racewalking in 2005. That 5:17 in New Orleans was my best time since then.)

Not only did I post a personal record time, but I actually won something. New Orleans is one of a handful of marathons with a judged racewalking division, and in due course I received a plaque for having been the second male racewalker. I’d done the same a month earlier in Mobile, but my triumph was somewhat dimmed by the fact that there were only two of us. In New Orleans I was second

= of seven or eight, and the Luna vi young Floridian who took . top honors nosed me out by

only 42 minutes.

But that was then, and this was now, and that 5:17 looked out of reach. Especially if it rained. And especially if that foot pain I’d encountered in Huntington Beach—and had twinges of during my infrequent training sessions—should happen to return.

Meeting Glen

The weather was all right on Saturday. The day’s highlight was a meeting with Glen Mizer, whom I knew

only from his posts on the Walking Site message board. At my suggestion he and his wife, Carol, had booked a room at Fairchild House, where Lynne and I always stay; it’s on Prytania Street in the Lower Garden District, and marathoners pass it twice, at 15 and 24 miles. Glen came up to our apartment Saturday afternoon and the two of us hit it off immediately. I didn’t have a tape recorder running, but later I would post my best recollection of our conversation on the message board:

“Oh, I’m so out of shape it’Il take a miracle to get me to the starting line. I haven’t been out walking since my last race.”

“You’re ahead of me, fellow. I didn’t even walk in my last race. Some old boys picked me up and carried me across the finish line.”

“T did get out for a few minutes yesterday, but I had to use a cane.”

“T had me one of them aluminum walkers.”

“T was gonna use one this morning, but I lost my balance trying to get up out of the wheelchair.”

“That chair of yours hand propelled or motorized?”

Glen’s also a racewalker, and younger and faster than I. Lately, however, he’d found himself forced by some sort of indeterminate injury to alternate walking with intervals of slow jogging—“slogging,” he termed it. Thus he would have to compete as a runner, rather than enter the racewalking category. This news did not break my heart.

We talked about the weather, too. The forecast had changed from rain all day Sunday to rain starting Saturday night and ending an hour or so into the race. We agreed that we’d be out there rain or shine—I suppose Glen’s mother had tipped him off, too, that he wouldn’t melt—but that shine was better. And we left it at that.

Lynne and I went out to dinner to a pizza joint a block away on St. Charles Avenue. I had a bowl of pasta as a sop to tradition. I don’t know that anybody pays a whole lot of attention to carboloading these days, and I’m not sure it makes any sense for someone cruising at racewalking pace, but everybody just knows you’re supposed to eat pasta before a marathon. And it’s not as though it amounts to a great sacrifice. It’s pasta, after all, not spiders. What’s not to like?

Though if someone proved, or even strongly suggested, that a marathoner’s performance would improve if he ate spiders the night before a race, well, you can bet there’d be a whole lot of arachnids swimming in marinara sauce . . .

The rain gods skip town

It rained a little during the night, but not heavily, and it had stopped well before dawn. I got up early, ate an energy bar for breakfast, got dressed, and pinned on my two number bibs. (Racewalkers were issued an extra bib to wear on their back, so that the judges could tell at a glance who was a walker.) Glen was waiting out

front and Lynne drove the two of us to the Superdome, where the race would start and finish.

When it did start, Glen slogged off and disappeared into the distance. I took it easy, cruising along at a gentle warm-up pace, and for the first three miles or so everything was fine.

Then my foot started to hurt—the right foot, in the same spot that had bothered me in California. It was nowhere near that bad, it was pain I could live with and in fact walk with, but I’d have been happier without it. I knew immediately what I’d pretty much assumed anyway—that my time last year, 5:17, was way out of reach. But that was OK, and I could still get through the race and finish in decent time.

The race course is west, through the French Quarter and out to City Park, where we turned around and followed the same route back to the Superdome. At that point, the race would be over for the half-marathoners and half over for the rest of us. Around mile eight or nine, I decided getting through 26 miles was going to be more than I could stand. I decided what I ought to do was go through the half-marathon finish at the 13.1-mile point and call it a day.

Now, thoughts of this sort are frequent for me. There’s often a point in the course of a race when I decide the hell with it! and the phrase I’m too old for this shit echoes like an old song. The thing is, see, that I never give in to it—or at least I never have. Back in my early 40s, when I sometimes raced 40 times a year, I never once quit short of the finish line. That record is more a testament to determination than to good sense, as there were a couple of races I would have been well advised to abandon, but so far I’ve always hung in there to the finish line.

Still, just as thoughts of suicide will get a person through a bad night, so will thoughts of dropping out keep a fellow on his feet. I told myself I’d quit at the halfway point, and when it came time for the half-marathoners to zig left and cross their finish line, I zagged to the right instead along with the rest of the full marathoners.

The course would now head up through the Garden District and on to Audubon Park, where it would make a circuit of the park before heading right back to the Superdome. Prytania Street was the route’s main artery, and Fairchild House was right there on our route, at the 15-mile mark and again around 24 miles. I’d have to get back to Fairchild House even if I dropped out, so I decided to keep going at least until I got there.

That’s what I’d do. Hang in until I got to Fairchild House, and then go to our room and lie down, and skip the Anchorage Marathon in later June, and never do another of these damned things for the rest of my life.

Lynne was waiting out front at Fairchild House. I told her I was hurting but said I thought I’d stay with it a while more, as it wasn’t getting any worse. So I kept

going on Prytania, and I took the little out-and-back detour on Napoleon Avenue, and I was back on Prytania at approximately 17.5 miles, when the little toe on my right foot sent out a spasm of pain unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It hadn’t really been bothering me enough to mention, its soreness was minor compared to the ache in the ball of the foot, but now, with no warning, it felt as though a tank had run over it. It was indescribable (although that doesn’t seem to have stopped me from trying), and it flared up anew every time I took a step.

All of a sudden I couldn’t do better than a slow and rather pathetic limp. I just stood there for a minute or two, trying to figure out what to do next. If this had happened a half hour earlier, when I was at Fairchild House, the answer would have been obvious. I’d have stopped there and then, no question. But now I was two miles past Fairchild House, and both my choices involved walking; I could walk back or walk on.

The pain: to stay or to go?

And there was the chance that the pain would vanish as abruptly as it had happened. So I limped on to give it the opportunity.

Didn’t happen. I was limping along when Glen showed up; he’d already reached the turnaround in Audubon Park and was on his way back, and feeling pretty lousy himself; he’d had some sort of sports drink that his stomach wasn’t happy with. He asked me what I was going to do and said later that, if I’d said I was going to quit, he’d have accompanied me to Fairchild House and quit himself. But for some reason I said I’d push on for a little while, and I did.

It took me an hour to cover the next two miles. What kept me going was the thought of how I’d feel if I started back before reaching the turnaround, only to have the pain recede. I’d really have found that infuriating. So I kept on limping, and tried to ignore the people who asked me if I was OK (No, idiot! If I were OK, I’d be walking right.) and the helpful soul who wanted to know if I needed electrolyte replacement tablets (Thanks, but what would they possibly do for my toe?). By the time I reached Audubon Park and swung into the 1.5-mile loop around it, I figured out my situation. I was in too much pain to go on and too stupid to stop.

And that became my mantra. J can’t go on, I told myself. I’m too stupid to quit, I replied. J can’t go on. I’m too stupid to quit. Can’t go on. Too stupid to quit…

During the park loop, my foot pain lost intensity to the point that I could walk without limping but still couldn’t manage more than a leisurely pace. That picked up a little by the time I was out of the park and up to the 21-mile marker, and it was then that I realized I was probably going to be able to finish the race. The only question was whether I could reach the finish line before the seven-hour

mark, when they were scheduled to shut it down. I didn’t care if it took me every minute of seven hours, didn’t care if I was the last person across the line, but I really wanted to finish.

And the pain backed off. I honestly don’t know how that happened. Barring the intervention of a Higher Power, and I have trouble envisioning one with nothing better to do than enable an aging athlete to persist in his folly, the best I can come up with is this: the protesting nerves decided I clearly wasn’t getting the message, so why bother sending it? The fool’s best interests would be served by stopping, they realized, but he really is too dumb to quit, just as he’s been muttering to himself. So why waste our time on him?

The anthropomorphism aside, I’m not sure this isn’t how it works. Pain, like everything else, exists for a purpose, and the purpose in this instance was to alert the organism to the fact that he’d done damage to a portion of himself. The message had been delivered, and with a vengeance; the message had been ignored; there was accordingly no need to go on sending it, and the transmission ceased.

I tried this theory on a friend, and he shook his head and lectured me on endorphins. My brain started producing endorphins, he told me, and they were better than morphine at drowning pain. Well, OK, but what prompted the brain to send out this tidal wave of endorphins? Exercise? I’d been exercising for hours, and that was what had earned me the pain in the first place. I still like my theory, and there’s room to stick endorphins into it. The mind, realizing that its message was being ignored, ordered up a big batch of endorphins as a mechanism for canceling the message. There!

With the pain gone, I could pick up my pace. I was racewalking at cruising speed by the time I reached Fairchild House, and the last two miles saw me moving at my regular racewalking pace, such as it is. I was going flat out when the finish line came into view, and I sailed across it with a net time of 6:34:25. That was an hour and 17 minutes longer than the same course took me a year earlier, and my slowest marathon ever by a good half hour, and yet it felt like my greatest triumph.

“T honestly don’t know what the hell kept me going,” I posted in my race report, “outside of a deplorable stubborn streak, but whatever it was I’m grateful for it.”

Assessing the damage

They hung a medal around my neck after I crossed the finish line, and at the top of the stadium ramp there was still plenty of food and drink left. More to the point, there was Lynne, who’d headed for the Superdome after I’d passed her at the 24-mile point. She drove us back to Fairchild House, and in no time at all I was in a chair with my feet up.

It took me a while, though, to take my socks off, because I was afraid of what I would find. I was still surprisingly free of pain, but enough blood had leaked through the sock to assure me that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. I did peel the sock off, finally, and the toe didn’t look good, but it didn’t look that bad, either, and it was impossible to guess why it had hurt as severely as it had.

I put a bandage on it and got on with my life. We ate in that night. Lynne went out and came home with a pizza, but the next day I was on my feet and walking around, and the day after that, Tuesday, Lynne drove herself to the airport, turned in our rental car, and flew home. And I set myself up at the desk, switched on my laptop, and started work on the new book.

And what | learned from it

The first thing I learned consisted of unlearning something I’d long accepted as truth: that nothing can compare to the wisdom of the body, and that you would do well at all times to listen to the body.

The author at the Niagara Falls Marathon in October 2005, his first marathon in 23 years.