Step by Step Read online

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to pick up racewalking on my own. Every Saturday morning Howard Jacobson, the chief poo-bah of New York area racewalking, held an instructional class in Central Park, at the very East Side location where most NYRR races began. The classes were free, and all you had to do was show up, which is what I did on the Saturday after I wrecked my knee.

  I showed up, along with twenty or thirty others. After a few minutes of basic instruction, we all set out on a six-mile circuit of the park, moving at whatever pace we chose. I wound up walking with a man and woman around my own age, both of whom had done this before. We walked at what the man estimated at a thirteen-minute-per-mile pace, and I pumped my arms and kept my knees locked and seemed to be doing pretty much what everybody else was doing.

  I don’t know that it was easy. Compared to runners, racewalkers work harder, go slower, and create more amusement for onlookers in the process. I was putting too much effort into it for it to be easy, seeking to do it correctly, striving to keep up with my companions. By the time we’d got back to where we’d started, I certainly felt as though I’d had a decent workout. But I didn’t feel exhausted, or even as tired as I often did at the end of a brisk six-mile run.

  And my knee felt fine.

  From that point on, went I went out for my daily hour or two, I did so with my knees locked and my arms swinging. A week or two later, I got my first field test as a racewalker in the Mike Hannon Memorial, a twenty-mile race in Central Park. It would be my longest race to date, four and a half miles longer than that 25K, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion that I could complete it. Still, if I dropped out after one or two loops instead of going the distance, I’d still take the same bus home, so why not take a shot at it and honor the memory of Mike Hannon?

  (Whoever he was. The club held a few memorial races, and never bothered to tell you anything about the person whose memory we were presumably perpetuating. All these years later, I still remember the name Mike Hannon, and I still don’t have a clue who the guy was.)

  I don’t remember too much about the race. I remember it was cold and clear, and I remember the field was small, because not that many people found the prospect of twenty miles in February irresistible, especially with a course of the same old Central Park loops. They didn’t even give out shirts for this one. For the love of Mike.

  We made four circuits of a five-mile loop—with various cutoff options, Central Park loops can be four or five or six miles—and somewhere toward the end of the third loop I realized that I was going to be able to finish the race. And I did, and without having to drag myself across the finish line, either. I finished in good form (or as good as my form was going to get) and did so, my records tell me, in 4:09:31. That works out to twelve and a half minutes a mile, and if I maintained the same pace in London I’d complete the marathon in something like five hours and twenty-five minutes.

  I could do it.

  It would take me more than twice as long as the person who won the thing, but what did that matter? Even if I ran the race, even if I somehow maintained for twenty-six miles my best five-mile pace, I’d still hit the finish line an hour and forty-five minutes behind the winner. When I got to London, I wouldn’t be competing with any of the other participants. I wouldn’t even be competing with myself. I would be battling the distance, and I now had reason to believe I’d be up to it.

  I took a bus home from the park, and a few blocks from my apartment I ran into a fellow I knew. I must have looked jubilant, because he commented on my unaccustomed buoyancy. “I have found my sport,” I told him.

  10

  I HAD FOUND MY SPORT. And it was an odd one.

  And how is one to discourse upon racewalking without acknowledging its undeniable oddness? It’s a genuine sport with a lengthy history, and has been an Olympic event since the early years of the twentieth century. Those of us who do it with even the slightest degree of seriousness don’t care to have what we do mislabeled as speedwalking or powerwalking. I’ve not been able to determine what either of those terms means, and as far as I can tell they’re catchalls for any form of rapid walking that doesn’t conform to racewalking’s rules.

  And they certainly do seem to irritate me. I never correct anyone’s grammatical mistakes (though I’m not above noting them with a full measure of satisfaction) but I can’t seem to avoid calling people to account when they refer to what I’m doing as powerwalking. “Racewalking,” I say, though you’d think I might know better. They’re going to go on calling it what they will, and I’ll go on correcting them, and it makes about as much sense as trying to blow out a lightbulb.

  The nomenclature’s simple enough, for all that some people have a hard time with it. It’s the sport itself that’s odd, not so much in appearance (you get used to that) or that it’s an unnatural gait (what, pray tell, is natural about the high hurdles?). The essential oddness lies more in its rules, and a quick look at its evolution will show how they came about, and why they are required, and how they doom the whole business to eternal quirkiness.

  The business of walking substantial distances in competition with others has been with us for a long time, and in the nineteenth century, much as it may strain credulity, the six-day walking race was a spectator sport. There were races held from one city to another, and occasional races that spanned the entire country, and I can understand why residents of Hare’s Breath, Nebraska, might gather at the stop sign to see a walker passing through, but a more typical event was held in a stadium, with walkers circling a quarter-mile cinder track for 144 hours. (Keep in mind that this was around the same time that Victorian novelists were required by publishers to turn out three-volume novels; I think it’s fair to say that our forebears were desperate for diversion, and, God bless them, rather easily amused.)

  Pedestrianism was a term devised for this sort of activity, and it wasn’t specifically confined to walking. More often than not, these races were go-as-you-please events, and a participant was free to run as much of the time as he chose.

  I don’t know how much running the participants did. If television had existed back then, we could look at the tapes and find out—but then if they’d had television, pedestrianism wouldn’t have been able to command much of an audience. The closest thing nowadays to nineteenth-century pedestrianism would be the twenty-four-hour and multiday races (of which more, far more, later). In my experience, a small number of entrants will run all of a twenty-four-hour race, while the greater portion will be runners who mix in a certain amount of walking, less in the early hours, more toward the end. And, of course, there is generally a handful of ultrawalkers, who will walk the whole thing.

  I’d guess they walked more and ran less back then, but because there was no distinction in the rules between one gait and another, a contemporary judge would probably deem some of their walking to be running.

  And there’s the rub.

  Because walking had become not merely a pastime but a competitive sport, the desire arose for events that would pit one walker against another without requiring either the participants or the spectators to invest six days in the business. Shorter races already existed, on a true go-as-you-please basis, but everyone ran them because running was so much faster. So couldn’t you simply bar running and have short events for walkers? Surely everyone could distinguish between walking and running, couldn’t they?

  Well, no. It wasn’t that simple. First you had to come to agreement on just what constituted walking, and what crossed the line and could only be called running. I imagine the evolution of this distinction was a fairly complicated business, but I also imagine that most of you reading this are no more interested than I in how racewalking got to be what it is.

  So let’s cut to the chase. Walking requires two elements to distinguish it from running. First, the leg must be straight at a certain point in the stride. Second, one foot must be in contact with the ground at all times.

  The first requirement, the straight leg, has changed some
what in the quarter-century since I learned to racewalk. I was taught that the knee of the advancing leg had to be locked when the heel made contact with the ground; now the rules have changed, and the knee has to be locked at the midpoint of the stride, when the body is directly above the foot. (Don’t knock yourself out trying to visualize this. It is, I must say, easier to do all of this than to explain it comprehensibly.)

  If you break this rule in a judged racewalk, the judges will call it creeping.

  The second rule—one foot in contact with the ground at all times—is much easier to understand and to explain. (And no, it doesn’t have to be the same foot all the time.) If you break this one, they’ll call it lifting.

  If lifting is easier to understand, that doesn’t make it easier to avoid. The better you are at racewalking, the faster you go; the faster you go, the more likely you are to break the rule against lifting—without knowing that’s what you’re doing. That’s why Olympic racewalkers so often find themselves getting disqualified. It’s not because they’re cheating. There are judges all over the place, and you’d have to be out of your minds to cheat on purpose. But if you go fast enough there’s a good chance that one foot will leave the ground before the other foot returns to it. That’s lifting, and the judges will DQ you for it.

  But only if they spot it. It’s not that easy to spot, and they have to be able to spot it with their naked eyes in order for it to count against you. Because, see, if you film elite racewalkers, and slow the film down and examine it frame by frame, you discover the unsettling fact that everybody lifts.

  So they tweaked the rule accordingly, and lifting has to be visible to the unassisted eye in order to constitute a violation of the rules. (And that eye, let us note, need not be entirely unassisted. Eyeglasses or contact lenses, to correct myopia and astigmatism and the like, are acceptable. Binoculars are not.)

  Most racewalkers don’t have a problem with the rules. Those who do tend to fall in one of three categories, which for convenience we could label the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

  First, the Good. Every once in a while an Olympic racewalking event is marked by the disqualification of a country’s whole team. Some years ago that happened to the Mexicans; they were the fastest contingent, and they all got tossed for lifting. Around the same time, a team of Italian bridge players was disqualified for cheating in an international competition, but this was different. When you cheat at bridge, you know it. The Mexicans thought what they were doing was legal. The judges thought otherwise.

  In hang gliding, as I understand it, the pastime becomes more dangerous the better you get at it. As you progress in the sport, you place yourself in increasingly precarious situations that a lesser participant would be unable to achieve. Then, if something goes wrong and an updraft suddenly vanishes, say, all you can do is fall to earth.

  That’s a harsher penalty than a disqualification, to be sure.

  Next, the Bad. Walkers who are new to racewalking, and who embraced the sport without adequate instruction, may be disqualified because they haven’t learned to walk in a way that the sport finds acceptable. More often than not, they’re bending their knees when they shouldn’t be. If such a walker draws a warning or a disqualification, it may encourage him to learn more and correct his technique.

  Finally, the Ugly. Not everyone is physically capable of racewalking in proper form. One friend of mine, an enthusiastic participant in twenty-four-hour and multiday races, has a knee he can’t straighten completely. Another fellow I met in Texas is one of a handful of certified Centurions; he’s walked over a hundred miles within twenty-four hours in a judged race. He doesn’t racewalk anymore, he said, because he can’t maintain a straight knee for great distance. He walks, and nothing about his gait would lead you to call it running, but it’s not racewalking.

  In the world of ultradistance walking, there’s general agreement that racewalking rules shouldn’t apply. In Europe and Australia, many ultrawalkers have never learned specific racewalking technique in the first place, and merely walk as rapidly as they can in a manner that comes naturally to them. In the U.S., most of us employ racewalking technique insofar as we can. Judges in Centurion events don’t worry about a soft knee, and the pace in these races is such that lifting is not an issue.

  At one such event, my friend Ollie Nanyes was exhausted and in agony in the late hours of the race. “I wish you’d go ahead and disqualify me,” he told a judge. “I can’t,” the judge replied. “I could only DQ you for running, and right now you couldn’t run if you had a bear chasing you.”

  11

  WITH THE TWENTY-MILE MIKE HANNON COMPLETED, the finish line of the London Marathon seemed like an eminently attainable goal. And so I went out every day and trained, and every weekend I entered a race. Ten kilometers and five miles in Central Park, five miles in the Bronx, a half-marathon in Brooklyn. My time in the Bronx race was 51:40, in Brooklyn 2:22:25.

  But by the end of the Brooklyn race, my feet were a mess. All these years later, a glance at my race schedule is enough to confirm that I was overdoing it, but all I knew at the time was that my feet were in bad shape. Blisters, soreness, pain. My knee was fine, racewalking really did avoid stressing the knees, but my feet were taking a beating. I waited for them to get better, and they didn’t, and by the time I got on the plane for London I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to finish the race—and would probably be well advised not to start it.

  I landed at Heathrow and found a bed-and-breakfast in Paddington. I went to race headquarters and picked up my number and souvenir T-shirt, which showed a feisty bulldog wearing the Union Jack. I took it back to my room and wondered if I’d ever get the chance to try it on.

  Because I’d long since decided that one had to earn the right to wear a race shirt, and I never put one on until the race was over. This had never been a problem, as I’d so far finished every race I signed up for, but how could I expect to finish this one? And why would I even bother to start it?

  I HAD A FEW DAYS in London to think about it, and I spent them seeing the city. My museum visits included the Wallace Collection, a small museum devoted largely to the work of nineteenth-century French artists who painted idealized bucolic scenes. This was supposed to divert me from anxiety about the impending race, but I realized it wasn’t working when I found myself noticing that every last one of those barefoot shepherds and shepherdesses had second toes substantially longer than their big toes.

  Which is to say that they all suffered from Morton’s Foot, a structural peculiarity well known to runners and their podiatrists.

  MY FEET DIDN’T get any better in the days leading up to the marathon. It rained the night before the race and was still at it come race time.

  The race started somewhere south of London—the halfway point would come at Tower Bridge—and I found my way there knowing it would be impossible for me to cover twenty-six miles, or anywhere close to it. I couldn’t even work up a good fantasy in which I managed to finish the race.

  What got me to the start was a little bargain I made with myself. I figured I could manage three miles, and I decided that would entitle me to wear the goddamn shirt. My feet were wet already, and it hurt to walk, and I couldn’t see how walking would get a whole lot better in wet socks.

  (Cotton socks, of course. There was widespread agreement at the time that natural fibers were universally preferable to artificial ones, and that real men didn’t wear polyester. There are a lot of good things about cotton, but most of them disappear in a hurry when you work up a sweat. Nowadays all athletic socks are either man-made fibers or wool, and runners favor “technical” shirts designed to wick perspiration away from the body. Cotton socks, a cotton shirt, ill-fitting shoes—oh, I was in great shape.)

  Still, three miles. How hard could it be to walk three miles?

  I WALKED THE whole thing.

  I don’t really know what kept me going. Some kind of stubborn determination, I suppose, but if so it was operating entirely on
an unconscious level, because when the race started I had no intention of staying with it for more than three miles or so. I didn’t aspire to anything beyond that.

  Nor did the pain suddenly abate, enabling me to change my mind. My feet were sore and they stayed that way.

  The organizers of the race were well aware that not everyone would be able to go the distance, and they had a bus or two that swept the tail end of the field, picking up whatever stragglers had sensibly concluded that enough was enough. Once you were past the thirteen-mile mark, the midpoint of the race, you were on your own; if you wanted to drop out, you could hop on the Underground or hail a cab.

  I kept walking, past the three-mile mark, past the five-mile mark, and on. I kept telling myself I’d drop out soon, and as I got closer and closer to Tower Bridge, I knew it was time to give up.

  Then I saw the bridge, and realized I was halfway there. I kept going and crossed the bridge, and it struck me for the first time that I might actually be able to finish this thing. Because my feet didn’t feel any worse than they had at the start, and they couldn’t get any wetter than they already were, because even cotton can only hold so much water.

  Two miles beyond Tower Bridge, we had a loop of about six miles around the Isle of Dogs. There weren’t any dogs to be seen, or much of anything else; it was in those days an unappetizing patch of urban wasteland. It was also the last part of the course that I can remember. The finish was at Constitution Hill—they changed that the following year—but I don’t know how we got there. I paid just enough attention to the route to stay on it.

  There was one point very near the end where the course led across a vast intersection, and traffic controls at that stage of the race were somewhat lax. In the interest of self-preservation, I forced myself into a raggedy-ass run across that fifty-yard stretch of pavement, but with that exception I walked all the way.