An article in the Today section yesterday gave an incorrect walking pace for marathoner Lynn Gaffney. She usually walks one mile in 12.5 minutes.

The Sun regrets the error.

The day -- Monday, Oct. 26 -- has been on Lynn Gaffney's mind for weeks. What it will be like. All the people who will be there -- 4,000 or 5,000 of them. The 26.2-mile loop through the city of Dublin, crowds lining the streets, cheering her as she takes a corner in her long stride.

Her decision in May to tackle a marathon was swift; her doubts afterward many. But tonight, five months later, Lynn Gaffney will board a plane for Ireland sure she will complete the race. And sure of much more. She'd been ready for a challenge, but totally unprepared for all she'd learn when she decided to cross the line.

Until this spring, Lynn Gaffney wore the girlish look of a 20-something partier, her long blond hair in a ponytail, her body smothered in a bulky old sweat shirt. Her friends said she had a "settled" look; everybody assumed she'd marry the guy she'd been dating for seven years. Rather than bliss, though, she felt only ennui. Ending things, she knew, was inevitable but scary.

Was it the right thing? She was the only one of six or seven friends not married or engaged, and it bothered her. But she made the decision, and in its awkward aftermath, she cut short the blond mane she'd worn since grade school. It was the most visible sign that Lynn had entered what her friend Rose would later identify as her "first-quarter crisis."

Lynn Gaffney is 25. She lives with her family on the Middle River in Essex, but she considers herself a Highlandtown girl, having spent virtually all her life there around her family's steamed crab carryout. These days she manages the place, Gaffney's Back Fin, seven days a week, from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. It's hard work, but she has three months off a year.

During this spring's off-season, she opened the mail to find a flier from the Leukemia Society of America about a fund-raising marathon taking place in Dublin.

"I was like, Ireland, really cool," she recalls. She'd always wanted to visit the land of her ancestors. The marathon wasn't until October, when crab season winds down. And it was open to walkers as well as runners. She could do it!

The Leukemia Society would provide a trainer, a mentor, an inspiration -- a child in recovery -- even potential training partners and ideas for raising the steep minimum fee. All she had to do was raise $3,200 for cancer research. And start walking.

May, June and July were a blur. Four miles, six miles, sometimes 10 miles a day, Lynn walked in suffocating humidity. There was no relief; from the swelter of the street she entered the steam bath of work.

Seven days a week, sometimes after walking three hours, she'd sort crabs, stun them, steam them for 20 minutes, bag them for customers waiting at the front counter, take phone orders, start all over again.

Lynn wasn't a stranger to exercise. But some days, in the thick of the summer when people stood five deep up front and she was in the back steaming crabs and downing water and listening to people get impatient -- ugly, really -- she didn't think she'd make it.

"I thought I would die," she says.

Whenever she could, she'd steal out with a sack of crabs, store it on a plastic mat on the seat of her black Grand Cherokee, and make a delivery to a regular. Customers would open their doors to find her soaking wet, hair plastered to her head. "Bad hair day?" one teased.

The physical demands of walking and work meant Lynn couldn't party until 2 a.m. every night as she had the previous summer.

She was changing

Since she wasn't "in a boyfriend thing," a couple of friends disowned her. She was stunned; some had been her friends since high school.

Maybe, though, she had signaled a need for her own space. It occurred to her that her friends were experiencing their own crises, adjusting to what she was doing, who she was becoming.

By July, though, she was sweating over something else -- raising money. She'd put off mailing solicitation letters, and October was not that far away. Her excitement gave way to anxiety.

"I have to do what today?" she asked herself waking up one hot July morning. "I just want to read a book."

Maybe she'd skip the training and just show up for the marathon. Maybe she'd just drop out; a lot of people did. Then she stumbled upon a story in Readers Digest about a woman with multiple sclerosis who finished a marathon, even though it took her 18 hours.

"If somebody who can't walk can finish a marathon," Lynn thought, "I can do it."

She compromised, walking fewer miles than her training

schedule dictated. Sometimes she walked only two miles. Sometimes she rushed to leave the carryout and get home by 10 to walk five miles before bed. On those nights, her mother followed her on a bicycle. Cathy Gaffney had relished the conversations she had on walks with her daughter, but now she could no longer keep up with her on foot. Instead of conversation, she offered wisdom from her own experience.

"When you stretch to a goal, you are isolated," she told her daughter. "Nobody cares."

Isolation was becoming familiar. None of her fellow marathoners lived nearby, and group walks were infrequent. Nor could she listen to the Dr. Laura radio show as she once did on long walks. Headphones weren't allowed in the marathon, and Lynn's trainer forced her to wean herself.

So walking became a spiritual time, a time of listening to her inner voices.

On her walks, she considered everything -- her life, the world, Bill Clinton, her favorite book: the autobiography of Nelson Mandela. What kept him going all those years in jail?

She imagined herself in various scenarios. What if she had gotten into the same situation as Monica Lewinsky? "What would my father do if that was me?"

She thought about how everyone makes mistakes, and everyone is human. "If I was in that situation," she asked herself again and again, "how would I want to be treated?"

She found herself becoming much more open-minded. She could see she had been stuck in her ways.

Other walkers and runners were raising money singing in bars. "That's not me," she thought. Instead, she settled on a raffle -- a bushel of crabs at $1 a chance. She also mailed out 75 letters to friends, family and customers.

Asking people for money made her keenly aware that pursuing this marathon, which allowed her to push aside everything else in her life and focus on herself, was, well, selfish.

She was gratified, though, when many customers donated to the Leukemia Society to thank her for the extra crab, the beautiful smile, the 10 minutes of chit-chat at the doorstep. "I did it for her," said one woman.

Each new donated dollar, each new mile she walked encouraged her.

She was lucky to spend 10 minutes alone with a book now. She couldn't remember the last time she went swimming in the river. From the picture window, she could see grime collecting on the paddle boat she had bought only months earlier.

She dropped inches, not pounds. In awe she saw her body push itself as if it had a will of its own.

A new understanding

As she walked in her neighborhood one recent Friday morning, she talked about what she had learned about herself over the past few months:

She had never been content to stay put. The first time she went to Greece, she stayed three months. When she went to college in Los Angeles and to study interior design in London, some friends couldn't understand why anyone would want to leave Baltimore.

She didn't blithely join the family business, either. It was only after she'd earned a degree in design that she chose a career in crabs.

Something pushed her to cross these lines, and once she did, it was harder to settle.

Her mother had crossed a line of her own. She'd married her father, a blue-collar worker. It was not what her grandparents had expected, though they had come to love her father.

Together her parents built a life. What started as a shed on Clinton Street 28 years ago now includes an interest in a picking house in Florida. The cottage on the river has been added onto, too. But every day around 2: 30 p.m. Lynn's father, Donald, and her brother, Neal, still pull in from the river and haul bushels of crabs up the bank to a refrigerated truck in the driveway.

The more Lynn walked, the more her outlook sharpened.

"I don't want to have a 'normal' life the rest of my life. Doing the marathon is an acknowledgment of, 'OK, I am different.' It made me think about how I got here.

"I am," she says finally, "at peace with myself."

The longest run

A milestone in Lynn's training occurred on Sept. 19, the day of her brother's wedding. At the last minute, she decided to join other walkers on the North Central Railroad trail rather than go it alone closer to home. It would be her longest trip yet -- 17 miles.

After 15 miles, she knew she wasn't going to make her 11: 30 a.m. hair appointment. She had to hop on her coach's bike for the last two miles just to be on time for the 3 o'clock wedding.

pTC On rubbery legs she danced until her spiked heel broke off; she fell and bruised her ankle. Still in her bridesmaid dress, she jumped into a friend's swimming pool on a dare, leaving butterfly hair ornaments floating there until the next day.

Four days later, she opened the mail to find a $130 donation from a customer who had run a marathon himself. Only $300 more to raise!

Still ahead, though, was her biggest training challenge: a 20-mile walk.

The rain that Sunday, Oct. 4, would keep her cool, but it also meant she would be walking alone. She passed only four people the entire time. Her bruised ankle ached. Toward the end, her long stride put stress on the back of her left knee, and she prayed for it to be over. But between Power Bars and her water bottle and jogging the last three miles, she made it, and immediately afterward indulged a Burger King craving.

After that, the doubts were gone; she knew she could finish a marathon.

Her pace was off -- 13.5 miles an hour -- but probably because she'd been out all the previous day at the Fells Point Festival. Her trainer says she thinks Lynn will walk 12.5 miles an hour in Dublin. She knows what it's like to walk in wet feet. The only uncertainty now is the terrain. What's a rolling hill in Ireland?

Last Sunday, after staying out late for yet another wedding, she walked eight miles with her trainer and mentor, taking in last-minute pointers on drinking and eating during the marathon.

This Sunday in Dublin she'll fuel up at the pre-marathon pasta party -- with her parents. Their surprise plan to join her was revealed the other day when a travel agent mistakenly left the details on the answering machine.

Four friends will be in Dublin cheering her on, too, and join her for two weeks of travel in Europe afterward.

With her friends, things are pretty much back to normal. At dinner recently in Canton they talked about how proud they are of her. Envious, too, of the time she has had to examine her life.

"Determined," they call her. Whatever she gets out of something only makes her want more. She'll finish, of course, and when she returns, it will be to a huge welcome home party.

Lynn doesn't expect to do more than one marathon in her life. But certain things will stay with her, she thinks. A devotion to exercise, for one. And a new approach to others.

Having turned inward, she says, she can look outside now, go up to people and just say, "So, tell me about yourself!" She sees herself continuing to volunteer for charitable causes. She knows she'll fall in love again, but perhaps not the same way.

And she already has a new goal -- to buy her own house -- and a new travel destination: Africa.

A year ago, she says, if somebody had asked her to walk a marathon she would have said, "I can't do that." Now, she says, "I can do anything."

Pub Date: 10/21/98