Chicago, A Tale of Two Races

It was the best of races, it was the worst of races.

Ok, I got that over with. But it is what I kept thinking coming out of the weekend as I limped around waiting for my quads to recover enough to walk like a normal human being again.

To get it over with up front: 4:04:16. That put me 7114/31,401 finishers. I guess that when you put it that way it doesn't sound quite so bad.

It was a warm day in Chicago, unseasonably warm. I would guess that it was probably around 65° at the start and probably close to 85° by the time I crossed the finish line. But that's not even as warm as most of my training runs were (how nice 65 degrees would have felt in July and August here) so I wasn't worried when I saw the forecast.

The race was amazingly well organized. I don't know how you accomplish something like that; there were 31,000 finishers. Add to that some 3,000 non-finshers and 11,000 no-shows. So if everyone who signed up had run, that would have been over 45,000 people! Everything ran like clockwork. I took the subway in the morning; it was crowded pretty much entirely with marathon participants. I got off at the Harrison station and made my way into the park. From there it was pretty easy (I had studied all of the material carefully to figure out where everything was) to find my way to the gear check tent and then around to the C corral where I was seeded along with the other 3:40 - 4:00 runners. The corral was relatively uncrowded, though it filled up pretty well by race start time. Still it wasn't shoulder-to-shoulder like most race starts I've been in are.

We got the national anthem sung by a couple of country music stars appearing at the country music festival in town (shows how much I know about country music that I didn't even recognize their names). And then there were several luminaries in the starter's box. I remember Datham Ritzheim and Cat Osterman (Ron, you should have been there ;-) by name. I looked for her as I passed the starting line, but wasn't able to pick her out.

The race started fine; it took me about 5 minutes to reach the starting line I guess from the gun. 10 from the elite start, and all of the clocks along the route started with the elites, so they were running about 9+ minutes ahead of my watch. The race starts north, out of Millennium park and then across the river before turning back to the south and then eventually back north again on a quick tour of the heart of downtown Chicago. It's spectacular and the crowds are amazing, easily six and seven people deep and lining every bridge and overpass along the way.

The energy of those early miles is astonishing. You really have to think consciously about holding back. Though there are enough people running in the street around you that you don't have to work too hard to set a reasonable pace. And it's not like the races in Austin where people who fully intend to walk the entire race like to get up at the front of the starting gate, and you have to spend the first couple of miles weaving around them. Everyone around you is more or less running your pace, so you can just settle in and run with the crowd.

I took it relatively easy and probably ran the first couple of miles around 8:45. It was so crowded that I never saw the mile markers, it wasn't until mile 3 that I first saw a marker. I got my split there at 25:29, which put me right at about 1:30 off my goal pace. That was fine; I fully intended to lose a couple of minutes during the early part of the race, with the hope that if things went well, I would get it back later.

Things went well for the first half of the race. I stuck to my hydration and nutrition plan, the water stops were all two full city blocks long with gatorade in the first block and water in the second (both sides). I made sure to drink at every single one of them and took my GU dutifully every 30 minutes. My early splits were good:

3 -- 25:29
4 -- 8:03 - 33:32
5 -- 7:54 - 41:25
6 -- 8:16 - 49:42
7 -- 7:37 - 57:19
8 -- 7:57 - 1:05:15
10 -- 16:03 - 1:21:18
11 -- 8:18 - 1:29:36
12 -- 8:11 - 1:37:47
13 -- 7:58 - 1:45:11

This part of the race, after weaving through downtown, heads north on La Salle street and goes up along the lake to near Wrigley field before turning back south on Broadway. That is a really great part of town; feels very much like a university area with streets lined with shops and then later row houses. Eventually you find your way back downtown and then cross the river and head due west. That's about the halfway point, and the race was going well.

The splits from there on tell a different tale:

14 -- 8:58 - 1:54:43
15 -- 7:50 - 2:02:13
16 -- 8:29 - 2:11:14
17 -- 8:56 - 2:19:59
18 -- 9:56 - 2:29:16
19 -- 9:39 - 2:39:35
20 -- 11:02 - 2:50:18
21 -- 12:30 - 3:03:08

I stopped taking splits at that point. Looking back, it's pretty easy to see where the wheels came off. As to why, I'm still not sure. All I know is that long about mile 15 or 16 my hips locked up and my left knee started hurting. I tried moving forward as well as I could, but quickly things devolved into a death march where I tried to run for as long as I could before I had to start walking again. The last four miles were particularly long and painful. As you can see, it took me 1:01 to run the last 5.2 miles. Of course using the word "run" here is a stretch.

I didn't see Patty or Mel along the way, though they saw me several times. It's just hard when you're running and the crowds are so deep along the way. I kept looking but it wasn't until around mile 25 that I caught sight of them. So I didn't get my recharge of nutrition stuff, but that didn't have an effect on how my race went. Everything fell apart before any of that would have made a difference.

Was it the heat? The nutrition/hydration? Did I not train hard enough? I can't look back and say that I really have any idea. Maybe I'm just not cut out to run long distances like that? Anyway, I did the training (the hardest I've ever trained for any race) and felt like I was ready. The heat was there, and it would have been nice to have a 45° to 60° day, but would that have made all the difference? The humidity didn't seem overly high and the breeze that blew out of the south felt nice from time to time. Also the first half of the race was mostly in shade due to the tall buildings.

Anyway, under the heading, "you learn more when things go badly," (my mantra, by the way ;-) this should have been a great learning experience for me. I have no idea what I really learned, though. I will say that I was able to appreciate a lot of things, like how much fun I had in Chicago with Patty and Melissa and how much I enjoyed the experience of running a big city marathon like this. Overall, it's definitely an experience that I won't ever forget and maybe someday I'll go back and do it again. Though I need some time right now to forget the pain before I'll be able to convince myself to try to do something like that again.

I should say something here about "Tis a far far better thing I do..." but I can't think of any good way of working that in. What I will say is that I really appreciate all of the help and support I got along the way on this journey. Dave, Scott and Jim carried me through so many of those long runs in the July and August heat. It's hard to imagine having made it through the training without that support. And Patty really supported me through the whole effort. I'm sure that those 5:30 wake-up alarms were more than annoying to her as was having to live with this grouchy, wreck of a man during those high-mileage weeks. And she and Mel were troopers on race day, suffering in the heat, hoping subway trains and cabs trying to keep ever ahead of me. I guess that, in the end, like with the rest of life, it really is all about the people around you.