The road to hell is also 26.2 miles long

Who sponsors this race anyway?

Have you seen the documentary about Badwater, the three-day ultra-marathon that's run in Death Valley each July? Check it out sometime, it's called "Running on the Sun: The Road to Hell is 135 Miles Long."

Anyway, the 2008 Bank of America Chicago Marathon didn't take me three days to finish, and the mercury didn't rise to 115 degrees, and I didn't require intravenous fluids, but it was pretty grueling. But who cares? I finished! And I'm thrilled.

Here's a bunch of numbers for you:

• "29 neighborhoods, 1 world-class race" as they say
• 31,401: number of runners who crossed the finish line
• 27,060: my place among the finishers
• 5 hours, 47 minutes, 2 seconds: time it took me to do so
  
• 45,000: numbers of runners who registered
• 33,033: number of runners who showed up to the starting line
  
• 12,000: number of runners who registered but didn't start (clearly they read the forecast better than I did)
• 20: minimum number of water/Gatorade tables
• 90: degrees Fahrenheit when I neared Mile 20
• 91: degrees Fahrenheit at Mile 21, when I stopped looking at temperature gauges

I signed up for Chicago with four other runners, all of them super fast and fabulous. (Over there to the left is the five of us masking varying degrees of distress before the race started.) Heidi and Beth had been anxious about the weather; they do not like to run in heat. I had been naively blaise about the weather, truly believing that it wouldn't be much different than the Vermont marathon was last spring.


Start line
Because Chicago is such a massive race, the start is highly organized in corrals for the fast (Heidi), very fast (Erika), extremely fast (Brooke Taber, more on him below) and inhuman (Lidiya Grigoryeva, who won the women's race in 2:27:17). The rest of us line up in the open seeding, where they helpfully have pace markers ranging from 7:30-minute miles to 15-minute miles. I had been planning to start at the 12-minute pace marker, but once I got there it seemed lonely and slow, so I went up to the 11-minute marker. Then I had to pee, so I left the start area and got in line at the Port-o-let. The lines there should have also had pace markers because some lines were definitely moving faster than others. As I stood there, I heard the national anthem sung, I heard the wheelchair start, the elite runners' start, and eventually the mass race start. This didn't really worry me because it can take a solid 15-20 minutes to actually cross the start line, which triggers the timing chip on your shoe. So I waited, and I peed, and then I realized the fencing around the start area was closed. So I had I nice little aerobic warm-up by climbing over and jumping off of the chain link fence into a swarm of 10-minute pace runners who helpfully made enough space for me to land without injuring myself (and without taking any of them down either.)

The cattle herd moved slowly at first, with lots of stops and starts but eventually we could see the start line and the mass of people opened up a bit and we were off. The initial miles were an awesome tour of downtown - jumping back and forth over the river and turning corners among massive towering buildings. I enjoyed Chicago and the race in general, but I have to say that the city on this particular day had many, many smells and most of them were a variation on sewage. I don't think the runners can be blamed for this because I noticed it early and it stayed strong throughout.

So, how'd it go?
As has been documented here, I had realistically low expectations for this race. I was certain I would start, fairly certain that I would finish, and guessed it would take at least 6 hours, probably 6:15. My rough plan was to run the first half, walk the second. As I neared the halfway point, I was losing energy but I knew I could do more than just walk the second half. At 13.1 miles, I walked till I saw the 14 Mile marker, then picked it back up to a jog.

Not too long after that, the race officials were on the loudspeakers alerting us that the course alert warning had gone from Yellow to Red. All weekend, the Yellow Flags were flying high, telling runners to be cautious and that conditions are "less than ideal." The Red Flags meant "seek medical attention, consider dropping out, don't be stupid." (Okay, those should be air quotes, not actual quotes.) At this point I was tired, but I was assigning that to lack of training, not the heat. My only concern was that the status would be upped to Black ("you have no choice, we're ending the race, sucks to be you") and I wouldn't be allowed to finish. So Miles 15-16 were a contemplation of running hard to cross the finish while the race is still going, and just going a comfortable pace so as not to kill myself in the process. I saw a handful people sitting on curbs in the shade, and many dozens crowded around the medical tents, but I only saw one person being carried into an ambulance. I heard the sirens more frequently as the race wore on, and I heard later a few dozen runners went to the hospital. (Clearly they didn't follow my training plan.)

Snacks!
Somewhere around Mile 16-17 I spotted several bags of pretzels sitting under a spectator's chair on the sidewalk. I felt hungry early on, and I was determined to get those pretzels, the only question was how ridiculous I was willing to be to make it happen. As I was deciding whether to just snatch the bag and rip it open, and throw myself on the mercy of the spectators, I realized they were handing out the golden, salty morsels from heaven in bowlfuls to runners. The sanitation of those pretzels had to be questionable, but I grabbed two huge handfuls and devoured them in a way that had to have looked slightly desperate and off-putting. Whoever those pretzel people were, you should know that you saved my race. (And the woman who gave me giant Lemondheads and Smarties a few blocks later was pretty awesome, too.)

Hydration!
From Mile 10 I had been pouring cups of water on my head in addition to drinking them. By Mile 17-18 I started to notice that my fingers were swollen and the tepid water felt freezing cold. I still wasn't fully aware of how hot it was, I just thought I was slow and out of shape. The weather.com forecast had predicted a high of 78 degrees at 2 p.m., and it wasn't that late yet. (Brooke Taber of the National Weather Service in Burlington, who also ran Chicago and hung out with us, chided me afterward for paying any heed to weather.com.) When I rounded the corner at Mile 20, a bank had a digital temperature display that read 90 degrees. That frankly shocked me and I immediately decided that bank didn't know what it was talking about. Soon after I saw another display that read 91 degrees. Dang! No wonder I felt like I was slogging through molasses.

Special effects!
There's a sweet graphic online that shows how fast I went during different phases of the race: mostly steady in the beginning but slowing, a significant slowdown 3/5 of the way through, then faster again at the end (pretzel power kicked in). Here's the static image: check out the rally late in the game!


From Mile 20 on I was constantly recalculating my pace and predicted finish time. All around me were people who had their own predicted finish times on their backs, and many of them were 5:30 and 5:45. The 5:30 people were clearly off pace, the 5:45s were actually right on. If I could stay with them (and assuming we crossed the start line at about the same time) I'd would be so, so thrilled. With 6 miles to go, it meant I had to walk fast and run more than half of the remaining distance. It's hard to explain how hard that actually was to do.

If the Goodyear blimp had been there....
Let me give you a visual: most of the race course was broad open streets, 4 lanes wide, filled with people running and walking in one direction. Deeper into the race, fewer and fewer people were running, leaving those of us who were to dodge and weave among the walkers to find enough space to actually run. I mean, I was chugging at a 13:30 pace and I was actually hollering to people, "on your left!" If you're familiar with John Bingham's columns in Runner's World that pay homage to slowpokes like him who stick it out, you'll recall that he calls himself "The Penguin" - tottering, wobbling but still moving forward. There were many, many times when I looked at the landscape of suffering runners late in the race and thought if this isn't the march of the penguins, I don't know what is.

The Finish
With a few miles to go, rounding the corner onto Michigan Ave, I thought I could definitely rally enough reserves, determination and crowd energy to jog through to the finish. Amazingly, with only 2 miles to go, I couldn't keep up a consistent run. I was definitely running faster than I had earlier, but I couldn't keep up that pace. Even the volunteers handing out cupfuls of ice, and the fire hydrants gushing cold water at us weren't enough to make up for the heat. (Not to mention that water-filled shoes can slow you down.)

From Mile 25 I was powered by fumes and will power. I knew I was just out of reach of 5:45, but not by much. I ran hard, probably at about the same pace I had at the beginning, rounded the corner to the 26 Mile marker, and tried like crazy to run to the top of the bridge there. For a course that prides itself on being fast and flat, I can say that neither was true at Mile 26. I nearly got to the top of that bridge without walking, but had to slow for about 15 feet. Then the course takes another turn, and it's downhill .2 miles to the finish line. I don't think I've ever worked harder to run .2 miles - I ran as hard and fast as I could, and about 25 yards from the finish I thought, "Jeez, it would be lame if I had to stop and walk right here."

Happily I did not have to slow down, I cruised straight through the finish, with an official time of 5:47:02 - a mere 2 minutes off of a goal that I didn't think was possible until way late in the race.

So what's next?
Clearly I need to write a manual on how to finish a marathon without really working at it. After that, I'm going to do some strength training because my abs were killing me from the effort of staying upright for all those hours. Shoulders, feet, calves ached, too.

And then, maybe in late November, I'm going to start training for the '09 Vermont City Marathon. This time, I swear, I will do it right. I will commit to the training. I will do my physical therapy exercises. I will do hill work, and speed work. I will not skip weekday runs. I will not have an attitude of 'just get in the miles' on the long runs. I will actually get a handle on nutrition. I will finish VCM in 4:59. And THAT will be my last marathon. Maybe.

Fun stuff:
These links go to the graphs of all of our races:

Ally's race
Beth's race
Brooke's race
Erika's race
Heidi's race
Patti's race
Lidiya Grigoryeva's race

And this is a picture of how I will remember Heidi from this weekend, constantly planning via text message. (This shot was taken near "The Bean" in Millennium Park.)