The Marathon

The Chicago Marathon came and went on Sunday and I ran it. It took me four hours, fifty-nine minutes and thirty-three seconds. That's a lot slower than I wanted, but, to quote some of our country's current leaders, you don't run the marathon with the legs you want but the legs you have. And so I did.

My dad and stepmom flew out for the experience. Let me amend that: they flew out to watch me run a marathon and buy an Apple computer. I've finally turned my parents into Switchers. Mom, you're next. We bought the Macbook on Saturday and spent a little time installing software and familiarizing them with the little marvel, then went to carbo-load at our favorite neighborhood Turkish restaurant. Free bread plus delicious gorgonzola chicken (times seared ahi tuna salad and mujver, or fried zucchini pancakes) divided by the amount of time we had to wait (about thirty minutes, which seemed longer because people were jostling us most of that thirty minutes) equals happy tummy. Dad and Deb appreciated the experience and, tired, went to bed early while Brandi made signs and put temporary red mousse dye in my hair. It was a busy day and a tense night. Both of us had dreams about the marathon. In mine, ten minutes before the start, I was just crossing State Street, shoeless for some reason, and trailed by a lackadaisical family unconcerned about my potential tardiness. Brandi had about the same dream. What would Freud make of that? Dreaming about a marathon before the marathon. Clearly, we're all in love with our mothers.

I should not have worried. I woke up with the alarm, strapped on my sneakers and ChampionChip (to record my race time separate from the start time; crucial when the start horn goes off and you don't even get to the starting line for another twenty minutes), pinned on my number and stretched a bit. I had run a couple miles the night before just to remind my legs what they were there for and had to account for that soreness. We got out of the apartment at about 6:45 AM, plenty of time to cue up for a race that didn't start until 8:00... that is, in an ideal world where the CTA doesn't decide to close tracks for construction, during the weekend when 1.5 million people would line up to show their support for 40,000 runners. We waited on the Brown Line track for about fifteen minutes. It doesn't sound like much now, but I was so full of adrenaline that any delay left me wanting to punch walls or CTA administrators. Neither were handy, so I just sat. You could tell the other runners immediately. Some, like me, dressed in winter gear except for the legs - I wore shorts - while others compensated for the cold snap by wearing what looked like snow camouflage suits, pants and jacket made of plasticized white paper almost entirely like FedEx envelopes, designed to be worn once and then thrown away mid-course if necessary. Boy, did I wish I had thought of that by run's end. As Dad, Deb and Brandi bravely said, the cold wasn't that bad if you dressed right. Truthfully, I was grateful for the chilly weather at first. I had trained in such ungodly hot weather over the summer that I thought any break in it was going to improve my race. I was wrong. We'll get to that in a moment.

The race started in Millennium Park, next to Buckingham Fountain. You may remember this bit of architecture as the chief visual at the start of Fox's long-running hit, "Married... With Children", jets spewing while "Love and Marriage" played over it. The jets were turned off. It's too cold now and the danger of freezing too high. Another clue. Brandi, Dad and Deb walked with me along Columbus Drive until they ran into a line: nobody allowed past without a number. We said our goodbyes. Brandi kissed me... on the lips! I walked forward, trying to find my way to the proper pacing group. New Balance had runners with signs going back to 5:00. I figured I was more of a 4:00 and tried to wade through people but it was a system of diminishing rewards. Eventually, you found yourself people aside, only to realize you were maybe three people in front of them. I make it a point not to honk someone off if they're going to be in kicking distance for the next three miles. I cooled my jets at the 5:00's.

One funny thing about marathons as opposed to 10Ks in my experience is the clothing. Marathon runners (except for me, I guess) tend to be a little bonier than the spectrum of more casual 10Kers. They get cold faster. So, like the FedEx snowsuit folks, they put on disposable clothing to stay warm until they don't need it any more. Relative to the value of the race - for some, a once-in-a-lifetime run - even a nice set of sweats becomes disposable. So you see clothes popping up like popcorn before the horn goes off, more and more afterwards. People would take off sweatshirts, garbage bags, snowsuits and throw them towards the edge of the corral. It didn't matter much whether they made it or not or if anyone was waiting to play catch on the other side. This brings to mind an opportunity for the bargain-inclined, since you could comfortably attire a family of thousands (and use the leftover bags to throw the useless stuff away) from marathon castoffs. But that's neither here nor there.

Eventually, the airhorn blew. After the wheelchair racers' start, and about ten minutes after the lead runners took off, the pack started to shuffle forward. My jokes, "Well, maybe we're making better time than we think we are..." and "Tag, you're all it," were met with silence, except for one woman in yellow, who said, "I don't get it." Okay, Ms. No-Fun. As we moved inexorably closer to the start, accelerating ever so slowly like a reverse Xeno's Paradox, I was amazed at the piles of clothes along the way. Not everyone had triumphantly cast off their cool weather gear. Some deposited them quietly on the ground, perhaps hoping to sabotage the five-hour runners and guarantee marathon's return to the elite sport it once was, perhaps unacquainted with the Nelly song that kept going through my head as clothing flew like disembodied witches over our heads, "It's getting hot in here... So take off all your clothes." A joke formed in my mind about witches, water and a well-intentioned Kansas girl, but with nobody to tell it to, it kind of died.

Eventually, we reached the starting line. Then we were off, if not like a shot, at least we were off.

Brandi and I had loosely planned a route for her, Dad and Deb. Let me amend that: I had recommended a route based on the marathon info in the Thursday Redeye paper, a route that would amount to non-marathoners taking the train to four different stops around Chicagoland. Brandi took that in and never exactly said "no", but it was clear from the get-go that she wanted more than four stops. The marathon guide listed all of the spectator spots along the way - I think there were twelve - and you could tell by the way her eyes lit up that her ambition was to hit all twelve, turning her, dad and Deb into the scrolling scenery you see in Flintstone's cartoons. So immediately, I felt a friendly paranoia, the inverse of a soldier in enemy territory after a shot rings out. Where did it come from? Anywhere. Could it be around this corner? Or this one? How do I separate the friendly faces from the even-friendlier?

As it turns out, the gang would see me at mile two and seven, miss me at seventeen because my pace had slowed so much and catch back up with me about 200 meters from the Finish line. As it also turns out, while it's hard to pick your loved one out of a crowd of 33,000, it's even harder to do the reverse, especially when team Larsen took off the special red caps I bought to help them stand out. I never saw them until the end. I wound up seeing two improv friends before I saw my family (TJ, in Chinatown, as I run by: "Matt!" Me: "TJ! How *are* you?" TJ: "Fine! How are you?" Matt, now nearly out of earshot: "Running!"). I was kind of bummed, because after mile eleven, all I wanted to do was hang off of my wife and sob. But maybe it's better I didn't. Sometimes the harder thing is for the best.

Brandi explained afterwards that, knowing the CTA's irksome work schedule and the trouble the gang had to go through to zip between miles two and seven, they retired to McDonald's for breakfast to plot their more leisurely route. They did see me at mile seven and thought I saw them. They shouted my name and I turned and waved. Brandi snapped off some photos. I ran on. I didn't see them, though, and it's not that I'm suffering from a hazy recollection. I waved at everyone. Several times along the course, I saw signs for "Free High 5's". I took advantage as much as I could. Ordinarily, I'm comfortable in my technological nest, my poly-cyber-womb, a bevy of computers arrayed around me at each of my three offices, places where I prefer not to be disturbed by social callers. Not Sunday. I wanted to cheer back for everyone cheering me on. I needed them, not least because I had no clear clue what had happened to my family. Several times, I thought, "I hope they're okay."

I ran on. I had a pretty full bladder at the start and was grossed out / envious of the runners who peeled away at the start of Lincoln Park to pee on the trees. One woman running next to me said in a weird accent, "No picnics today," which I thought was apropos. I skipped the Gatorade/water breaks until hunger started to gnaw at me at mile seven. By that time, I was starting to feel it. My knee, which at times in the past gets tricky, was starting to ache. When the wind blew, it went right through my light, artificial fiber shirts and shorts, and about thirty seconds later it felt like each step on my right knee someone was rubbing tacks against the outside. It hurt. All I could do was run forward, though, and count on my legs warming up enough for it to go away. Around mile eleven, I nearly collapsed. My pace, which had been around 9:40, dropped massively. I slowed to a walk, cursing. Had I not run my way up through the pack, past the 4:45 pacers? Had I caught up with the 4:30s and passed them in vain? Did I have a prayer of catching the 4:15s now?

In a word, no. No, I did not. Just walking was painful and I wasn't sure I was going to make it to mile 12, much less 26.2. If Brandi had been around the corner, she would have had a tough time talking me into staying in the race. But Brandi was not around the corner, and the only way I was ever going to meet her was by moving forward, taking advantage of everything the race course offered to get me to that finish line, because I had made a promise not only to myself, but to everyone who RSVP'd to the "Matt's Running the Chicago Marathon" party we'd arranged later in the day. How could I meet their eyes and say I'd run 11/26th of a marathon? How would I feel when they said, "Well, at least you tried. And it's longer than I can run..." That's the bummer of running your second marathon. You know it's not longer than you can run, and some part of you just hates yourself for being so much more petty than you were before.

So, I took Gatorade at every stop, knowing it would make my bladder less comfortable but keep my energy up. I lurched into a jog, using my arms for momentum, quietly thankful for the cross-training I'd done in the pool. I counted the miles down to Taylor Street, where I knew they had PowerBar PowerGel, basically sugar packs with the consistency of shampoo and the flavor of coffee-flavored fruit. At mile 15, I waited in line for the stalls, not so much because I feared an accident on the course but because I knew I would feel an iota better with just one pain to focus on. I was lucky. One man in line said he'd stopped three times during the race. Three! I would hate to have been part of his training runs, no pun intended.

If the mechanics of running were pretty simple, the course was even more so. I was never far enough behind that I didn't have people around me, though after mile 3 the density dropped to slightly less than an average day at the airport. We ran north, turned around 180 degrees almost to our starting point, then west a few miles, turned around, south, west again to the PowerGel break, east (and by this time, every turn I mentally screamed, "Get to the END, already!), south a while, east some more, north, south and north for the final stretch. Having two marathons in two cities to compare, I can say that Chicago's goes through slightly less-sketchy neighborhoods at the end, but not by a lot. I still can't decide whether it's good to be so much more familiar with the expanse of Chicago than I was with Cleveland's course. I guess it will take more marathons to figure it out.

Another unexpected bonus of the course this year was the foliage. Chicago has been lucky this year to have an extended fall. When the leaves started turning almost immediately after Labor Day - they change faster after a hot summer - I thought we were in for a brutal winter right away. I was pleasantly shocked. I had also done a lot of training runs at night, so not having to stop for stop lights and enjoying nature's fireworks along the way really was a boon.

What can I say about the finish line? By now, all of Chicago is talking about the winner of this year's race, who crossed it, keeled over, bled in his brain and went to the hospital. He's recovering now, but there are ominous rumors of someone's misplaced banana peel. I kid. Regardless, by the time I crossed, three hours after the winner, there was no sign of that particular drama, just a big green "Finish" stretched across Columbus Drive. I said to a guy with the name "Billy" written on his shirt (neat trick: then strangers can root for you along the way), "Come on, Billy, let's finish this." He thanked me for the encouraging words and we ran for it, as best we could.

Afterwards, I was more grateful than words can describe, for the support of my friends, my family, the city, the thousands of volunteers, bananas, my wife, my wife for being my wife, and to all the other runners. I was also very, very grateful not to be running. And so I am still.