Sunday, October 12, 2014

Chicago Marathon Today

I ran the Chicago Marathon today. My time was 5:01. Here I am in Chinatown, where my brother Mark snapped a shot:

marathonchinatown

There I am, a happy fellow,
with a cap, canary yellow.

I bought the cap on Friday on the theory its unusual Tweety-Bird color would make it easier for my relatives to spot me during the race. As it happens, I knew where to look for them, and I think I spotted my brother, and my son and son-in-law, before they spotted me.

One of my other brothers, Mike, was in the race, but I didn't see him until afterward. There's 40,000 people or so running, so meet-ups can be kind of hit or miss.

It's a race that features crowds. Fantastic crowd support cheering you on, which I loved, and crowds of runners who break into three-abreast walking so that you have to run around them.

My scheduled start was 45 minutes after the elite start. So, when I first got downtown, rather than going to the start area, I had enough time, due to quirks in the course design, to walk over to near the 2 mile mark, and catch a view of the elite East African runners zipping by. These guys are running sub-5 minute miles, so I still had half an hour to get to the start.

The Kenyans are speedy,
indeedy.

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