Today marked one of my favorite days of the year in Chicago--the LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon. After playing in the Loyola Softball Alumni game and catching up with many former teammates from near and far (one of who ran the marathon today) well into the night... it was an early morning (and a beautiful sunrise!) as I rose to drive a teammate to the airport.

And then it was time to get serious about being a spectator. And I mean that seriously. With 45,000 runners and 1.2 million spectators moving around a compact metropolis--you have to have a solid game plan. I signed up to track our former teammate Andrea, printed off course maps, calculated her approximate location, and another former teammate of mine and I were off on our bikes to cheer her on as much as possible. We biked down the path to the South Side and made our way to Chinatown which, while I have never run the course myself, I have heard is one of the coolest parts of the race.

I never received the notification text messages, so we were a little uncertain about how the first half of the race had gone. But, if all was going according to plan, Andrea was scheduled to be coming through shortly after we arrived. Well... we waited for an hour, sifting through the athletes with our eyes, to no avail. We finally figured that she must have been having a great race-day performance and was better off than she guessed she would be. Sadly, we decided to grab some food and then make our way to the finish line to meet up with her. As we sat down to eat our Chinese food, I got a text that Andrea had just ran by. We packed it up and booked it out of there. Flying around the city on our bikes, we were able to catch her in the last stretch.

This is where the twist comes in. The race directors called the race off. It was in the high 80s with high humidity. The Sun-Times reported 250 people went to local hospitals and one man died. If you hadn't hit the halfway point by 11:45am you were diverted to the finish area immediately via cutting across downtown. Anyone who was in a 4:00 finishing group or behind them were told by police to walk the rest of the way. In addition to the heat, that was why everyone's times were so far behind the predictions.

We spotted our friend and ran out on the course to offer our support for a bit. She was in pain, from the heat and her knee, and asked us to walk her in the rest of the way. The last mile seemed to be about half marathoners and half supporters as everyone walked it in to finish the 30th LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon--hottest race day in history and a unique second half.

I've gone down and cheered on friends in the marathon for a few years now. It is unfailingly inspiring. I'm always happy to go down and experience part of the excitement. Maybe one of these years I'll complete it myself. But for today--with the bike down to Chinatown and back to my apartment--I coincidentally biked almost exactly 26.2 miles

< 26 mile bike >