Road to Chicago (Spectators Trip Report)
We are back from Chicago and it turned out to be a great trip. Amy did amazing! Many of you have probably read about how ‘bad’ the Chicago marathon was this year but we had a good experience. I will let Amy talk about most of the race details, this will be the spectators post.
I like being a marathon fan more than I think I would like being a marathon runner. I had read about how you could use public transit to get to about 5 different spots on the race course but that wasn’t quite enough. I had an ambitious goal of meeting Amy at about every mile along the way. To do that we purchased a bike rack for the car and hauled our bikes up to Chicago with us.
It was a beautiful Morning. The scenery was quite amazing.
This is us pre-race. I am sporting my one-of-kind T-Shirt.
Front: I chased my wife for a year before she would date me.
Back: Why stop now? Amy Barker’s Super-Fan “I’ll see you along the way.”
Amy in the starting coral shortly before the race.
Starting line, it was madness here. Only about 36,000 runners decided to run. There were 45,000 registered. It took them all around 30 minutes to cross the starting line. To provide context, the elite athletes were already 1/4th of the way finished before the last person started.
I had used a combination of bike maps, the marathon course map, and google earth to plan my strategy for the day. Amy’s sister Becky would be tagging along. Her company was well appreciated! Google earth was a great tool as we had to cross some fairly busy streets. Using Google Earth we were able to zoom in and see all of the tunnels that passed under the streets.
Due to the confusion of navigating the city and me gaining confidence in what we were doing we skipped straight ahead to mile 4. Holding up our big pink sign Amy ran up and greeted us. Unfortunately, we were slow to our bikes and Amy had passed our second checkpoint before we got there. We waited about fifteen minutes wondering if she had cramped and needed to stretch or something, but eventually we realized that she was long gone. At her pace she would have been about 2 miles ahead of us so we had to go into contingency mode. We cut under the race via a park tunnel and was then on the inside of the route. This pushed us to the half way point of the race where we finally got back on track and was able to meet Amy about twelve more times.
You can see the original race route in light blue and our route in dark blue (Click map for larger image). Every-time you see a red star indicates a successful meeting with Amy.
It was at about mile 18 that they ‘canceled’ the race. We are not fully sure what that means as they still timed them all the way to the finish. They tried hard to get the runners to walk which lasted for 10 minutes or so and then the runners kicked it into high gear and finished strong. Towards the end it was a little depressing as a lot of runners were going down and needing assistance from medical teams. Ambulance sirens were pretty much nonstop for the entire race.
I was too caught up in the chase to take as many photos as I would have liked to have taken but it was a lot of fun nonetheless. Amy finally had a little room to run. For the most part she all the runners were crammed together like a herd of cattle. If you have ever watched videos of the running of the bulls in spain. It looked a lot like that, except through the streets of Chicago.
Post race photo.
We ended the day with a trip to a Giordano’s pizza place and that was by far the best pizza I had ever had. The trip was amazing, but it is good to be home.
