I just ran my 11^th marathon. I think it was 11, anyway. Lets see, New York, 1988, (the first one); then Chicago, 1991 (qualified for Boston!); then Boston, 1992; Chicago, 1992; Chicago 1993 (the year it snowed); Austin, 1994; Las Vegas, 1995; Boston, 1995; Chicago, 1997 (the fastest of all); Myrtle Beach, 1998; and finally, Chicago, 2001. Well, that doesn’t count the three ironmans, which as any serious runner knows, includes a full marathon at the end. So you could say that the real number is 14 then. I should note that other than those 14 times, never did I ever run as far as 26.2 miles on any other single day. So, eleven, fourteen, whatever – some people would say that’s crazy, while a few really crazy people do that many in a single year, who’s to say what’s really crazy?

I read a quote from somebody the other day that said nobody who hasn’t run a marathon really comes close to understanding what it is like to run a marathon. I know that’s true. They don’t have any idea. That, in itself, may be the most important reason that they haven’t done it themselves. In fact, its been my experience that when you watch other people running a marathon, even though you might have run a few yourself, even then you don’t really remember what it is really like. But I’ll tell you one thing; when you’re out there doing it, you feel it like nothing else. It doesn’t mean you’ll be any more capable of writing about it, or even remembering it, but you do feel it, that’s for sure.

Before the start:

The start: I missed the helicopters. In some big races, they have helicopters, and right before the start they come down low right over the starting line so they can get a good shot on TV, and the increasing roar as they come in low gets you ready to run like you’ve never run before. But anyway, there weren’t any helicopters this year because of the terrorists and all that stuff, so they just counted down and sent us off. What they should have done is had a flyover of fighter jets. That would have really gotten us going.

In other races, I’ve been right on the starting line, or close to it, but this time I was about 100 feet behind the line, so when they started the race, nothing much happened. We just kind of pushed our way forward, slowly, until we hit the actual starting line, and about then it cleared up and we started to run. Right as I hit the starting line and started my watch, I remember somebody’s garbage bag that they had been wearing up until the start reached up and wrapped itself around my ankles, and I thought it would unwrap itself, but it just continued to grab me and I thought for a few steps that I was going to fall down like a clumsy fool, but I finally managed to disentangle myself and we took off.

Mile 1: There’s a place where you go under a bridge and lots of people stand on the bridge above you and cheer for the hordes of people as they run underneath. And we all feel great because we aren’t tired yet and they’re all cheering for us and we all feel like we could run 100 miles. As I came up on the first mile marker, I checked my watch and realized that I was going to be over 7 minutes, 7:05 or so. I wasn’t too happy about that although I knew I had lost some time in fighting through the crowds of people. I still have a strong recollection of my 1997 Chicago marathon, when I ran a 2:46 time, which was my best ever, and I remember that my first mile was under 6 minutes. My reaction to being over 7 minutes was that I might be in for a slow race, although I knew I had been slowed down somewhat by the crowd of runners in front of me. I knew, at that point, though, that I wasn’t going to be anywhere close to 2:46 on this day. I still held out hope of meeting my goal for the day of being under 3 hours, though.

Mile 2: We made a couple of left-hand turns and I settled into a regular pace. I remember thinking about the weather, which was cool, but without any wind or rain. I wasn’t cold at all, but I remember thinking that we were running in the shade because of all the buildings, even though it was a sunny, cloudless day, and at that moment it probably would have felt better if we were running in the sunshine. When we hit the mile 2 marker, I was at about 13:45. I had mixed feelings about that. It was about a 6:40 mile, but it felt like a 6:20 mile. At least it was faster than the first mile, though. At this point, I felt good and even though I knew I couldn’t go much faster, I thought if I could hang onto the same pace for then next ten or twelve miles, I would be okay.

Mile 3: At some point, you realize that you still have a hugely long ways to go, given the meager distance that you’ve already run, and you realize that you have to start thinking about something else, anything else, to distract yourself and get yourself through a few more miles without too much damage. For me, one way I do this is by running a song through my head. A good song, one that I know all of the words to. A really good song might get me through 3 or 4 miles before I get tired of it or lose the ability to focus on it. I always seem to come back to Bruce Springsteen songs. Backstreets, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born to Run, and the Promised Land all came to mind this year. ‘The dogs on mainstreet howl, cause they understand, if I could take one moment into my hand; mister I ain’t no boy, no I’m a man, and I believe in the promised land.’ Its not easy sometimes, but I still believe in the promised land right here – that I can have the life that ‘they’ always promised me, that a man can find the woman he loves and she will love him back and they will be happy together. ‘Blame it on the lies that killed us, blame it on the truth that ran us down, you can blame it all on me Carolyn it don’t matter to me now; when the breakdown came at midnight there was nothing left to say – but I hated him, and I hated you when you went away…

Mile 5: A guy running along next to me says something like, “there’s something to keep us motivated”, and even though she was 40 or 50 feet ahead of us by now, I knew exactly what he was talking about. She had passed me about a quarter of a mile ago, and was pulling away from me fairly quickly for so early in the race. She was wearing one of those bathing suit style running suits that mostly the really fast women wear. She was pretty muscular, more than I am usually attracted to, but the combination of the extra tight running suit and her running in the general direction of away from me certainly got my attention, as well as at least one of the guys around me at that moment. Well, it was a good distraction for a while, but after another mile or so I lost track of her and never saw her again. I assume she finished ahead of me, but I’m not certain of it.

Mile 7: We made the northernmost point of the course, and I noted that the wind, although barely existent, was blowing from out of the north, which meant we would have a tailwind behind us for most of the remainder of the route. Probably wouldn’t make much difference, but any good news was much better than bad news at this point, in terms of keeping in a positive state of mind. My mile splits were between 6:30 and 6:45 at this point, and I was starting to calculate how far below a 7:00 pace I was running, knowing that a 7:00 pace would get me to the finish line in just a couple of minutes over 3 hours. I knew I needed to get a few minutes below that pace in order to give myself a little breathing room in the last few miles, and at this point I was about one and a half minutes below that pace. Figuring out the splits and the pace and all of that in my head is another way to get my mind off of the pain and focus on something else for a while, and at this stage of the race it provided a pretty good distraction for a while.

Mile 8: We ran down Broadway, then onto Clark, and it was the first time where a large group of spectators was concentrated. The sun was out, and everyone was happy and having fun.

Mile 9: We made a little S Curve, a right turn onto Webster, followed by a rolling left onto Sedgwick, and there were a lot of people as the course narrowed and the smart ones among us took the shortest path through the turns, coming almost face to face with the spectators who were crowding the roadway. At mile 9, I was a little bit over 61 minutes, and I noted in my head that four years earlier, when I ran my best marathon, I had ran the first 10 miles in 61 minutes. By now I could tell from how I was feeling that I probably wouldn’t make my original goal of being under 3 hours, but I figured I could hang on and be fairly close to that time.

Mile 10: They all had bells on, and they were ringing them as we crossed Division street, and there were a lot of them, more than I expected, and they were loud and enthusiastic, and it made us all feel big and important, like we could run fast all day long.

Mile 11: Its funny how these miles are getting more and more fuzzy in my mind as we get further through the course. I don’t remember a thing about mile 11 at this point. My miles were starting to get slower, I was starting to struggle a little bit, and my memory of what I was thinking is getting fuzzy. Hmmm?

Mile 12: We ran through the loop for the last time and then headed west, cutting across Greektown and then suddenly there was hardly anyone lining the course.

Mile 13: After the twelve mile marker, we head west for a whole mile on Adams, then go one block to the south and head back to the east, into the city. Mile thirteen, then, is just a straight mile with hardly any spectators and not much to see. It gave you a chance to think about the fact that the halfway point is coming up at mile 13.1, and re-evaluate your progress and your goals.. I had been running pretty close to 7 minute miles for several miles in a row now. This was good in the sense that I was keeping a steady pace and not slowing down too fast, but it was bad in the sense that my average for the entire second half of the race would need to be about the same as I was running now if I was going to be under 3 hours. It was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen, but I thought maybe I could come in at about 3:05 if I kept doing well.

Mile 14: The trouble with getting to the halfway point is that you’re tired and uncomfortable and it seems like you’ve been running for an awful long time, and besides that you still have as far to go again as you’ve already come so far. But by the time you reach the end of mile 14, then it doesn’t seem so bad because now you’ve run more than you have left. It works out pretty well – you run one mile, but you gain two miles on the distance between how far you’ve come and how far you have left to run.

Mile 15: Mile 15 heads south down Halsted for a little ways then turns west onto Taylor Street. You pass through Little Italy and the closed up Mario’s Italian Lemonade stand, then a block or two of a fairly small but creepy looking CHA Housing Project, then a little more of Little Italy. I don’t know the name of this particular project, but it has a couple of the darkest and most sinister looking buildings you could ever want to see. Barely any spectators hanging around here. Chicago’s Little Italy has always been a big disappointment to me, I should point out. There’s just a few Italian restaurants – nothing all that interesting really.

Mile 16: This mile goes further to the West on Taylor Street, then heads South on Ashland Avenue. Not much going on around here. When I put my shoes on today, I ran the laces through the extra holes above and outside the holes that were previously the top of the lacing and I pulled the laces up a little tighter than usual, all with the idea that my feet wouldn’t move around as much in the shoes as I felt they had been doing lately. It is almost always a mistake, no make that a stupid mistake, to make any sort of a change like this right before a big race. But I, in my infinite wisdom and experience, did it anyway, and by about this point I was paying a price. My laces were slightly to tight and the shoes didn’t bend as much on the top as they usually did, so the tops of my two feet were hurting and felt like something was cutting into the tendon or whatever that is that connects the top of the foot to the front of the bottom of the leg. In my marathon running state of mind, though, I did not want to waste time and spend energy stopping to loosen up my shoes so I tried to deal with this by just wiggling my feet around once in a while to try and loosen up whatever was constricting on the aforementioned tendon. This helped alleviate the pain, but it came and went for the whole second half of the race. Any fool can see it would have been much easier to stop for ten or fifteen seconds and fix the problem. But I did not want to lose those seconds, did not want to have to bend down all the way to the ground, and did not want to stop because it can be hard to get back going again. Besides, it didn’t seem to be doing any permanent damage, and what’s a little more pain at this point? So I didn’t stop.

Mile 17: Somewhere around mile 17 I remember somebody asking me if I was doing all right on my 3 hour pace. He asked me that because I was wearing one of these special pacing tags on my back, and it had 3:00:00 written on it. You were supposed to be able to run with all the other people who had 3:00:00 tags on their backs, including a designated leader of the 3:00:00 group, but it didn’t really work out that way for me. I couldn’t get up close to the leader and his core group at the starting line, so I never really saw them. But having people out there with these tags, and the 3:10:00, 3:15:00, 3:20:00, and all the other tags, helped give you a constant sense of how you were doing relative to how other people were doing. So I told him I was pretty much on pace, which I was, and that I didn’t know how much longer I was going to be able to maintain. I could tell I was slowing down just enough that I probably wouldn’t be on my pace for more than a few more miles. But I didn’t feel like describing all of that to someone at the time, so I just said I was on my pace so far.

Mile 18: We are running through a mostly Mexican neighborhood called Pilsen at this point. For some reason there don’t seem to be as many people out at this point of the course as other years, although on other parts of the course there seem to be more than ever before. As I’m running along at this point, getting close to the point in a marathon at around 20 to 22 miles where you often “hit the wall” and slow down dramatically, I remember, still, pretty clearly, what I was thinking about four years ago when I last ran this race. I was having a good race, and knew that with a good finish I could run my all-time best marathon. I was 35 at the time, which is about the age that I expected my marathon running to peak. To make a long story short, I realized that this might be the best race I ever had and it was time to focus like I never had before on getting through the last few miles, and I really was able to tune out everything else, including a lot of the pain and fatigue, and focus in on having a strong finish. In running a marathon, in my humble opinion, the most important thing is preparation, which includes such things as training, diet, and hydration. A smaller part is the actual physical execution of running the race, and a big part of that is mental – the ability to endure the pain, push yourself, etc. I’ve always been pretty strong mentally in this way, but I always had some sort of a letdown in my other marathons. This time, I was able to concentrate and keep my focus better than ever before, and I was able to keep a strong steady pace all the way to mile 24.

Mile 19: Another short stretch south on Halsted, then we turn onto Cermak heading Northeast. Right after the turn, there was an aid station where they were handing out powergel packets. I had three of these in my fanny pack and had eaten / swallowed / choked down one or two of them already. I eat the ones with caffeine in them in a race. I can’t say that I feel an instant burst of energy or anything like that, but I think they keep you going for longer than if you don’t eat them. Sometimes they make your stomach a little queasy, but I was doing okay with them today. (For those of you who don’t run long races, a powergel packet is a little foil pouch of goopy sugary stuff which is something in between a liquid and a solid. They are easier to digest than a solid and pack more carbohydrates than a liquid. They supposedly give you quick energy which can be absorbed into your system faster than a solid energy bar.

Mile 20: Somewhere around here I stopped paying much attention to my watch. I could tell I had no hope of making my three hour goal. Nothing was going to happen now that would make my legs suddenly be able to go faster than they were going now, and that is what would have had to happen in order to break the three hour barrier today. So now the extra energy of looking at the watch and then calculating my pace and my last mile was no longer worth expending and trying to remember. I knew this might cost me a few minutes, because I would not be aware of how much I was slowing down, but I didn’t care too much now whether I ran 3:05 or 3:10. The only thing I was counting now was how many miles were left to go.

Mile 21: These miles can be really long in here, so sometimes I count steps. I know I get about 1200 steps in a mile, so if I can count 300 steps, I know I’ve gone another quarter of a mile and I only have 23 more just like the last one to endure. I don’t think I’ve ever actually counted steps for a whole mile. Somewhere along the way your mind just shifts to something else and you lose count or stop counting and it doesn’t really matter because you’ve kept up the pace for that many more steps without thinking too much about it.

Mile 22: This mile goes by Comiskey Park, then crosses over the freeway, on a bridge which marks the southernmost point of the course. Now it is basically just a little ways over to the lakefront and then a straight shot up the lake to the finish line. But first, we go north up a desolate little frontage road or something resembling one. Actually, it is LaSalle street, but it doesn’t resemble the LaSalle street that you find in the loop downtown, where all the banks and brokerages live.

Mile 23: This one is a long mile. You were thinking you were really close to the lakefront, but you go almost a whole mile to the east, and then you make a little turn, but you still don’t see the lake. At this point in the race there are water stations with water and Gatorade at every mile. I had been trying to choke down a little bit of Gatorade and then a little bit of water at every aid station up to this point, so I wasn’t feeling dehydrated at all. By now, I knew I would be all right, so it was okay to skip the fluids a couple of times.

Mile 24: Around this point you start to pass a lot of people who are walking. You also get passed by quite a few people if you are slowing down a lot. I was witness to a little of both, but not such a large number of people passed me as to totally discourage me. Some people offer encouragement to the ones that are walking, but it is hard for me to expend that much energy and I know it won’t help them that much anyway. These aren’t people who walked off an on throughout the race, and they aren’t people who expected to be walking any part of the race. These are people who either didn’t prepare properly or didn’t execute properly, by going too fast, not drinking enough, etc. That isn’t to say they didn’t train hard or didn’t spend a lot of effort preparing – they just didn’t manage to get it quite right. Once you run out of gas in a marathon, you can’t just fill up the tank again. You just have to push on as best as you can. I should say, for the record, that it is difficult to fully prepare in every possible way to run the marathon that you want to run, so the majority of people don’t get it right in any given race. In my case, today, I was lacking in a few areas in my own preparation – most notably, I didn’t do hardly any speed work, barely any fast tempo runs, and not even as many long runs or as many miles as I really should have done in order to run the kind of race I wanted to run. The difference in me and the people walking, generally, is that they were somehow less well prepared to run the type of race they wanted to run, and they crashed. Of course, many of them would say that they had unexpected things go wrong in the race, but I say that most of those problems are still in some way related to preparation.

Mile 25:Mile 25 takes you along the edge of Lakeshore Drive, and then through a tunnel under part of McCormick Place, which is a huge convention center for those of you not from Chicago. The thing about running through a dark tunnel after running 24 miles in the sunshine is that it is a huge change and it is just plain weird. I think they should play that strange music that they play at O’Hare airport in the tunnel between the two United concourses. Even without it, though, you’re very tired at this point and your mind has a little trouble reacting to being plunged into an enclosed space and relative darkness for a few hundred yards. It’s a big wide tunnel, and I’m not really claustrophobic anyway, but just the change in light and the echo of everyone’s footsteps is pretty remarkable. If I had been as focused at this point as I was four years earlier, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed any of this, but I was much more aware of it this time.

Mile 26 and the last .2 of a mile: I remembered from four years ago going down a little hill and through a little tunnel near the end of the last mile, but I didn’t really remember going up a hill right before that. This time, that hill seemed pretty long and steep, even though it really isn’t. After you finally trudge over the top of the hill, you go down, through the little tunnel, and around one corner. Then you think you must be almost to the end, which is great, but you can’t see the end so then you realize that you have further to go than you thought, which isn’t so great. Finally, you make it around the bend far enough to actually see the finish line, which is quite a ways down what has now become a big wide city street. For a moment, you take in the fact that you are further away than you thought, but then all is forgotten when the roar of what is now a pretty large and loud crowd lining both sides of the street all the way to the finish line. So you pick it up, just a tiny little bit, and you make it look good and you get a good look at the clock and your watch and then you can finally stop running.

This is a work in process (that means I’m still working on it!) (but its almost done now!)