Chicago Marathon 2026
I worried about the heat. Summer training had gone really well, and had really started before summer, probably in May. I had several mornings up at 5:45am and out to do 24k before work at 8 (meeting, camera off). I had a few holiday runs on not-exactly highways, one in a thunderstorm around a park in New Jersey while deer looked at me like I was an idiot, hundreds of trips to the lighthouse at the bottom of Tommy Thompson Park (where also sometimes deer looked at me like I was an idiot). 400km+ every month for the whole summer. Then the weather in Chicago said it was going to be hot, the organisers sent an email saying the event weather status was yellow (because hot) so I worried about it for a week. Race day looked like it was going to be a dip, of sorts, between a Saturday of 26 and a Monday of 29(!).
I woke up at 5 in the morning on race day, but didn’t actually leave the hotel until 6:40. Ate some stuff, walked up and down. After leaving I jogged lightly down towards the start while eating a banana in the most dignified way I could manage (not very). I went straight for the corral. In every large-enough race where portaloos are scarce and the waits long, there is inevitably something I will refer to as the Informal Accepted Pissing Wall. In Boston it was somehow the side of a convenience store. This time, it was the fence behind the portables on the way in to the corral. After that, I waited for twenty minutes, awkwardly stretching, jiggling my legs, and turning my watch on and off to make sure it would catch GPS but not somehow waste the entire battery immediately. Someone sang the American anthem, the wheelchair races went, the pros went, and then I was off.
Immediately into a 500m long tunnel. GPS instantly useless. You are running 4:40/km. You are running 3:12/km. You are in space. You are still asleep in the hotel and have missed the entire thing. Ran by feel for a while, more or less the same pace as the people around me. This race also did not have (visible, at least) kilometre markers, so I really had no idea what kind of pace I was doing until 3 miles: 19:30. Ok then. Pretty much on time, good work legs. From there to, say, 25k was a breeze. The heat had not yet materialised, because the sun had not yet fully materialised, and nearly everything up to this point had been in the shade. On a few patches with open sky, my watch started to tell me 3:55/km, sometimes 3:50/km. A little fast, but everyone knows the last 10k of a marathon is the easiest bit. Let’s just keep going. See what happens.
From 25 to 30k, my thighs started to ache a little bit. Not what I expected. I had - apparently successfully - overcome a calf strain literally the day before flying out, my hamstrings had felt tight in the lead up, did my feet hurt maybe?, but not the thighs. Those guys are reliable. On to 30 to 35k, arguably the hardest bit: way too far from the end to be complacent, but definitely far enough in to be feeling it. Some parts in the sun, but I had a solid routine at every water station of dunking one over my head and drinking another. Careful not to mistake the first one for Gatorade. I had been doing gels every 5k, and had my last - large, Beta Fuel - on 35k, after which the strategy was more or less “don’t think about it, just shut up, you’re at the end if you don’t count too much”. Thighs were aching but still a manageable amount. GPS had broadly recovered so I knew at the very least I had a PR in the bag, I would have to lose a lot of minutes to screw that up. The sub-2:48 goal was also reasonably certain, but I didn’t allow myself to daydream, even into 40+.
I’ve stopped and walked in races before, last year’s Waterfront Marathon, the UA 10k, but I didn’t even think about it until 40k, and the extent of thinking about it here was “it would be incredibly stupid to stop now, so don’t do it”. Reader, I did not do it. I turned a corner and saw the finish and for a brief shining moment I thought I might squeak under 2:45 and accidentally qualify for Berlin (I don’t really want to go to Berlin). Lucky for me, that moment passed, but I glided across the finish line in 2:45:49, high fived a bunch of volunteers, did not throw up, got a medal, did not throw up again, realised that that time was now mine, forever. When I talk to myself in the shower I can say to my imaginary interviewer, “yeah, 2:45, it went pretty well”.
I learned later that the organisers had upped the event weather status to red: too hot, go home, everyone dies immediately. The consensus on the internet seems to be that it was, indeed, too hot. I am usually the most heat prone person in any situation, I have a cup of tea and radiate warmth for half an hour, but this race felt fine. Looking at the numbers I did marginally slow down for the last few km, but there are many obvious reasons for that, and it wasn’t significant. Somehow, incredibly, I did the first half in 1:22:54, and the second half in 1:22:55. Splits you could set your watch to, which is useful when your watch is not doing its job.
Good race, job done, what’s next?