its tuesday now and the tops of my feet still hurt from running the 2009 chicago marathon on sunday (i have no idea why the tops of my feet would hurt from running 26.2 miles but they do). i figure while they are hurting and i am procrastinating from writing papers for my next d.min seminar i will post some photos and thoughts concerning the marathon.
1st, the chicago marathon is incredible. it is the best race of any distance that i have been involved in. it is HUGE! i mean amazingly large. it took jim and i 10 minutes after the starting gun to just get past the other waiting runners at the barriers and on to the road for the race. it was another 15 minutes before we actually reached the starting line (which was at least 1/2 mile away from where we had started). 45,000 runners take up a lot of space. the only weakness of this mass of people was that i originally wanted to improve upon my marathon time from my first marathon. that wasn’t going to happen with all the weaving between people that we had to do. otherwise running with a crowd was exhilarating. the 1.5 million spectators were also incredible. i had hours of music and podcasts placed on my mp3 player ready for when the energy of the race lagged and i was running by myself. that never happened. each neighborhood that we ran through had new and exciting things to look at. the people cheered, they were creative, and the whole thing was incredibly entertaining. i already liked chicago but after the way the city responded to the marathon i love it.
2nd, running the marathon with jim (pam’s brother) was great. i have never run a race with someone before and now i know that i have been missing out. the conversations we had over the 5 hrs of our run made the whole thing fly by. i never felt like listening to music because i so enjoyed talking with jim. the other advantage was that he kept me running. my calves were like rocks at mile 20. if it hadn’t of been for jim i would have quit running and just walked. thanks jim.
3rd, as always family made all the difference. pam, the boys, jill, and her parents bounced all over the course to cheer us on. a lot of people think that marathons are solo experiences but that is because they haven’t reached the point of realizing you can’t go on and then seeing your family and knowing you have to. i loved the fact that they went from spot to spot to make sure that we continued. it was a huge thing.
finally, jim and i ran the marathon on team world vision. world vision is a great organization for sponsoring children. pam and i have seen some of their work first hand in nicaragua and it’s organization i belief in. it is also a group that does a great job with those running for it. there were people all through out that course that erupted every time they saw a world vision shirt. since world vision was the largest charity at the marathon that equaled a lot of world vision jerseys and therefore a great deal of cheer eruptions for those supporting the world vision team. team world vision raised $600,000 before the marathon and there is a possibility of another $400,000 coming in after. if you’re interested i can send you a link.
as a SIDE NOTE on the above point i have never run with my name displayed anywhere and that was great. i’ll be doing that again. people encouraged me by name along the whole course.
