If you’ve read my running posts here, you’ve had to endure my endless asterisking of the first time I ran the Chicago Marathon in 2007: I made it 16 miles before they called the whole thing off because they hadn’t had enough water for the unexpectedly hot October day (but I was in a lot of pain from my IT Bands and probably wasn’t going to finish anyway). Blah, blah, blah. Well, after today I can finally just say “yes, I’ve run the Chicago Marathon”. And I set a personal best doing it (by over two minutes): 5:23:14

It was also a good day for the charity I was running to fund-raise for, Misericordia. Thanks to a bunch of you, I got just over my personal goal of $1000, and the collective fund-raising of all the Misericordia runners got over $100,000 for the first time ever.

It was a little emotional running through the Pilsen and Chinatown neighborhoods, oft-cited as two of the most exciting neighborhoods to run through, since I never got to them the first time. And the whole run was the wonderful tour of our city that I was expecting. And the three-leaf clover design of the course meant that Erica was able to bounce around inside the center of the run and I got to see her several times along the way, which was an enormous boost—she’s an amazing support to me.

A standard maxim of athletics is “nothing new on race day”, and I usually agree. When I found the 5:25 pace group I was planning on sticking with, I discovered that they were doing a run/walk method of keeping pace, which is not really a method I’ve trained for. But my usual Marathon method of “run a little too fast until I’m too tired and then walk” hasn’t been that awesome, so I decided to try it out and stay with them. I think the PR proves it was a good decision.

Overall Time: 5:23:14 Overall Place: 33206 / 40802 Place in Gender: 19250 / 22297
Place in Age Group (M40-44): 3282 / 3687