The Day The Marathon Was Canceled
When a marathon becomes a test of survival instead of speed, the only lesson that matters is humility.
I chose the 2007 Chicago Marathon because people told me it was flat, fast, and usually cool. I was not an experienced runner. I did not train aggressively, and I did not respect the distance going in. I thought the reputation of the race would carry me.
October 7 Did Not Cooperate
The LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon started that morning in the low 70s and climbed toward 88 degrees, the hottest race day in its history to that point. About 36,000 people started. Fewer than 25,000 finished, including me. Around 11:30 a.m., three and a half hours after the start, organizers shut the course for the first time in the event’s 30-year history. Aid stations were overwhelmed. Runners reported water and cups were gone. Hundreds were treated for heat illness. Ambulances, city and suburban, were stretched thin. One runner died. From where I stood, the streets looked less like a race than a casualty corridor.
I had walked in that day underprepared. The lesson was not a finish time. It was humility.
I had treated 26.2 miles as something other people’s stories could guarantee: a flat course, a cool city, and a plan that would hold. Heat does not care about any of that. Neither does an empty table at an aid station. The body keeps a stricter account than the entry form.
Not giving up, on a day like that, is smaller and harder than the phrase suggests. It is not a speech at the end. It is refusing the bargain the heat offers every few blocks. Stay upright while the scene around you comes apart. Take water when a stranger has it. Walk when running is no longer honest. Keep the next block as the only distance that exists.
A first marathon is supposed to teach pace and patience. Mine taught a sharper version. Conditions can cancel the race you signed up for and leave you inside a different one, with no possibility. You do not get to negotiate with it after the start.
Race operations and heat protocols changed after 2007. This is not a warning about the marathon people are running now. It is a record of the one I ran then, in other rooms, on other days when the plan fails and the only move left is to stay in it.
Humility first. Then the next block.
