Case of the Mondays: 31st and Wentworth on in

October 8th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanR

Sunday morning, I peeled myself off a buddy’s couch in Lakeview and made the trek down to the south side of Chicago to run the Chicago Marathon. Well, not exactly run the Chicago Marathon in its entirety, but rather, run the last 3.5 miles or so with my dad. He’s a seasoned, grizzly vet in the marathon game, having run Chicago on more than a few occasions and even qualifying and running the Boston Marathon a few years back now. But yesterday, he hung up the 26.2 mile shoes for good, this was his swan song.

If you haven’t heard: it was hot. The hottest Oct. 7 ever in Chicago. Too hot for a marathon. Much, much too hot. It left a man dead and about 315 people taken away by ambulance due to the heat. People were laying down on the side of the road. A lady in a medic tent was screaming her head off. As I waited at 31st and Wentworth, peering into the sea of woebegone runners, a cop walked in the opposite direction of the throngs of competitors and said: “The race is canceled, everyone has to walk from here on out.” Which, really, didn’t work at all. This is like telling a woman to stop giving birth when the baby’s head has peeked out, it was mile 22.5 after all. It became apparent the heat had become too dangerous, reports said water stations had run out of water. As my dad finally reached our meeting point just a few blocks north of Sox Park, I hopped in with him and we embarked on the last few miles. This is not the first time I’ve run the last bits of a marathon with him. The experience is sort of fake. You get all the cheers, the accolades — I even got a finisher’s medal. But on this day, I hadn’t been going for hours and hours in this heat, I had merely jumped in for just a short run. But even still, you can’t help but get swept up in it all.

My dad said his breathing was good, but his legs were dead and had only walked once for a short period of time. But these last few miles, they were brutal. We ran for a bit then walked. Ran for a bit, then walked. For as slow as we went, I was hit by the humidity; how people ran this whole thing was almost beyond by comprehension. Then more words from organizers: “The clocks have been turned off, we strongly advise that you walk from here on out.” It was through the gate at mile 25 and my dad, body beaten up beyond belief, seemed to have ceded to the organizers. “Is it OK if we just do that, bud?”

“Sure,” I said. And in that moment, we realized it was the end of an era — something my dad had trained so hard for so many years, something that was the very fabric of his existence the last few years, was coming to an end. We embraced. It was one of those emotional father-son moments, ones that don’t come around very often. But not too long after, we started running again anyways. And we didn’t stop from there on out. Even the final hill of the race, just before the turn for the finish — the hill my dad told me right when I jumped in he absolutely refused to run up — we ran. And heck, we even had a bit of a sprint the last straightaway. (Which, if continued for a mile probably would have only been about a seven or eight minute pace. But still, he had a kick!)

He came in about an hour slower than he usually does for 26.2. Oh well. We survived. We finished. And we did it together. On this day, that was all that really mattered.

Photo via Avant/Chicago on Flickr.