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2015 Chicago Marathon

Date: October 11th, 2015
Time: 3:38:27 (8:20 pace)

I ran the 2015 Chicago Marathon. This was a great race. It was also the biggest race I have ever participated in. According to this Competitor.com article, 45,000 runners were selected in the lottery out of 70,000 applicants. Of these, 37,182 finished the race. I was the 5770th of these to cross the finish line. Yet despite the sheer number of runners, everything went smoothly, maybe with the only wrinkle being the long time required to get to the expo. The weather cooperated, and it was in low 50s and sunny for most of the race. This was perhaps bit above ideal marathon conditions, but the tall buildings provided nice shade, and it didn't feel too hot. I was just glad we didn't get to experience the infamous Chicago wind!

Route along with the cadence from my Garmin Forerun GPS watch. The elevation profile was totally whacked, showing I climbed up to 1300 feet.

I very much enjoyed the course. It's flat, but not boring like Shamrock. There were spectators along for most of the way. Also, since we were running through a city, it was easy to occupy your mind over the 26 miles. I ran this marathon with my water bottle like in Richmond, and it again worked out well. I also ate a lot of gels, some 10 in total. It helped a ton, and I didn't bonk at all in this race. I was actually able to pick up the pace around mile 22, and even run around 7:30 for a bit.

Start of the Chicago Marathon. I was in Coral D, but ended up passing many Cs and even some Bs.
These photos came from MarathonPhoto. I felt dirty giving money to that awful company, but my vanity got the best of me. Not only were the pictures outrageously expensive, the quality was also bad. These three are about the only out of 12 that were not terribly underexposed.
Woo-hoo, done! A new PR! The post race beer tasted great.
Meeting up with wifey and also with Erik who also raced. Erik finished in an amazing 3:21:44. We also had few other people racing from Capital Area Runners; pretty much everyone did great (I was the slowest, as usual).
After the race, we went to get the famous Chicago deep dish pizza, but honestly, I wasn't that impressed. I much prefer the thin Italian variety. Later on we visited China Town where we had a noodle soup and also saw these astrological statues. I am a monkey, apparently.
Next morning I donned my hot pink shorts and went for a recovery jog to Navy Pier. I took this photo from there.

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