The Debacle Known as the 2007 Chicago Marathon

Last year's marathon was a disaster. Much of my training session was mediocre. I developed a case of vertigo in the midst of training that threw everything out of whack. I basically lost two weeks of solid training and because of it, I was playing catch up for much of the training session.

However, it the last few weeks of training, things started to come together and I had a really good final 20 mile run and thought everything was rounding into form.

Unfortunately, as most of you know, the weather didn't cooperate last year. It was incredibly hot and humid. I was sweating standing in the corral before the race started. That is a very bad sign.

I stayed on pace until mile 6. At that point, I realized that I was going to need to slow it down to finish the race. It was just too damn hot and humid. I saw runners better than me already walking by the third mile.

At mile 11 when I saw Tiffany and the crew, I gave her my pace band and said it was going to take me a while. I also told her to disregard my predetermined times I was supposed to hit the mile markers and that I would make it to Chinatown at some point.

At that point it became a race to just finish. The conditions were horrible and I just couldn't stay cool. I saw several runners passed out, getting medical help and the sound of sirens
was everywhere.

Thank God I ran in another running friend who was running that day right around the 12 mile mark who said he run with me for while. Let's call him Shane Victorino. If it wasn't for Shane, I don't think I would have finished. He tried to get me to pick up the pace a couple of times, but my body body really wasn't cooperating.

Shane was originally going to pull away at mile 22, but he offered to stay with me until 25, when he would finish strong. I struggled much of the second half of the race and walked a good chunk of it. I would eventually finish the marathon in a stellar time of 4:13:33, my slowest marathon ever. I placed 6212. The number of finishers has been in question since that day. As most of you know, many of the runners were forced to stop running.

After the race, I told everyone that I was done running marathons. That obviously didn't hold true and that's where we're at today.

Here are the pics:

Immediately after the race, with ice pack


Michael, me and Nick


Tiffany and me