After finishing the 26.2-mile Chicago Marathon in four hours and five minutes Sunday morning, Music senior Lindsay Klecka said she felt like she was “on top of the world.” That is, until her muscles caught up with the adrenaline.
“Right now, I feel like a big bruise,” she said.
The Bank of America Chicago Marathon took Klecka, other Northwestern students and about 45,000 total runners on a loop around Chicago, starting at Grant Park and winding through 29 neighborhoods, including Wrigleyville, Little Italy and Greek Town, before finishing back where it started near the “bean” in Millennium Park, Klecka said.
Klecka, who ran the marathon for the first time in 2005, started training for her second race over the summer using a free online marathon training schedule. It takes months to prepare, and the training schedule will change your lifestyle, she said.
“There were all those Friday nights I knew I had to get up to run Saturday morning,” she said. “After all the months I put into training, it was an incredible feeling to do it.”
The last two years, Weinberg junior Brian Wasserman has stood on the sidelines and watched his mom run the marathon. This year was his turn to wake up at 3:30 a.m. over the summer to train with her for the race, he said.
“The experience is totally different from the other side,” he said. “You can’t imagine the experience of running it until you actually do it.”
Wasserman said it was a challenge to finish the race but spectator support helped him “push through.”
“When it’s Mile 21 and it’s hot and you don’t know if you can do it, hearing the spectators cheer you on is incredible,” he said.
Members of the Evanston Running Club, a group of families and individual runners who meet for weekly jogs around the Evanston area, volunteered at the 16th mile mark to pass out Gatorade and cheer on the 10 club members who were running in the race.
For the volunteers, the race felt like a huge festival, said Al White, one of the club leaders who ran in the race in 1998 and has volunteered for the past several years. The club is planning a party for the marathon runners at Prairie Moon on Wednesday.
“It was fun passing out the cups to the runners as they went by,” he said. “But you can’t imagine how many cups you have to sweep up afterwards.”
But at least this year, they had enough cups for all the runners, White said. Officials halted last year’s marathon midway through after a record temperature of 88 degrees and a lack of water caused runners to collapse.
With temperatures in the high 70s and better planning Sunday, the marathon ran a lot more smoothly this year, White said.
Marathon organizers yelled out “red threat” warnings for the runners when it started to get hot and suggested for people to slow down, said Medill senior Robin Johnson, who ran the marathon for the second year in a row. Volunteers also used hoses to mist the runners with water, she said.
“Last year I felt like I was going to die,” she said. “I was not excited about this race. If you had asked me before today if I’d be thinking about running a marathon again I would have said no.”
Johnson finished with a time of four hours and 15 minutes, eight minutes faster than her previous time.
“That’s the best part of the whole race – the finish,” she said. “You go up a hill and you turn and there are people everywhere. It’s packed and everyone’s cheering. It’s an amazing feeling.”
McCormick junior Karthik Murali, a first-time marathon runner, said he was just happy to “crawl over the finish line.” Finishing the race with a time of four hours and 19 minutes gave him a sense of achievement, he said.
“It’s just one of those things I’ve always wanted to do in my life,” he said. “I did it.”
