Chicago marathon

47,000 people running, 1.5 million cheering - One of the best marathons in the world. It was an epic event and it was surreal to be a part of such a huge event.

What made it better was my cousin, venkat, was running this as his first marathon! So, there I was doing the chicago marathon as my half-way training run for the 50M. Two years back, I would have never imagined myself doing a marathon as a training run. Yet, there I was and it was pretty annoying to my cousin when I kept referring to it as a regular long run :)

Venkat didn't have the best of training and made through all of the training period alone. I decided that I would not let him alone through out the marathon course.Its a daunting task and irregular/insufficient training makes it much tougher.

The weather was cold as expected. It was the wind chill that was pretty bad. We did a decent pace (11 min miles) till about Mile 14. Then my cousin had some bad ankle trouble that seemed to be there from training too. I then had to play 'kabbadi', put up with curses/abuses from my wonderful cousin!

I had my revenge in the last 300 metres though - I abused and insulted his fitness levels. I made so much fun of him being lazy and challenged him to sprint against me. Then he took off - so did I - We could hear the thousands strong crowd cheering heavily for us!! What crazy whacky guys would sprint each other after a gruelling 5 hr 22 min run! Well we were crazy enough ..and the finish line was a relief!

There was a lot more in the run and my cousin loved it - he will be a returning team asha runner next year! Here is his runner page

The rest of Team Asha did great in Chicago too! Our Austin runners - Anita and Vinod made their PR (personal record) times! Gaurav, ganesh and anurag did pretty good too!
Anurag did a great time for his first marathon!

Here are the
Chicago Photos