8th – Chicago 5k

The following morning started off with the official 5k run at 0730 from the Millennium Park and around the loop in the center. Meant as a social run as a warmup for tomorrow’s marathon there is no reason to push yourself in any way. The weather was nice but cold, and it stayed dry with only a breeze. Quite nice conditions everything considered. App 7300 runners participated and the fastest ran it in app. 15 minutes. I ended up finishing in 25:48, putting me as 1072 out of 7115 overall (top 15,01%), 814 out of 3455 men (top 23,56%) and 140 out of 594 in M4044 (top 23,57%). I obviously didn’t catch the part where it wasn’t a competitive run – it probably wouldn’t have hurt to relax a bit along the way. Oh, well – it’s nice getting a good result, and it was only a 5k after all. Crossing the finish line you were handed drinks and snacks, and to my surprise you were also handed a medal. I did not see that latter part coming!

Photo by MarathonFoto.

After having returned to the hotel for a shower I went out for breakfast. Following that I decided to just visit the Institute of Art, apparently a very famous and large museum at the park that has a large variety of stuff. And yes – from the old classics from Europe (and especially the Netherlands) including a lot by Monet to modern stuff that at best could be defined as “odd”. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand modern art. A rock cut into three pieces. It was a nice Japanese rock, but apparently the artistry was through the roof because you could “see how beautiful the pieces are as how they fit perfectly together”. Or the self portrait that was just a pile of sweets. “Optimal amount: 175lb”. Or the self portrait “White acrylic paint on wall”. The wall was white. There was no difference between the color of the wall and the paint, so the resulting “art” was basically just a blank wall. The a collection of statues that each were accompanied by three questions that the artists had answered to explain their creations. One of them a wiggly shape forming a circle and the question was “Is it wiggly or circular” (which one could say is a reasonable question) but the answer was “The onlooker does not know what they are looking at. But it is grounded like they are.”. And the rest were equally if not even more out there. I couldn’t help but think they were high on their own supply. Maybe I wasn’t high enough? A more reasonable explanation (in my mind) is that they are having a bet among themselves trying to see who can come up with the most outrageous idea and still manage to sell it as “art”. 

Or maybe I just don’t understand modern art. 

The good weather brings everyone out to the Bean.

After a somewhat confusing visit to the museum I returned to the hotel where I relaxed until dinner. Fastest service ever. Arrived at 1800 and left 45 minutes later after having both lasagna and tiramisu. I can be an efficient eater when I want to, I admit, but it was the wait time for the food that was the shocking part – 2 minutes was the longest I had to wait at any time throughout the meal. And the food was genuinely good and didn’t seem rushed. 

6th – 7th – Chicago pre-race(s)

Slightly jetlagged I woke up before the alarm went off, though at that point I had had more than 10 hours of sleep, so one could argue it was time to go.

Leaving the hotel I found my way to Millennium Park to figure out how long it would take to get to the starting area on Sunday, and from there slowly made my way to the runner’s expo. Walking the main concourse in the massively huge facility I passed multiple ridiculously large halls (several of them were larger than the hall at Royal Arena in Copenhagen) before crossing a walk bridge into an equally large building where the expo was held.

When I arrived there were multiple long queues to get in and they didn’t move at all. It took me a moment to realize that today, on the first day of the expo, they didn’t open until 1100 and I arrived maybe 10 minutes before that. When they did open the queues started moving at a decent pace which effectively funneled people through security before being directed to the booth that had your bib. After having received my bib I also picked up my kit for the 5k morning run on the day before the marathon before entering the expo hall. Here I picked up the marathon kit (which contained my t-shirt and mostly just vouchers) and had a walk around looking at the booths of various more or less running-relevant stuff. There was nothing really interesting, though I did leave with two boxes of energy bars which were pretty much tossed at me when passing by the booth.

The Bean.

Walking the waterfront.

Leaving the expo I wandered through Chinatown before circling around and ended up back in Millennium Park and seeing The Bean (I am a tourist after all). And while the official name is Cloud Gate everybody calls it The Bean, and seeing it that name makes perfect sense. Crossing through The Loop and walking the Chicago Riverwalk brought me to the waterfront where I continued a bit north before crossing through Millennium park and returning to the hotel. Perfect timing, as it had just started raining when I entered the building. A few hours later I left for dinner, something I had been looking forward to; Chicago style pizza. It’s basically a cheese pie with pizza toppings, so when you cut it the melted cheese, while still relatively firm, lightly oozes out. For dessert I had a cookie which ended up bigger than I would ever been able to imagine. It turned out it was made in a individual-size pizza pan (6 inches), filled up the pan and topped with ice cream and whipped cream. Just like the pizza it was disgustingly obscene and I loved every single bite of it. And I am pretty sure it’ll prevent me from getting a sub-4 hour time on Sunday.

Do you want some pizza with that cheese?

When leaving the hotel the following morning I went to grab breakfast nearby; 2 pancakes, sausages and eggs before heading north. My plan was to go along the waterfront but the weather made that a miserable idea. It had gotten windy from east-ish and it varied between drizzling, pouring down and the occasional break until past noon. So instead I wandered through the city streets until crossing the Chicago River where I headed towards the water to see Navy Pier. It is basically a large recreational area built on top of a very large pier, but as it was out of season and morning everything was closed, and the few other people out there looked like me; having a look around trying to ignore the disappointing weather.

Standing in the center below the Bean looking up.

I continued north and found myself up alongside the zoo which is free to enter which meant I ended up entering and had a walk around to see what they had to offer. Nothing really spectacular, but I assume if you have a zoo which rely entirely on donations it does limit you one way or another.

Returning south towards downtown I took a couple of hours rest in the hotel before returning outside to grab dinner. It was surprisingly hard to find an Italian place with room for one (third time was the charm and I still ended up sitting outside) so when returning to the hotel in the evening I found a place online and secured myself a table for Saturday night. Or tried – it took half an hour just to find a place that had room for one and was willing to book only one! The dinner was pretty great, but I am baffled by the size of the desserts. The piece of cheesecake was enormous – and dense – and I am sure the calorie contents dwarfed that of the creamy pasta with bacon I had as a main.

5th of October – Arriving in Chicago

In spite of it being an almost 9-hour flight getting to Chicago was (almost) without issues along the way. Obviously, as we are in Denmark, there were problems with the train signals towards Copenhagen so only one train departed my station every hour which didn’t leave any margin for error going to the airport. Also, the flight didn’t have internet. What is this? The stone age?

Arriving in Chicago it was fairly uneventful getting through immigration. The officer did point out it was suspicious that I had been in Iran in ’17 while eyeing me up and down, and I had just started worrying about if this would be the end of the trip for me, until he continued grinning pointing out the suspicious part was that I still had my head on my shoulders. Hah-hah. Humor of airport security. 

Arriving in Chicago.

It took a bit to find the train to the city – it required a trip across terminals with the airport train before I could get settled into a seat on the train that took me on a 40-minute ride to the city center. From there it was a 5-minute walk from there to get to the hotel. 

The hotel has some weird quirks. There are rooms on floors 3 to 22, except for on floor 9 where the reception and restaurant is located. There are three elevators, and it seems like two of them stop at every three floors. It doesn’t open its doors – it just slows down and stops for maybe 4-6 seconds before it continues for another 3 floors until the next stop. Staying on the 18th floor and wanting to leave it was infuriating that the elevator stopped 5 times before reaching the ground level. The doors never opened until I had to exit. Leaving on the third elevator was mind-blowing – leaving the room and being able to leave the building only a few seconds later? Wild!

Despite having a room on the 18th floor I didn’t have much of a view; there was a taller building across the street blocking the view. Lots of large windows and it looks like most of the interior is apartments. And not all apartments have curtains so you have a fairly unobscured view into other people’s home. As someone who enjoys his privacy that concept gives me the willies. As an example; right now maybe one floor below me there is a woman lying on her carpet in the middle of the living room on her phone. Butt-naked. Not a care in the world. 

One would think that as this height you’d be far away from the street noise, but I suspect that being across from an even taller building the noises are just channeled up past my window giving me the full experience of the traffic. Also doesn’t help that the window doesn’t fully close/seal; I even had an employee up to see if I was doing something wrong but nope – couldn’t fully close, adding a slight draft throughout my stay. Marvelous!

3rd – Return home

I had a ticket for the train back to London at around noon but with a relatively early check-out time at the hotel I had a bit of time to kill before heading home. There wasn’t much to do and weather wasn’t really “walk-the-town”-weather though still dry. It resulted in some slightly bored trotting around before getting on the train and getting back to London and Heathrow airport. From there a break in the lounge before flying home – the end of a generally very uneventful trip home.

Cardiff was a nice old city (town?) with a very interesting and charming castle in the center. I was honestly surprised by how much I was into the tour there and would not have minded to be on a more extended tour to get to see more of it or being told more details of the rooms. But Cardiff is also part of the UK which means that having sun on the race day was near-miraculous. The weather most of the time was just moist and grey. But in spite of all that it was a very nice visit. And I completed the 4th of my 5 Superhalf runs.

Full album can be seen here.

2nd – Cardiff race day

Being so close to the starting area I was in no rush in the morning – I set the alarm to 08:00 so I could faff about at my leisure before leaving. I woke halfway up 20-30 minutes before the alarm went off and all I registered was what sounded like torrential rain coming down outside. What a day for a run! I nodded off again, and when the alarm did go off the rain had mostly quieted down and not long after completely ended.

Half an hour before start I left the hotel and joined the flow of people going to the starting area where I quickly found the section where my wave was located (which was pretty easy as it turned out it was at the end of the street where my hotel was located). I positioned myself in the middle of the group and shortly before start the 1:45 pacer moved up towards the front – and then he left and ended up in the rear of the 1:30-1:45 group with the 1:30 pacer in the front. As it wasn’t possible to move around in the now gathered crowd of runners I decided to run without a pacer – and if the 1:45’er passed me I’d hook up onto him and have him pull me home.

Wheelchair racers where sent off at 09:50 followed by elite and sub-1:30’ers at 10:00, and as they were leaving the starting area we were moved up towards the starting line and at 10:04 we were let go.

While waiting at the starting line it was getting obvious that the risk of rain was rapidly decreasing as the cloud cover was lightening and the sun was coming out. While waiting we were in the shade but somewhere between 2 and 3 km we took a 90 degree turn putting us straight towards the sun which meant that with all the water on the ground from the morning’s rain and the rapid increase in temperature the humidity skyrocketed. Not quite the start I had been hoping for. Throughout the race I overheard multiple locals comment on the weather noting that the current situation was far from what they had expected.

Around the half-way point it became a common sight to see people hand out either Haribo or Bassett winegums or Turkish delights. That was great! It was also around that time where runners finally had been spread out enough that it wasn’t uncomfortably congested anymore. It wasn’t because there were more runners than at similar runs, the streets were just quite narrow for the entire course so while they were quite nice it was a bit impractical with this many people gathered all at once. 

We circled south from the castle past and across Cardiff Bay over the Cardiff Bay bridge, which turned out to be significantly flatter than I had expected. From there we went through the center of the city and further north before doing a (roughly) 180 turn and returned to the center and the finish line behind the castle. While there weren’t spectators everywhere, where they were they were very supportive. 

Crossing the finish line you were handed your medal, (very pink) finisher t-shirt and various drinks and fruits. I managed to find my way through the finishing area and a short walk later I had returned to my hotel. Extra bonus: the receptionist noted that I was the first runner staying at the hotel to finish. Yay? 

I crossed the finish line in 1:45:11, right above my goal, but without a pacer I was pretty happy with the result. Also considering the Chicago marathon next weekend I tried not to push myself (too) hard. I came in as 1718 out of 12.783 overall (top 13,44%), 1528 out of 7236 men (top 21,12%) and 265 out of 956 M40 (top 27,72%). So relatively speaking it was a very nice result which I am pretty happy about. You had to get to M75+ or F60 to find a group winner who was slower than me!

Returning to the hotel I had a much needed shower and relaxed the rest of the day. I left again around 17:00 and walked around for maybe an hour before I found a place for dinner – a burger place named Fat Hippo seemed right up my alley.

Returning to the hotel – again – before 20:00 I indeed felt like a fat hippo and did absolutely nothing productive the rest of the evening.

29th of September – 1st of October – Cardiff pre-run

The easiest path to Cardiff from home is flying out to Heathrow, take the train to Paddington and from there the train to Cardiff. I had planned with an hour from arriving in London to catch my connection to Paddington so it was absolutely wonderful to find out the flight was delayed for almost an hour.

The scheduled 2-hour flight ended up being 1½ hours, and rushing through the airport (why do you always arrive at the one of the furthest away gates when you are in a hurry??) a couple of dense and slowpokes in the automatic passport gates did their best to delay me, but I still made it to the platform with 5 minutes to spare. Considering the size of the airport I was pretty impressed with that.

The train to Paddington went swimmingly, and apart from maybe 10 minutes’ delay the connecting 2 hour train to Cardiff was a satisfyingly relaxing adventure. From Cardiff central it was a short 10-minute walk to the hotel where I checked in at around 2130.

An hour later after settling into one of the smallest hotel rooms I have ever been in I went for a short walk to take in the surrounding area in the dark. Turns out I’m less than 10 minutes from Cardiff Castle which is where the run will start and finish so at least that will be easy on race day.

River Taff with Principality Stadium on the left.

City Hall.

The following morning I left the hotel and went to the castle where I got myself a ticket for a tour of the castle which for an hour brought us around in the main building where we were presented to some of the rooms. The were all gorgeous and beautifully decorated – and lots of symbolism and references. The children’s room had the walls lined with painted characters from numerous fairytales. The men’s drinking/smoking room has decorated with zodiac signs relative to the seasons, the people the weekdays are named after and the cycle of the sun and the moon and “their” gods/personifications – the theme of the room being time. Another room’s theme was John the Elder (the guy that wrote the last book in the bible). Greek, Latin, English, Runes, hieroglyphs, Hebrew and other were all represented in one form or another. The 3rd Marquess of Bute (who was at the time considered the richest man in Britain if not the world) who ordered the remodeling of the castle under the architect William Burges knew 23 languages and wanted to be able to enjoy the bible as originally as possible. We also came through a roof garden, a small dining room (where you’d call on the staff by pressing a button disguised as a carved squirrel’s nut – a nut in its mouth, that is), the large social hall all castles have, a room where you went to talk after dinner which was also where the tour ended. This is called the drawing room – not because you draw in the room, but because you withdraw yourself from the dinner and in here afterwards. 

Leaving the building you passed through the library which still held a lot of old books in various languages. Coming outside it had started drizzling on and off which didn’t prevent me taking a walk on and inside the battlements (the insides had been offered up and used as bomb shelters during WW2) and the central keep. The latter was basically now an uncovered circular wall which previously had been filled with small buildings on the inside lining the wall. I finished off in the war museum which presented a historical walkthrough of Welch and British military.

About to leave I realized it was pouring down so I ended up staying for lunch. Having finished lunch and it was still pouring down I decided I couldn’t be bothered to wait for it to stop so I left and had a walk down to Mermaid Quay to have a look around. Walking around I realized that my insistence on not being holed away in a hotel room when travelling was being trumped by the weather, so mid-afternoon I returned to my room where I stayed until dinner (where it fortunately had stopped raining).

The ventilation in the hotel room is almost non-existent. There is a vent in the bathroom but it is small and can barely cope after having a shower. I managed to figure out how to turn on the radiator and used that to try and dry my clothes, though it’s making the room both hot and humid. I guess it’s still better than having to wear soaked clothes when going out.

The expo for the run was basically just for international runners as GB runners apparently had their kit sent to them instead. So I was told to pick up my kit at the expo on Saturday at 0800-1000 or 1300-1800. I never made it out the door to be there in the morning (what a surprise!) so I relaxed and had a walk in Bute Park all the way to Haily Park. At that point it had gone past noon and with no breakfast or lunch yet I thought it would be time to return and find something to eat.

A pair of racoons on the Animal Wall at the castle.

I got all the way back to the City Hall and the expo – there had been a lot of talk and writing about gathering at the expo and seeing al the sponsors and booths but the only thing that was open when I arrived was a tent where I collected my kit without an issue. The t-shirt is a finisher shirt so I won’t be getting that until I cross the finish line. The problem with that is that if you finish late (there is a 4½ hour limit) there is a risk that your size is gone if too many grabbed a size they hadn’t been registered for. Apparently it happened at the Royal Parks HM when I ran it. I got my stuff, got something to eat and being mid-afternoon at that point I retuned to the hotel to relax. I went out in the evening for dinner close by, but apart from that I spent the rest of the day being fantastically unproductive.

French silliness

With 3 half marathons and 1 marathon planned for the coming two moths one would think that I'll be getting enough running for a lifetime. But I have nothing planned for next year so I've been feeling the need to plan something for then. And with these thoughts churning I saw an ad for Paris marathon next year in April, which sounded very interesting. Also, if I'll be hit by extreme luck and have my spot at London moved this run won't interfere. In any case, London will be taking priority regardless, so I'd happily cancel other plans if I got to do London sooner than originally planned.

So seeing no downsides (apart from the running part) I ended up booking a spot at the Paris marathon. 

30th of March - 1st of April
Flying out to Paris in the early morning which means I will have most of the day in the city. I expect to go to the Expo already on the Thursday to get it over and done with, and as they don't open until in the afternoon on the first day I'll have plenty of time to get there before I'll even be able to get in. Also, on the Saturday (the 1st) I've signed up for the breakfast run which goes from near the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower where breakfast will be served. Other than that I'll spend time checking out the sights and generally just being a classic tourist.

2nd of April
Race day - start and finish will be on opposite sides of the Arc de Triomphe, both near a metro station that will take me directly to and from my hotel at Montmartre. The course will go east and circle around in the Vincennes Woods and return almost parallel (but separate) from the start of the course, before reaching Notre Dame where we'll be following the Seine until circling around the Auteuil racetrack and head back north to the Arc and finish. Apparently this run is second to only New York marathon when it comes to number of participants.

3rd of April
Got a flight home in the early afternoon, so if I can get a late-ish checkout at the hotel it means I can spend the morning relaxing doing nothing before having to go to the airport, resting my legs which they'd probably appreciate.

Historical weather data seems to imply that the weather can be very variable in the beginning of April in Paris. As in one day it can be around freezing and the next day it could be 10°C-15°C. So with two running days I might have to bring all kinds of clothes with me, just in case. It'll be interesting.