a spectator at the Chicago Marathon

My Timex alarm watch cried out at 5 A.M. on Sunday morning, October 9, 2005. Time to get dressed and load up with coffee. This was to be a very long day.

I choked down a bowl of oatmeal as Debbie went about her business, eating, drinking, and making multiple visits to the bathroom. Marathons give you a real opportunity to turn yourself inside out. Nifty.

We left the house in darkness at 6:00 A.M. The drive on the Edens to the marathon is always the same. Debbie looks at people in the cars around us and announces "game face" or "no game face." Game face is the look a marathoner has two hours prior to the race. It is somewhere between serious and scared. I think it looks likes someone falling and knowing what they are going to hit.

We quickly found parking at a lot that gave us a piece of yellow cardboard in exchange for twenty bucks. Great deal.

After parking, we connected with Debbie's training partners at the Hilton and Towers. Walking through the door of the Hilton, we were greeted by the minty fresh smell of Ben Gay.

It's funny, when you are running the race, the sights and smells hit you in a completely different way. Somehow the fetid smell of porta potty, while fowl, is nevertheless comforting. As a spectator, it takes your breath away.

With just under an hour until start time, it was starting to get light outside. We worked our way up Balbo in search of Charity Village (a collection of tents for the various runners who have raised money for charity) -- Debbie's charity was Y-Me). We entered the Y-Me tent to a steamy blast of portable heater heat. The tent was Game Face central. After a few swigs of water and some light stretching (the runners, not me) we began to make our way to the start.

The walk to the start was an upstream swim through a mass of people of all shapes and sizes. After the 50th time, I lost the energy to say "excuse me" as I pushed past more and more runners, fans and assorted leashed dogs. The most exciting part (and this was to be repeated throughout the day) was working past strollers. Would it be asking too much for these folks to spring for a sitter just this once? Think of a slow moving drain partially clogged by hair and then to complicate things, someone places a frisbee over the drain -- not so much flowing.

Like many other runners, Debbie was wrapped in a giant plastic bag (think Hefty). She was a teeth chattering advertisement for Lifeway (makers of a probiotic drink of some sort, try www.lifeway.net . Is anyone anti- , oh, nevermind). To get to the starting line, Debbie had to climb a fence. I had never seen that before and have to say she was quite graceful on the landing. Boy, that could have ended the day before it started. Fifteen minutes to start.

To be continued. . .