Stories, Articles and Race Reports
Chicago Marathon - 9th October 2011, USA
Chicago Marathon: Planes, Trains and Automobiles
By Eddie Hahn (USA member)
The Chicago saga…
The Chicago Marathon was a fiasco. The saving grace is that my second youngest brother, Tracy, 33 finished his first marathon there. (Tracy is an identical twin, and his brother Tim, who lives and works a 6 hours drive away in Marysville, OH, came to watch the event.)
At (45) I finished my lifetime 143 rd marathon. A former Army friend, Mariano Torrespico, offered to billet us at his apartment. Mariano has an apartment in nearby Skokie IL. (He and I were in 9 th Engineer Battalion Mechanized in Aschaffenburg, Germany from 1987 through 1990, and we recently reconnected on Facebook.)
Upon getting our car rental and linking up at Mariano's place, I inferred he was a little deceptive about his living conditions. On his web page- he displayed himself in front of a wrought iron fence in a suit. He works as a freelance journalist, web logger, ghost writer and court interpreter. Many of his jobs have encompassed editing medical documents for Drs.
Knowing he was a bachelor (divorcee) with no children, I “assumed” he had a nice pent house apartment-though he never elaborated. He “implied” he had a car, basically by never stating that he didn't.
He didn't have a car. Mariano lived in a low end apartment less than 2 blocks from railroad tracks. Though he claimed the trains didn't run after 10 PM at night, Trac says he heard them at least every half an hour all night. Tracy insisted on sleeping on the floor…one of Mariano's couches was only 4 feet long, the other barely 5' 10” and Trac is 6'. I am about 5' 8 ½. Trac used the couch cushions and I slept on the cushion-less couch, not the conditions I hoped for.
The toilet had plumbing issues and Mariano chased a few roaches off the area near his stove.
I considered staying at Mariano's in Skokie instead of, say, a race host hotel because my Uncle Bob, a 50 state finisher (who also ran in Chicago for his Illinois Marathon), warned me hotels in Chicago were "very expensive."
I interpreted this as inordinately costly because my uncle is a business professional and much closer to upper-middle income than I am: he operates on a much bigger budget than I do.
In retrospect, it would have been better off paying the larger price for a host hotel next to the Chicago Marathon start line (like the Holiday Inn, where our brother Tim and his family stayed.)
Despite the fact that I had a GPS, I permitted Mariano to drive our rental car: he reinforced the fact that he knew Chicago and its drivers better. He drove us to the exposition to pick up #s etc. Tracy and Tim and his family later went to the former Sears, now Willits tower observation deck and Mariano and I went to nearby pasta dinner.
We drove around late trying to get last minute stuff for Tracy's first marathon (Ie body glide which we could not find in the expo.), and looking for bagels and bananas. All the while, Mariano drove the rental like a complete madman. I was scared to death he would wreck, however we made it back without an accident. Trac (supposedly) set his alarm for 430am and we finally got to sleep well after 10pm.
I woke up to see quite a bit of light peeking through the shade and immediately knew it wasn't 430 am in Chicago. It turned out to be 6:40 am.
The original plan was to have Mariano drive us to the start…at the point of realizing the hour, I knew we had to leave immediately. I had to make a snap judgment about Mariano. I hadn't seen the guy in over 20 years in person, and he had already (in my view) deceived me about the apartment/his transport situation… I didn't trust him to drive…I really didn't even want to leave anything there.
We told him we would just handle it ourselves and took off to the start. The GPS brought us over way too many surface streets…but we finally got somewhere near the start around 7:20-7:25. The official regular start was 7:30 am, wheel chairs 7:25—and as one would imagine with 45,000 (registered) runners,…why we planned to be there 2 hours earlier.
(about 35,000 finished.)
We saw a barricade only partially blocking access to a parking garage not too far off the freeway exit on the surface street we took… the garage had an empty space. We drove around the barricade and parked. I put the parking ticket in the window.
(It's worth noting I am accustomed to paying first in most places in California, a practice that could have paid off big time here, especially since I would have paid with my debit card….)
We took off at a hard run toward where we believed the start might be.
Eventually we saw marathoners heading towards us, and we started to run part of the course in reverse. We noticed a place where we could “cut off” one of the corners, so we could find the most direct route to the actual start.
We estimated that we ran three miles by the time we got to the start, little did we know this was just the beginning of a nightmare-Tracy's first marathon, an Ultra.
(For some perspective I recommend the travel Movie “-Planes Trains and Automobiles,” a case of life imitating art. (In our case the reverse: trying to “leave” not “get to,” Chicago.)
We verified with course officials where to enter the start and pass the correct timing chip mats so we would be scored. It was a good thing we clarified: we needed to pass two mats about 20 meters apart
There were still several thousand runners who hadn't crossed the start line.
Trac and I ran together for 2 miles then he went on ahead. (He finished officially in 4 hours 41 minutes. I would take 6: hours 2 min. I took over 100 pictures on course.)
When I finished, we used Tim's car (Trac drove) in endeavor to locate the garage where we parked. Tim's family which, in addition to my sister in law Shannon, includes Tess (13) Alessia (2 ½) and Kelvin (1) all waited in the hotel lobby, and passed time in Chicago streets. Their car seats the number of people that came on the trip.
The three of us brothers spent longer or as long looking for the car as Tracy did running the marathon. We never did locate it that day.
We tried to activate Trac's family finder feature on his phone (located in the car), but since he had denied the option originally, the feature couldn't be employed without “physically accepting it” on the phone.
Ace rent a car said there was no factory GPS technology in the (Toyota Carolla)-and even if my GPS could have somehow been used, it was turned off and in the glove compartment.
We used a parking garage locate feature on Tim's Ipod and drove for hours while calling dozens of hotel-garages the only description to go on was the color and style of the parking sign (which turned out to be common)..(We alos knew the cars position on the first floor "third parking space on the right and that it could be observed frm the entrance.
Neither Trac nor I noted the cross streets…and I though I (thought) I had recognized the garage near the 13 th mile of the marathon while I was running (the way the course is configured-that is actually near the start)… I asked a course official if I could go look in the parking garage, and she said “no if I left the course at all, for any reason, even if I re-entered in the same place, I would be disqualified.”
(We looked for that cross street later, and it would not ave mettered: that wasn't the car the garage was housed in.) Tracy eventually got stopped for running a “solid yellow” light while performing an illegal u-turn. (We had been up and down so many streets he was reaching burn out.)
We explained our overall dilemma to the police, and they let him go with a verbal warning-ordering Tim, the only person with a physical license on his person, to drive. They told us they couldn't help locate it (that's not life and limb and there are “1000s of garages”). We would just have to call every garage until we found it.
We learned that afternoon that Trac's flight had been bumped up and he could still make it.
Meanwhile, back in Philomath OR, Tracy's wife, Angela, contacted authorities and learned that with extensive special screening Tracy would be allowed to board without ID (I never thought this could be done in a post 9-11 environment.) (I later learned Tracy's screening was Akin to the Spanish inquisition and he was the very last passenger permitted to board.)
By 9:05PM we called the search off and Tim drove Trac to the airport, leaving me in my marathon attire in the lobby of the hotel, Holiday Inn. (By now I was shivering, the sun was down, the air conditioning in the hotel on full blast...I I had the car keys, my cell phone, digital camera, and $25 cash in my hip bag. (My wallet effects in the car…)
I took a series of trains and buses back to Mariano's apartment arriving sometime after 10PM.
(To top it off, Mariano's apartment was about 8 blocks from the bus drop off.)
I had just enough time to take a college quiz on the computer (which I had planned to take earlier in the day.) It was due by midnight PST.
The next Morning Mariano proofread a letter that I drafted to Ace rental to help me locate the car. It took 2 hours using buses and trains to get to Ace near O'Hare. I was at Mariano's mercy—and very limited funds. I had brought a change-semi formal-slacks and collared shirt-and Mariano wore a suit accompanying me to Ace.
We gave them the letter, I took their business card, and we went back to Mariano's apartment. (The only decent memory-Mariano took me to a train lay over business where the Albanian owner and his wife cooked fantastic Chicago brats-with grilled peppers and onions…)
When we got back to his apartment, again, I started calling Spirit airlines...talking to telemarketers in Mumbai India (I took an Urbanization class this summer, which confirmed what I already knew. I don't say it to be mean-the professor that showed us the video was Indian.)
I was originally scheduled to leave on Monday anyway...
Interestingly, my flight also got moved up…but it wouldn't be late enough.
I got word sometime around 6-615 Monday that the car was found but the plane left at 730- not enough time to get my (and now Trac's) stuff and make the flight. I learned all flights to LA were booked in the coming 36 hours, and even if I took one I would pay $125 flight change plus any “difference in fare” compared to what I booked it at.
I finally determined that I could take a flight to Las Vegas, and wouldn't have to pay the supplemental charge(s) and there was a space that night. I took a cab to the rental car-the flat rate shuttle driver had no idea that I had to rapid fire-organize two peoples effects and get my wallet out of the rental before I could settle with him.
I grabbed all our stuff and got an ace shuttle to the airport, where I waited. I had been in communiqué with my mother in Rancho Cucamonga, and she agreed to help out and was waiting when I got to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas.
Unfortunately Trac only had (1) key for his truck back in Portland Oregon—where he had flown from. His wife drove another vehicle from their home in Philomath, about 100 miles South to pick him up, . (He also accrued parking charges that week. )
Mom and I got a hotel room in Primm Nevada..it was around 2 am after a late (not very good buffet) when we got to sleep… That afternoon I shipped Trac's stuff-UPS 2 day—wallet, keys binders and mechanical engineer books…(we are both students..and he and Angela have an 8 month old, Ashton who was awaiting him
Of course I was happy to finally be back to my wife Yuri and Francis (3 mo.), Julian (4) and Samantha, 7, here in Crestline-just a 40 mile further drive from Rancho Cucamonga.
Eddie finished in 33071 st place out of 35755, in 6:24:54
Photos
It's not all bad new Eddie