by I rode on my trainer while I watched the documentary “Spirit of the Marathon” this afternoon. The movie was wonderful; I really enjoyed it. I’ve run Chicago twice and it’s one of my favorites–it’s such a wonderful, wonderful city and the race is first rate all the way.
If you have to do one of the big US marathons, hands down I would recommend Chicago. Marine Corp Marathon was too hard to run due to all the less-than-serious runners (I spent far too long dodging people who were taking walk breaks 10 across), and NYC (while a fabulous course and one of my favorite cities in the world) has that horrible pre-race wait for hours. I haven’t run Boston (yet; I’m counting on my 60s to be the magic decade for qualifying, lol)and I can’t think what else would qualify as big city/big marathon.
Anyway, I loved revisiting the race and I thought they did a fabulous job of picking a variety of runners. I found myself talking to them as the movie went along. And the really fun thing was pedaling as fast as I could while they drove down the course; that was fun! Perhaps I need to invest in some kind of training video, because I sure find the trainer to be painfully, torturously boring. But it is better than nothing.
Between the bike ride and doing my stretches today, my hip/back feels a lot better. I’m sad to not be running this weekend but I’ll do whatever the doctor says in order to be completely well. I’m not one of those to get back to it early–better safe than sorry, and I never want to be sidelined with this again. I’ll be walking before the boy’s soccer game and riding my bike again tomorrow.
