i woke up this morning at 5am for the chicago half marathon to the tap tap tap of rain. checked the radar map to see if the rain would end before the race got started at 7:30. every time i zoomed the map out further, the storm cloud (that’s the leftovers of hurricane ike you’re looking at in green and yellow) got bigger. maybe only because it was 5am, it was funny enough to me to take a screen cap.

the rain did not, in fact, stop, and we ran the entire half marathon in the pouring rain. more than 7 inches of rain fell on chicago over the weekend.

i finished with a time of 1:53’47”, which is not my fastest time yet, but given the conditions it was my best time compared to other runners.* too bad, then, that i mostly only race against the clock. that is the good and bad thing about an inclusive sport like running. there will always be someone faster than you and someone slower than you, but the clock isn’t subjective. it doesn’t account for rain, or blistered toes, or a bad night’s sleep.

this week is peak marathon mileage**, then we start the taper down to marathon day, october 12. think good thoughts for marathon day weather, friends. these races in the rain or other non-ideal conditions are good practice, good for strengthening the moral fiber and all that, but when you’ve been working, daily, toward a goal for nine months, you just want it to go well. this year some of my marathon energy has been diverted to helping two women (who have, over the past 6 months, become my very dear friends) train for their first marathon. which means that i not only want a good day for myself, but for M and H especially. the law of averages means that if you run enough marathons, there will be some good ones and some bad ones. but when it’s your first, well, it’s hard when it doesn’t go as expected. trust me.

that’s another one of those cliche-because-it’s-true life lessons about running distance events like a marathon. you can spend weeks and months preparing for it, but it all comes down to one single day and there are a million factors that are out of your control. you can train and train, and on the day of the event, wake up sick, or roll an ankle, or there could be a freak heat wave in chicago october, or any of a million other things. running is about taking what the day gives you, and adapting. adapting yourself, but also adapting your expectations. you can’t work this hard and plan for failure. likewise, you can’t possibly prepare for all of the things that could go wrong. so instead, you have to make the body, and the spirit, flexible.

*120th of 1215 in my division (women 30-34), put me narrowly in the top 10%
**which is only 37 miles, practically nothing in the world of distance running, but still plenty for me.