Chicago Marathon etc.

Running in the Heat (Courtesy Marathonguide.com)
The biggest marathon weekend of all time.... The final day to qualify for the USA Men's Olympic Trials.... The weekend should have been a different story than it turned out to be, but the main story of the weekend was the weather. With a heatwave blanketing much of the USA, runners at the Chicago Marathon had to endure temperatures in the high 80s while runners at the other weekend races endured versions of the same (with the exception of the St. George Marathon where conditions were ideal). Different races chose different approaches: at the Twin Cities Marathon it was business as usual, but hot. The Lakefront Marathon chose to lengthen the course limit, to allow runners to take it easy and still finish. The Chicago Marathon chose to announce an early end to the marathon and reroute finishers who did not reach the halfway point in under three hours (gun time). For safety reasons, the approach of Chicago was probably necessary, but from the point of view of runners who were yanked off the course, the approach of the race was the equivalent of murder. The reviews we've been receiving at MarathonGuide.com have been uniformly angry with runners citing the "wasted cost of travel," "inability to take advantage of training for a marathon to actually finish a marathon, a now-broken string of Chicago Marathon finishes and other travails. CNN called it a "fiasco." The New York Times called it "havoc." We call it a lose-lose situation for the Chicago Race Director and City Officials