It has stopped raining, for the moment. Renate and I stand with what appears to be several thousand people, some in matching tee shirts, others with headphones clamped firmly to their ears. The ambitious ones twitch anxiously about two hundred feet ahead of us, a hand on their sports watch as they wait for the gun. We’ve checked our bag, stretched our legs and laced a digital pace-tracking chip into our shoelaces as thunderclouds pile up over Lake Michigan.
The “oh crap, this race is in ___ weeks” training regimen kicked in about a month ago. Two months earlier, we’d talked ourselves into entering Chicago’s 5K Race to Taste, which would be my first road race in three years, and Renate’s first ever. Our modest goal was to complete the run without stopping.
“Want to step it up a notch?” Renate asks after the first mile marker. This question comes from the woman who, just a few days prior, half-mockingly threatened to leave the course if we ran by a Starbucks with an empty, overstuffed chair in the front window.
“Maybe the thought of a frappuccino will propel you past the finishing line,” her sister teased via email last week. “I’m all about incentives. Maybe a manicure??”
We’re running for food; each race participant gets a full sheet of tickets to the Taste of Chicago. Secretly, I’m also running to see if Renate likes it, if perhaps running road races will become something we do together. Though pleased with her progress over the past month, she claims not to enjoy running. I’m not really sure why she’s running this race, but she is, and she’s doing well. By mile two, as the sky opens up, she’s silently pointing to openings in the crowd, and we steadily move ahead in the drumming rain.
“How’s it being married?” a good friend of mine asked on Friday. As is the case with many (too many) of our friends, we haven’t seen him since we got married and moved from Boston to Chicago last fall.
It should be an easy question to answer, but I usually wind up sputtering out lots of sentences instead of just saying, “it’s good.” I feel the need to explain why it’s good, how the marriage and move have become intertwined into one big, unpredictable thing, and that the upheaval of so much has left me less surprised — but surprised nonetheless — at unexpected proposals such as “let’s run a 5K.”
“I liked it,” Renate says matter-of-factly minutes after we cross the finish line. “We should do another one.” I agree, and we head home to clean up before returning to spend our hard-earned meal tickets on gyros and fried dough.