They were dropping like flies.

That is what my aunt said about the marathon runners breathless on the phone as I was driving home from the marathon.

It was an expression I had been hearing all day. Sunday’s Chicago marathon was hot, sure, but there were other problems and triumphs in the streets of Chicago.

First off, ten thousand people did not show who were going to run. In the end, ten thousand more did not get to finish, instead they were carted off in cooled CTA buses to the finish line from the halfway mark.

Because of the heat and a lack of water and paramedics, the race was technically cancelled after three hours. This means the times were not official and many people were not able to run the whole marathon.

I was not among those cut off in the middle of the big day, I was able to finish.

Since early June, I had been training for this marathon, and each day I felt a little sillier; the silliest being the marathon day.

It began with just my friends and family thinking it was reckless to be training in the desert of California. Then I told them how much I was eating because of all the training, and we were all astonished at the sheer poundage, I had never eaten that much in my life. It seemed like a waste, I did not need to train that much to be healthy.

Later, I would leave my friends an entire weekend morning and afternoon, peaking out the night before to sleep at 9 p.m. I would run for twenty miles, not to be more healthy but to train for a marathon I signed myself up for months ago.

I feel better for doing it, or more so, I feel relieved for having fulfilled my goal to finish the marathon. Also, the people from whom I received donations for the Ted Fund charity organization might have felt strange had I not trained enough to finish the race.

The weather report had stated since a week before the race that the temperature would be ninety degrees race day. I lowered my standards from getting a good time to simply finishing.

Until I finished the race, I had no real idea what kind of monster I had gotten myself in. Friends and family, experienced runners and non-runners, speculated what it would be like for me during the marathon.

Being completed now, I can say a few things: The lines for water were annoyingly long if they had water at all. To save time, I would take a chance with the later tables.

I never would have run 26.2 miles on a day like Sunday.

Watching all the people cheering the runners on is a good alternative to the listening to the marathon-banned Ipods.

Any ‘powerbar-in-liquid-form’ will taste and feel disgusting.

I have never eaten so well during a race, with pretzels, granola bars, powerade, organic bananas, Gatorade Gu, and Jolly Ranchers handed out from everywhere.

The South Side of Chicago knows how to treat the runners, opening up their fire hydrants and giving snow cones to the tired, mile-20 runners.

If cops tell marathon runners to stop running, their body and brain are trained to continue running, even if it is only at a defiant two miles an hour.

It is surreal to run through the same Chicago that takes cars hours to travel city blocks. The run probably took as much time as it would to drive the same course on an average day.

Runners are desperate for water, every public fountain was packed, every park or hotel pond had runners dunking their upper bodies in it, and if they are told water is running out, they will drink like a camel to the point of over saturation. All told, there were many painful and amusing moments involved.

When the race was official cancelled and turned into a ‘fun run’ after three hours, my marathon pace runner, Dan, running a five hour completion pace, decided to keep running. Police officers badgered him, saying he was supposed to be on their side, but he kept running, and I kept following.

We ran a defiant four miles while other runners and police officers told us to stop, rolling their cars through the closed streets so there was less room for the rebel runners to nimbly step around the non-runners.

I walked a couple of the miles as more people were walking, blocking the way forward, until the street opened up in the final northern stretch of Michigan.

Because of the havoc, in fact the New York Times article about the run was titled “Death and havoc mar Chicago Race,” the run felt more like a protest turned bloody. The contrast was that there was almost solely white, middle class people running, and they were each wearing hundreds of dollars worth of synthetic athletic equipment.

The race was dramatic, and for some unlucky runners, tragic, but it was not life-changing. It was a good goal, but it was pretty aggravating. It was quite a feat, but anything that takes less than four months to train for has to be put in its correct place.

Finally, in the last two hundred yards, it was seeing my girlfriend and my best friend (I know my family was somewhere there too) cheering me on that gave me the only real boost I got from race. I was happy to see them after all that mess.