Step 1: For the first 20 miles, put your right foot in front of your left.

Step 2: Put your left foot in front of your right.

Step 3: Repeat 105,600 times.

Step 4: Have Chicago police tell you it’s no longer permissible to run and that you have to walk the remaining six miles - but that it’s okay, the clocks are off and your time won’t count.

Step 5: Find out your time does count and get really, really angry.

It was a brutally hot day, one runner died and nearly 11,000 of the 35,000 runners didn’t finish. Many runners are faulting the city or the race organizers - there wasn’t enough water, there weren’t enough aid stations, et cetera - but the real problem was lack of communication.

As we came around the bend approaching mile 19, someone on a loudspeaker was announcing that ‘the race is now over.’ That wasn’t funny. We’re dying in this heat, we’re trying to finish and you’re making horrible jokes.

Turns out it wasn’t a joke. Soon after, we were stopped by a race official standing in the middle of the course telling us we needed to walk to the next aid station and that we were not allowed to run. For the rest of the race, the clocks were turned off - lending credence to the idea that we weren’t getting official times - and police stationed around the course actively stopped participants from running, citing heat concerns.

The fire-department helicopter even did a low pass over us, blaring that we needed to stop running over its megaphone.

So we finish, feeling deathly hot but accomplished, only to find out that my 4 hour, 20 minute pace at the halfway point had turned into a 5 hour, 18 minute finish. Thanks, Chicago Marathon, for making me looking like someone who couldn’t manage his own body and pace.

The real problem with the marathon was lack of communication. Was the race cancelled? Could we still finish? What about times? Would they count? Who was in charge? No one, not even the aid-station workers who were in constant contact with the central authorities, seemed to know the answers. As I said, police were stopping us from running; the race authorities, however, took a softer stance, saying that we could finish if we wanted, but we needed to be careful.

And there doesn’t seem to be any information about this police stoppage. In fact, the only major media outlet I’ve seen with any mention of the situation was the Detroit Free Press, which noted

Organizers said they initially hoped to let those who had made it halfway complete the 26.2-mile race. But as the event continued, even those who had passed the halfway mark were told to turn back.

Some kept going, and helicopters hovered over the course while police officers shouted through a bullhorn and warned runners to slow down and walk.

But there are many people to be thanked and noted:

• The volunteers who stayed out for six hours on a record-breakingly hot day, who poured water and gatorade for us, who dug into their own pockets to purchase bags of ice, who cheered us on throughout the entire race. It’s an amazing feeling to have someone you don’t know tell you how great it is to be out there, watching.
• The two spectators who helped me, personally. When my legs cramped to the point where I needed to stop and stretch and I ended up with a Charlie horse, one guy grabbed my foot as I massaged the muscle back into place. As he helped me up and I began running again, someone else yelled out, ‘You’re a champion!’ I just wanted to finish, but thanks to them.
• My friend Tim, who raised more than $1,300 for the Children’s Miracle Network as a charity runner but was almost unable to finish. He trained hard for the race, he gave it his all, but he needed a little help to cross the final mile marker. Congrats to him.
• And, of course, my father, who drove up specifically to support me, and my friends Frank and Micky, who endured the heat just to cheer me on. As I came up to where they were standing near the end of the race, all I could think was that I needed them to be waiting for me … and they were.

While the entire thing may have been plagued with complications, it was quite the experience. Maybe next year will be normal weather, one where people don’t die while running. Until then, I’ll be running and getting ready.

One of the greatest things about the coming of autumn - in addition to the fact that I get to stop hating the heat/humidity combo - is the glorious day when I get on the train in the morning, open the paper and discover, via an advertisement or a mention in a column or something, that Starbucks has its pumpkin coffee back in season.

I’m not much for spending a lot of money on my coffee; while I enjoy buying a good cup, it’s not something I do all the time. But the flavor of pumpkin is somehow the entire season, distilled: It’s playing soccer when you were a kid, it’s a crisp evening with a sweater; it’s going to football games on Friday night. So, naturally, I had to get a Pumpkin Spice Latte.

My first thought: Damn, that’s expensive. More than $4. The second: What’s in a latte, anyway? I bet it’s going to have whipped cream on top. I don’t want whipped cream on top. My third thought: Oh, they have pumpkin scones too.

‘Pumpkin Spice Latte and a pumpkin scone,’ I said.

‘You really like pumpkin, don’t you?’ she asked. Knew that one was coming.

In any case, it was great, I felt at one with the cool morning air, all that. Then my boss sent me the link an article on ‘the eight most fattening foods in fall,’ and instructed me to look at number three on the list. It was my latte.

I went to Starbucks’ nutritional information and discovered that I had just consumed nearly 1,000 calories. At least the marathon is this weekend. Looks like I’m going to need it.

Note: All events are taken from an exact transcript of today’s happenings. Paraphrases and one speculative statement were used, but no embellishments were made.

Step one: You wake up to the sound of gentle rain, softly lulling you back to sleep.

Step two: You arrive at the office and recieve a call from the PR director of the Golden Knights, the Army’s elite parachute squad. ‘Thanks for publishing the picture of one of our boys in the last issue of the magazine,’ he says. ‘Would you like to do a demo jump with us sometime before this weekend’s Air and Water Show?’ You reply in the affirmative and he says he’ll call later in the day to confirm.

Step three: You make hotel arrangements in Tokyo for an next week’s school trip, completing your Beijing-Shanghai-Tokyo triumvirate of travel.

Step four: Your boss takes you to an upscale uplunch then gives you an autographed copy of ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’ that reads ‘To Brother Nick Ziegler, in honor of my dad, Fr. Bob, [screenplay writer] Peter Hedges.’ You’ve never even seen the movie.

Step five: You recieve an e-mail from your former roommate offering Cubs-Reds tickets for tomorrow evening just behind home plate. Naturally, you accept.

Step four: You receive confirmation that you’ll be jumping with the Golden Knights tomorrow at 8 a.m. and that you’re ‘allowed to do anything you want, because the colonel said you’re the guy in charge,’ according to the staff sergeant doing the booking. This completes a childhood dream that began when you were four, attending the Dayton Air Show, when you dreamt of being either a Golden Knight paratrooper or a Air Force Thunderbird pilot.

Step six: You leave work to throw in the Windy City Darters finals, where you (speculatively, as of 4:56 p.m.) win the city championship.

And that, my friends, is how to have a Good Day. Updates in the morning.

Places have different meanings for different people. I’m not that big a fan of, say, St. Louis, as bad things happen every time I’m there.

Yesterday morning, however, I found myself in Denver, a city where only the most insane of things happen to me. On my first visit, I drank seven Long Island Iced Teas and ended up at a club where I was frisked by a masked man, because it was the venue’s policy to search all entrants for weapons. The second time I was here – for a business trip this time – I was told explicitly by my boss that I was allowed to have a good time, but that I needed to be ready by 9 a.m. the following morning, as it was my turn to drive.

So I stayed up until 5:15 and, when roused by my supervisor because it was, you know, my turn to drive, I believe I looked directly at him and said ‘What’s your problem, man?’

That didn’t go over so well.

In any case, I was expecting nothing less than the second coming of Christ while I was in Denver this time. While the Rapture didn’t happen, exactly, in the first two days I’ve been here I’ve experienced the following:

- a shooting at the state capitol, which is three-quarters of a mile from my hotel

- one of the people I’m staying with storming off at dinner on the first night and refusing to talk to us for the next hour, causing quite a scene in the restaurant;

- a tour of the Flying Dog brewery, which features label artwork by Ralph Steadman, the artist for Hunter S. Thompson. Nothing noteworthily insane happened here, but it was twelve kinds of hip.

- and the near-coup de grace, when a bicyclist weaving in and out of Denver traffic during rush hour was absolutely annihilated by a car. We’re talking flying, arms and legs akimbo, in the air and rolling up on the hood destroyed. The guy got up and walked away, somehow, but the woman driving our car was in no state to continue driving.

So I found myself in the non-enviable position of having the guy in the back seat run out and check on this accident victim, leaving me with a hysterical woman behind the wheel of my own car while I tried to frantically re-route us to find where this bicyclist (and the guy in our car, who chased this miraculously walking man to try and convince him to go to the hospital) during rush hour in a major city, all while trying to process what had just happened.

Don’t worry: It turns out the guy was okay and refused our entreaties to take him to the hospital. The rest of the night, thankfully, was low-key in comparison.

Day Three brings the end of the urban portion of this vacation, as we head to the summit of Pikes Peak (and hopefully get away from insanity). We’ll see, however, as with this luck there’s going to be a landslide or a mutant robot monkey attack.

After a long week of finishing exams and finishing a magazine, it was a relief to be able to turn to the idyllic retreat of western Illinois. We set aside three days in Galena to recharge, plan for the next year and sleep until 10:30.

All went as planned – and I even found a restaurant that served caipirinhas in small-town Illinois, so that was gravy – until we left. The roads out of town were all under construction, so as we sat in traffic we watched the skies on the horizon darken and become more and more ominous.

Not two hours after we left, a supercell tornado touched down. Normally this would be a bad thing, but I’ve never witnessed one in person – so I chalked it up as a loss. In the meantime, I was kicking it in Dubuque, Iowa, preparing for a wedding.

The world just isn’t fair sometimes. At least there are, y’kno, strip malls here.

It’s 3:14 on 3/14, and what better way to celebrate being a geek than, well, by being a geek? Soon, I’ll be leaving to run 3.14 miles, to drink for 3.14 hours and to make 3.14 phone calls (I have yet to figure out how this one is going to work). So cup your hands together to make the shape whose ratio of its circumfrence to its diameter and put on your favorite pi t-shirt, available here at Think Geek:

And, without further delay, the first 1,000 decimal places of pi:

3.

1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510
5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679
8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128
4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196
4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091
4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273
7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436
7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094
3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548
0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912
9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798
6094370277 0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132
0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872
1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 6892589235
4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960
5187072113 4999999837 2978049951 0597317328 1609631859
5024459455 3469083026 4252230825 3344685035 2619311881
7101000313 7838752886 5875332083 8142061717 7669147303
5982534904 2875546873 1159562863 8823537875 9375195778
1857780532 1712268066 1300192787 6611195909 2164201989

Yes, I’m a complete loser. Thank you for noticing.

Once upon a time, mid-summer 2006, say, there was a college fraternity that held its 150th anniversary in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. During the festivities, a Congressional proclamation was read “recognizing and honoring the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.”

It was great and nice and fun to have the Senate of the United States officially recognize the organization I get paid to publicize – and it took care of the ‘you need some sort of political acknowledgment for this ceremony’ part of the equation – but the concurrent resolution (109th Congress, second session, S. Con. Res. 81, for those of you who care), was about as bland as it gets.

Read it here. ‘Whereas, for 150 years, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity has blah blah,’ and so on.

In any case, I had forgotten all about the resolution; its impact on my life had been negligible. Then there was all this discussion about a troop surge in Iraq and how Congress wasted weeks debating a non-binding, concurrent resolution decrying the idea. A friend sent me a link to this op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle that quite nicely ties those two elements together.

So … we have a new Democratic-led Congress that wastes time saying things that hold no weight, that are said in the same tone as ‘good job, college fraternity’ and ‘we should have a National Horticultural Therapy Week.’

I’m just saying. Not that I’m saying.

This really happened, I swear. It even says ‘The Associated Press contributed to this story’ at the bottom. Seriously.

Bret Stieghorst was watching an adult movie … His downstairs neighbor … heard a woman screaming … ran up the stairs and broke down the door, all while brandishing a three-foot long military-style sword.

Read it all here. Only in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Of course.

This was forwarded to me yesterday, and I found it funny and poignant for little Billy, given my previous posts here and here on the topic of astronaut interviews and subsequent buffoonery.

With much respect to Mr. Fish.

A few weeks ago, the Chicago Transit Authority - the agency responsible for the el and the bus system - announced major delays in its service that would be taking place for the next two years. I can see the utility in upgrading a system that’s been in existence since 1947 and, according to a documentary I briefly watched last week (’Connections,’ and no, don’t ask any more questions), still using track switches that are more than 30 years old. But while the system is talking about making an upgrade starting this April, it began pushing my buttons as soon as the announcement was made.

Annoyance the First. My normally 45-minute commute to work stretched to more than a hour and a half on one of the coldest days of the year. Sure, there are delays, and I can accept this. But this fact, coupled with Annoyance the Second below, was too much.

Annoyance the Second. My new RFID-equipped fare card stopped working abruptly … and was promptly confiscated by CTA personnel. Instead of sending it in, however, the attendant merely held on to it, forcing me to go all the way to transit headquarters to get a new card. My appearance even caused the worker in customer service to remark ‘He took your card? I wish they would stop doing that.’

Yeah, me too.

While I was taking this trip in the snow this morning, though, and interesting piece caught my eye about simply streamlining existing processes in an effort to reduce the current (and pending) congestion. A rider took some ideas from the Parisian transit system and came up with 12 ideas for the CTA.

In the meantime, though, looks like I’ll be getting even more reading done than usual on my soon-to-be-really-long trips to work. The next two years are going to be fun.

An item in the paper today pointed me in the direction of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration - let’s ignore for a moment that I previously had no idea such a division of the government existed, but hey, someone has to study substances and mental health - and the Chicago metropolitan area was given quite the superlative. Quoting the agency’s ‘Substance Use in the 15 Largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas: 2002-2005′ report:

Among the 15 largest [Metropolitan Statistical Areas], the Chicago (25.7 percent) and Houston (25.6 percent) MSAs had higher rates of binge drinking than the national average (22.7 percent). … binge alcohol use is defined as drinking five or more drinks on the same occasion (i.e., at the same time or within a couple of hours of each other) on at least 1 day in the past 30 days. [italics mine]

Read the rest of the study

The responsible, rational part of me wants to decry these results, calling them ‘irresponsible’ and ‘reprehensible’ and other such pejorative terms, but another part of me wants to take at least partial credit for such a momentous achievement. To be called be called dedicated imbibers of adult beverages is one thing, but to be the absolute top of the charts in terms of per capita consumption should get me a gold medal or a blue ribbon or something. Just how much of that ranking am I responsible for, I wonder? Hmm …

• 2005 Chicago census: 9.4 million residents
• Incidence of Chicago binge-drinking: 25.7 percent
• Thus, number of Chicago binge-drinkers: 2,415,800

So at one of 2,415,800 people, I’m 0.0000414 percent of the binge crowd. I’m making t-shirts. Go team binge-drink Chicago!

So … the ‘Intervew with the Astronaut’ post from last week? Apparently he’s at the center of a NASA love triangle.

Since I’m in the middle of publishing an interview with him, I won’t comment further. But still … wow. This one has everything: BB guns, pepper spray, diapers. Yes, diapers. Read it.

[Update, 11:02 a.m. Apparently the brits have even more information than Fox News. They’re reporting on love letters.]

The problem with the RedEye is that its covers give the inside content a hype that the stories just can’t uphold. I’ve been tempted by stories promising sex and rock ‘n roll, only to be greeted by 200 words on common-sense ‘Are you serious? Of course going to bars to find long-term relationships isn’t fulfulling’-style writing.

In any case, the RedEye did a good job today. It doesn’t get much more understated than a lone lowercase ‘finished,’ showing just what the city was thinking last night. Click the thumbnail for a larger shot.

Finished.

(sigh)

And there’s more shocking news from the world of Rowling. Not only - as I mentioned yesterday - is Daniel Racliffe getting nekkid, but, according to the Wall Street Journal, the list price for ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ is $34.99. From the story:

Scholastic Corp. scheduled July 21 for the release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” and set a cover price of $34.99 for the novel. The price is $5 higher than author J.K. Rowling’s most recent book, and a sign that Scholastic is intent on maximizing its profits on what is expected to be the last in the Potter series.

Rest of story [subscription required]

Forbes already lists her as the second-richest woman in entertainment, just behind Oprah, so I really don’t mind paying the extra cash.

Time to start saving now …