Forget the time.
That became the plan halfway through the Chicago Marathon.
Joelle Reeves and I started the day running together. She had trained for a strong sub-three-hour race. The work was there. The confidence was there. Then the marathon gave her a completely different day.
The first warning showed up early. By mile 10, she knew something was wrong. The pace started to slip. At halfway, she stopped.
A marathon is very good at making one bad moment feel permanent. You have trained for months. You have one number in your head. The city is loud. Everybody around you is moving forward. Stopping can make the whole day feel over even when half the course is still sitting there.
So we reset it.
The time was gone. Fine. We could still finish. We could run at the pace the day allowed, walk when needed, use the crowds, and get to the other side together.
There was a small cry and a pep talk. Then Joelle made the better decision: “If you can't run fast, run like a rockstar.”
She started working the crowd. Cheering for people. Smiling at runners. Pulling noise out of the spectators whenever she could. The race she had planned was gone, but the actual day was still happening.
I stayed with her.
That was not a complicated decision. We were teammates. We had started together. She was having a hard day. My own finish time stopped being important.
Prospect Park Track Club had become a big part of my running life by then. I had raced for the club, served on the board, and helped with marathon training. We had done enough miles together that it was obvious when the day changed.
Chicago was one of the first huge race days after the COVID gap. Five months earlier, I had won my age group at Duathlon Nationals in Tuscaloosa. That day ended with a clean official line: first place, 1:05:58.
Chicago did not need another line from me.
Joelle crossed the finish smiling and throwing up two peace signs. We had taken the original goal apart and built a different day from what was left.
She wrote about it later in “Run Like a Rockstar” for PPTC. It is her race and her story. She is direct about the pain, the disappointment, the ego, and the decision to keep going.
I like her version because it does not pretend the day secretly went according to plan. It did not. She wanted one race and got another one. Time mattered. She had spent months training for it and was pissed that the result was gone.
Then we did the remaining half anyway.
We finished the Chicago Marathon together.
Not the race we planned.
Still a good one.