Chicago Marathon

By Benjy Lipsman in News on Oct 12, 2004 9:35PM

Chicagoist was really excited and wrote about real-time runner tracking but found out this weekend that maybe the technology isn't quite where it should be yet. At the Chicago Marathon, sending text messages every 5k for 40,000 runners proved to be difficult. One minute we got a message that said our friend passed the 15k mark so we headed out to meet him at our designated spot along the course. Literally the next minute we got another message that said he'd just pasted the 30k mark. And 5 minutes later we got a message that said he passed midpoint (about 13k). Needless to say we didn't get to see our runner friends until the marathon was over.

Evans Rutto, from Kenya, won his second straight Chicago Marathon, finishing in 2 hours, 6 minutes, 16 seconds.. just a few minutes over the world record time of 2:04:55. Constantina Tomescu-Dita of Romania won the women's race despite spending the last few days in bed with the flu. She blew away the rest of the field in a personal-best 2:23:44. Those Romanians and Kenyans sure can run! The winners of the men's & women's races got $125,000 each.

Khalid Khannouchi, a former world-record holder and naturalized U.S. citizen came in 5th place and was the fastest American. Brian Sell, or Utica, NY was the next-fastest American, coming in at 11th place. See the Americans aren't too shabby!