Inspiring marathon ...

Sunday, Oct 07, 2007 - The day dawned bright & clear. It was the day of the 30th Annual LaSalle Chicago marathon. It was last time the marathon would be run with the "LaSalle" name, since the bank has now been bought by Bank of America. It was also a special day for me since I was one of the volunteers who would be serving drinks at the event.

One of my friends was visiting from St.Louis, and he agreed to volunteer as well. Up bright and early, well - by weekend standards, we boarded the train to get downtown. As we stepped out of the station, a truly inspiring sight met our eyes ... Contestants in wheel chairs & runners in the 75 deg heat (the mercury would later climb to 87 deg by noon) and people lined by the sidewalks with banners, placards and pom poms - cheering the runners on their way! It was like all of Chicago had turned up to cheer them on.

We walked the 1.6 miles from Union Station to Grant park, most of the main roads leading to the venue were blockd due to the marathon. On the way my friend stopped to pick some free headgear courtesy Energizer that looked like pink bunny ears! Cheering the runners along the way, we walked on to our destination, where we were part of the beer tent. Our stall was supposed to serve out beer to the runners that made it past the finish line.

The first set of runners that crossed the finish line, were mostly professionals and athletes who were training seriously for other marathons. When offered a beer, they just looked at us in disbelief that we were serving beer at a marathon!

At this time, I was wondering if we would ever serve out the beer we had with us. However, this was to change shortly. Within an hour, the next batch of runners - amateurs who had trained and made it across the finish line were at our stall. These were people who had trained hard for weeks to be able to run the marathon and had made it!

Our camp was making up slogans like "You trained all year, now have an ice cold beer!" Quite noisy with our slogans, we attracted a lot of attention and soon had runners flocking to our stall. All of us volunteers were just running back and forth with cups of beer. The beer dispenser had 5 taps and we were just letting the beer flow out. Moving the cups out in an assembly line fashion - they were disappearing faster than we could serve them!

Never had I seen so much beer in my life ... flowing like water. It was an experience of a lifetime! For about 4 hrs - we served beer non stop. The runners were glad ... Most of them blessed us or thanked us, and expressed extreme gratitude in some form or another. Just watching their expressions as they downed the ice cold beer, the sheer contentment that you could see on their faces ... was worth enduring the heat to serve it.