This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Hot Chocolate race and they were including a Legacy experience on top of the annual experience they produce for this race. This year they recognized runners who have been running the race in 10, 5 and 3 year periods. I landed within the 5 year because I did 6 consecutive Hot Chocolate races in Chicago. My friend Jo is also a legacy runner the 3 year tier, he also signed up and ran the race with me.
This year was very cold, I layered my clothes and also used my wool running socks, but I was still cold. While we waited in our corral I was hoping that the run will get me warm. The sun started to rise and it turned out to me a sunny day, which was promising weather wise. I joined Jo in his corral “E” and we made our way to the front of the corral.
They released the corrals pretty quickly, we only waited about 15 minutes until we were off on the streets of Chicago. We started north on Columbus and made our way to lower Wacker Drive, where my GPS on my Garmin went a little whack, which I expected since GPS in general in the downtown area is not accurate, they say it’s because of the buildings. When we exited Lower Wacker Drive we tuned on Lake street and it looked like my GPS had an approximate .5 difference from the mile marker, so my Garmin did a pretty good estimation from my strides.
We went back down the loop via Clark Street and made our way to Van Buren, where we took a left. We approached Michigan Ave, where we saw Rick on the side and continued south on Michigan Ave. Just before Roosevelt Rd they had the big signs indicated the route for the 5K and the 15K. We stayed to our right where the 15K course continued on Michigan Ave.
We continued south until we arrived on 31st Street, where we took a left and then a right on Martin Luther King Drive. We continued south until 35th Street where we took a left and ran towards the lake. This was a new portion of the route, which took us to the 35th street pedestrian bridge that crossed over Lake Shore Drive. We turned left and started our northern route to the finish where we passed through McCormick Place and Soldier Field. As we made our way past the Field Museum I knew that we were very close to the end.
We continued through the Museum Campus underpass and went up the incline towards Columbus Ave. Once we turned right onto Columbus we saw the finish and Jo an I took off to finish the course. We finished in 1hr 47min 23sec, we beat our time last year over a minute! Although the weather was cold, it was a fun race. I basically ran this one for the Legacy experience, I am not sure if this one will be on the roster for next year’s races.
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