Chicago Calling

Hello! Welcome back to Footprint – and happy Friday.

Whether you’re a first-timer or, like this week’s interviewee, a veteran World Major champion, the peak weeks of any marathon training block are – both naturally and necessarily – hard.

I am currently knocking on the door of the business end of the block, hoping to stumble through.

This stage of the process is typically a bit of a struggle for me. It might be a crisis of confidence. It might be a crunch for time. It might be – this week’s twist – the early stages of a cold. There’s always something. Or some things.

The path to the start line often feels longer, and steeper, than the road to the finish. On early mornings and dark nights, during busy days and long weeks, the challenge is finding the time, space and energy to find your way.

Two-time New York City Marathon champion Geoffrey Kamworor speaks to Footprint ahead of his Chicago Marathon debut next month

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Geoffrey Kamworor has claimed every spot on the New York City Marathon podium, coming third in 2018, second in 2015, and winning – twice – in 2017 and 2019. 

He’s come second at the London Marathon, too, and finished third – twice – at the Berlin Marathon, in 2012 and 2013. 

Next month, the veteran elite distance runner will stray from the races he knows.  

The Chicago Marathon is famously flat and fast: a race where boundaries are tested, and records broken, by some of the best athletes in the world. But Kamworor, 32, is not treating it any differently to the others he has run.

“The fact remains that it will be a marathon,” he shrugged in a recent interview. “It will be 42 kilometers.”

Sure, the course is different. But the task remains the same.

In Kenya, where he trains with the rest of the NN Running Team, Kamworor has spent months focused on the fundamentals.

“My training now is really very intense, because of the task ahead,” he explained. “That’s the marathon.”

This part of the cycle, with miles upon miles of running, hour after hour, steeling your legs for what is to come, is universally hard – even for a former champion.

“It’s really tough, especially during long runs, tempo runs and the track speed sessions,” said Kamworor.

He has endured training of this intensity, time and again, for more than a decade – driven by the same ultimate ambition. In Chicago “my ambition actually is to do a great result, of course to win,” he said. “Because that is everybody’s wish.” 

For Kamworor, and the seventy or so pro athletes at the front of the pack, winning is literal: a battle to cross the finish line before anyone else. 

But for the other fifty thousand people tackling the streets of the Windy City, the definition is whatever they want it to be. When you run 26.2 miles, you get to choose. 

Winning can mean simply reaching the finish. It can mean getting there in a certain time. It can mean feeling a certain way. It can mean supporting a worthy cause. It can mean realizing dreams, or dispelling doubts. The list goes on. 

Every marathon – Berlin this month, Chicago next, and beyond – unites an exceptionally broad field, with countless targets, causes, dreams, and doubts, around the same narrow objective. 

The marathon is a leveler. No matter why you’re running, or who you are – from seven-time World Major marathon podium finishers and global popstars to first-timers and seasoned veterans – the fundamentals are the same. 

Everyone sets off from one line in pursuit of another. And everyone has to prepare their muscles, and minds, to confront the reality of what’s required to get there. 

Training for a marathon “doesn’t need perfection,” Eliud Kipchoge, arguably the greatest marathoner of all time, and one of Kamworor’s teammates, once said. “It needs consistency.” 

Kamworor knows what it’s like to consistently train, through the good days and the bad, for a marathon. 

He knows what it’s like to finish, feeling like all the work was worth it. And he knows what it’s like when life throws up setbacks that push the start line out of reach. 

His sights are now set on Chicago. New race. Same goal. “It gives me a great opportunity,” he said, “to see what I can do.”

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The World Athletics Championships were anything but predictable – from Cole Hocker’s comeback for the ages in the 5,000m to self-declared ”academic badass” Amy Hunt’s shock silver in the 200m.

My highlight of the meet took place during the final stretch of the women’s marathon. Julia Paternain was dumfounded as she crossed the line inside Tokyo’s National Stadium, and a cameraman told her she had finished third.

The Uruguayan athlete, who grew up in the UK and previously represented Britain, switched her allegiances to Uruguay earlier this year, and was among the last to qualify for the race.

“I’m not one for wishy washy quotes but one thing I do believe in is just trying,” Paternain wrote on social media this week. “You don’t always have to have some huge goal on the other side but just start.

“When I was out there I wasn’t thinking about anyone else. I was just running.”