The Heat Was On At The Chicago Marathon
The weather had been nothing short of scorching when it shone over the myriad of runners participating in the Chicago Marathon held last Sunday, the seventh of October 2007. While the sunny type of weather normally does not call for the halt or suspension of such events, the heat which had gone up to a whopping eighty-eight degrees (outdoing the 1979 heatwave) and was accompanied by practically overwhelming humidity had gotten so bad that a man tragically collapsed around noon, four hours into the course. The man was taken to Veteran's Affairs Hospital, but was declared dead at one in the afternoon by the Cook County medical examiner's office.
The man who had unfortunately passed away at the races was Chad Schieber of of Midland Michigan. The thirty-five year old had dropped as he was running on the South Side. There were many who witnessed the man fall unconscious and fail to respond to attempts of reviving him. The medical director of the race, George Chiampas, summarized the accounts as this: It sounds like he lost his pulse very fast and died on the race course.
Under those circumstances, it was not at all surprising that the organizers had opted to shut down the race at that point; as it was, more than three hundred individuals suffering immensely from the heatstroke and the like were taken to the hospital. Those who had already passed the half-way point at the time, however, were supposedly allowed to continue running for a while longer before inevitably being sent back to the starting line as well. Thus far, there were no other deaths at the marathon during the heatwave.
What was surprising, however, was that there were those who still made it to the finish line, despite the sweltering atmosphere. For most of the race, Moroccan Jaouad Gharib and Kenyan Patrick Ivuti had turned the event into a one-on-one competition, constantly overtaking each other until finally, with a time of two hours, eleven minutes, and eleven seconds, twenty-nine year old Ivuti had beaten Gharib by a mere fraction of a difference only five tenths of a second. Ivuti nevertheless commented on the state of the weather. The weather was not good, he says. It was too hot.
Ivuti, along with Ethiopia's Berhane Adere who had ended up the top female finisher of the race with a time of two hours, thirty-three minutes and forty-nine seconds, won the prize of one hundred and twenty-five thousand American dollars.
