万花筒 Kaleidoscope2007-10-14&10-15, 酷热马拉松

Thousands of wanna-be marathoners never crossed the finish line in Chicago this weekend. But our reporter Dan Skinner did pass the finish line. He joins me live by phone from Chicago, to tell us about the conditions of the race.

--Dan, how are you doing today?

--Um, I am doing pretty good. My legs are a little sore but my wife Sharron * who ran up with me are in good shape overall 3.

--All right. Dan, this is your first race that you did right? And did you do it with your wife, is that right?

--Yes, we did it together. We’ve run a few half marathons in the past year in Chicago and Cleveland and a few other places. But this is our first full marathon 1.

--Ok, as you are running along and then you get to a mile marker, was it 20, I think? When someone tells you, er, this marathon is over.

--Yes. It was actually marathon at mile 20, my friend Adam, I saw him there and he said- did you hear the news? And I said, no, what? And he said the marathon has been canceled. And my first thought was what do you mean it's been cancelled? What were running a marathon, that’s not cancelled? But we pressed on and about a quarter mile later, we heard the kinda first official announcement from, er, Chicago police that the race had been canceled. And at that point, they were encouraging everybody to walk rather than run. But nobody was officially pulling it off, the course at that point, so we figured as long as they were gonna let us stay on the course, we were gonna keep going at a slower pace and do our best to make it to the finish line.

--Dan, we are talking about hundreds of people who had to go to the hospital or who are at least had to get treated at the scene, plus one death. When you were running this marathon, did you notice that people were dropping out?

--Yes, that’s when we starting around about the16th mile, which was a stretch of the race. That was very, kind of not very shady 4 at all, a lot of stun 5 beating down. And that was really all for the first stretch that, er, um, we started to see a noticeable 6 drop in the water and the supplies, I mean there were people on the ground being treated too, we saw one man who was being treated for what, appeared to be an ankle 7 injury, and a medical personnel 8 said, you know, we can’t get you an ambulance, we can't always get ambulances for emergencies which in most races, you know, a serious ankle injury would be an emergency but on a day like this, they had to, kind of, er, take the ambulances for really critical 9 situations.

--Well Dan, it sounds like you are doing ok, and I’m glad you are but that is gonna be quite a story to tell for a while. The marathoner 2 sort of wasn’t.

--Exactly, it’s kinda bittersweet what’s, ah, you know, maybe not the race stage experience we had hoped for, but years from now when people ask you when did you run the Chicago marathon, we can say, we ran a really hard one. So, er, it's a, it’s a nice memory, and, we are thankful we finished, and, feeling pretty good about ourselves

--Dan, thank you so much for joining us.

--Thank you, Reggie.