Events list

Bank of America Chicago Marathon 2008

On Sunday October 12th, 2008, runners from more than 100 countries took on the 31st Chicago Marathon - one of the fastest marathon race courses in the world.

The Chicago Marathon is one of the largest city marathons, with approx. 40'000 runners every year. It also figures amongst the "big 5" marathons in the world, together with Boston, New York, London and Berlin.

And this year again, Jim Jordan made it possible! Help-for-Hope's colors were flying through Chicago, thanks to Jim, who took on the city's 42.195km for the second year in a row (click here for the story of Help-for-Hope's Chicago Marathon 2007 participation). THANK YOU JIM FOR RUNNING ON BEHALF OF CHILDREN IN NEED!

To the left: picture of Jim sporting the race T-Shirt with a photo of his children Isabel and Daniel. Below is the story, in Jim's words:

"It was another hot one with a cloudless sky and the sun beating down pretty hard. I heard that the temperature got up to 85 degrees [almost 30 degrees Celsius].

The organizers learned from last year [one of the hottest Chicago marathon races, with 31+ degrees Celsius] and had plenty of water and Gatorade for the runners. They more than doubled the amount of liquids available and had 20 water stations compared to 15 last year.

Below: pictures from Jim at Mile 18, courtesy of his colleague Paul (thanks Paul!). Looking great Jim!!

I was hoping to run it under 5 hours, but by the time I crossed the halfway point at 2:30:01 I could already feel myself slowing down. On top of that, I could not find my wife Wilma and the kids in the crowd and they did not see me either. That was disappointing because I really needed a boost at that point.

Similar to last year, it seemed that most of the runners were reduced to walking a large portion of the last 10 miles. I ended up finishing in 5:18:54. Considering the conditions, I am happy with that. I beat last year’s finish time by 25 minutes, so this is my personal record.

I wore the small Help-for-Hope tattoos on my hands, and the large tattoos on the back of my calves for all the runners passing me to see.

During the last few miles I kept asking myself why I would ever want to do this again and I could not think of an answer. But now that I’ve recovered I’m already planning to set a new PR next year."

WAY TO GO JIM!! And congratulations for another great feat!