I felt it was time for me to start working towards a 5K a few months ago and my friend Erica said she'd run a race with me. As great as it is to run along Chicago's lakefront, when you do it all the time it doesn't make for a very exciting race route, so I wanted to try something different. I found a race on the runway at O'Hare airport that sounded so weird I couldn't resist. "This looks idiotic so we should probably do it," I emailed Erica, and she agreed. Honestly at one point before the race I felt so achy and crabby that I thought about pulling out and she reminded me "I think this race is going to be so stupid and so we have to do it" and it was very good motivation. It was a 5K at the airport! What the hell!

So, because this race was so dumb, we were told to arrive by 6:30 for an 8 AM race, on a Sunday. At the airport.  I got up at 5:15 AM to go pick Erica up at 6.  She brought me a really delicious fancy coffee in an adorable little tumbler so between the good caffeine and getting to catch up with my friend (plus the lack of airport traffic) meant things were looking up. Until we got to the airport and realized we had no idea where we were going. And because the race was so dumb, there were really vague directions given by the race directors that gave very little information, which was frustrating because it's the airport, where you think they'd want to be specific. We drove around the perimeter of O'Hare, stopping at every terminal looking for one of those cops-who-always-yells-at-you to move to maybe give us some input but for once we couldn't find one. Erica finally tried putting in the name of a road that was mentioned in the directions and we drove off, at one point circling through a barbed-wire restricted area where a clearly over-it security guard told us which way to go.

We joined a long car queue and finally found parking (which in truth is nice for a race) but we were miles from O'Hare proper. We walked along some forbidding-looking barbed wire and hurricane fence to get to the race site. In the distance on the horizon we saw people walking in the gray mist to the runway and again we were like "We chose the dumbest race."

One of the things Erica was most excited about in the race was the promise of touch-a-truck. As the mother of a small boy I am very acquainted with "touch a truck" but Erica, you see, doesn't get to just touch a truck any old day. So we realized that if this race delivered one thing, it was trucks for touching. Trucks galore! We touched a bunch. And a few planes too. AND we met Ronald McDonald!
And after all that we even had time to use the pot-a-potties before we lined up for the race. So, maybe the race wasn't that dumb.

The race course, it turned out, was even more boring than running along the lake. It's just a ton of concrete with the airport off in the distance, down and back. So I'm glad Erica and I got to catch up during it, and also glad it was overcast because the sun beating down on the tarmac with no shade would have been unpleasant.

Anyway we had a nice run chugging along (there was one aid station, as promised) and then after the run we collected as many freebies as we could in our arms and shirts. There was lots of free hot food if we were willing to stand in line but we were ready to drive back home. On the way to the car we got legitimately excited about touching more trucks. There was a guy on fully-extended firetruck ladder we were psyched to get to wave to us and a fireman let me get on a firetruck when I asked to take a photo in front of it (not something I would do if I didn't have a little kid at home who would find this super cool.)

I also got a photo with a real live fireman, not just me on a truck. Can you imagine?

In the end, Erica's and my ironic fun turned into real fun. On a scale of 10, I'd give the race a 2 on directions, a 4 on the actual race, a 7 on postrace food and a 10 on truck-touching.