This weekend, 55,000 brave souls will line up in Grant Park for the 2025 Bank of America Chicago Marathon, one of the original Abbott World Marathon Majors. Upfront, some of the world’s swiftest runners will engage in a contest of speed and crisis management we call racing through the 29 Chicago neighborhoods. With good conditions predicted, record times are possible—perhaps even at the world or national level. Both have been discussed in the pre-race build-up.

Beyond the stopwatch, however, will lie a deeper reckoning. For in its transformation from act to actualization, the marathon will inform across many levels. 

TEMPORAL

At its most basic level, the marathon unfolds meaning over time—from immediate sensation, to delayed insight, and finally long-term transformation. It is both a withering away and a building up, with the former being the predicate for the latter. Yet it isn’t a cycle free from doubt. You can’t learn who you are unless you challenge who you could be.

PSYCHOLOGICAL

Running long distance cuts a path to individuation, where effort over distance reveals one’s core identity. The runner who begins is rarely the runner who finishes, as distance and time wear away the everyday physical and psychological armor we don to face the world. But through the course of a marathon, those defenses don’t simply break down, they are converted into distance gained and self-awareness gleaned.

A dispiriting doubt at mile 18, as the body shifts from glycogen’s high-octane to fat-burning’s lower efficiency, becomes a lesson in resilience by mile 23 after weathering the transition.

This personal transformation extends beyond the individual runners, rippling out with civic implications, which seems especially important in Chicago 2025.

CIVIC

Running in such huge gatherings becomes a microcosm of civic engagement—where effort and endurance lead to eventual communal reward. For whatever one’s own achievement may be, it will not have been accomplished alone. Even the winners will have been spurred by their opponents. 

While mass activity carries risks—like the frenzied unrest of a feral crowd, which Chicago has weathered before, whether in the summer of 1968, or in more recent times—there is also the reward of transcendence when solitary effort joins a community spirit. 

Such gatherings elevate the individual while bringing into clear relief the spirit of civic engagement this world cries out for daily.

SPIRITUAL

In Tony Hendra’s 2004 memoir, Father Joe, he recounts visiting his Benedictine friend and learning that the Benedictine order was the first to claim work, in and of itself, was a sacred act.

“Work, in the Benedictine tradition,” Hendra wrote, “enjoyable or not, exalted or humble, is prayer, a principle best expressed in the classic Benedictine dictum: laborare est orare—to work is to pray.”

Perhaps we might extend that principle to running: currere est orare—to run is to pray. Where the body’s labor becomes a form of meditation as we jog, run, or race within our cathedral of city towers, through transepts of concrete, with our motion becoming a form of devotion.

There is also congruere—to run together—which offers a congregational aspect to the act.

When cars vacate city streets and crowds by the thousands gather in their place, when banners arc at the start and finish and runners don their simple uniforms as footfalls and salutes fill the air—the race becomes something extraordinary, even cathartic.

It is communion—with self, others, and something greater. As Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon in 1966, put it: “A mutual expression of our belief in what it means to be human.” 

Through its great length, the marathon embraces all our faults and favors—struggles and triumphs, isolation and unity—qualities that define both our shared attempts to conquer it on this day and the other larger challenges confronting us in the days ahead:

A difficult race in a difficult time.

Best of luck to all. 

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