[ RACE.2026 ] 🇺🇸 Chicago, United States
Bank of America Chicago Marathon Training Plan
11 October 2026
Chicago is a single flat loop through twenty-nine neighbourhoods, and one of the fastest marathon courses on earth. If Boston is about surviving the course, Chicago is about not letting a fast course talk you into a mistake.
What the course is actually like
A loop out of Grant Park through the North, West and South sides, on wide, firm city streets, with exactly one hill worth the name: the short rise over Roosevelt Road in the final kilometre, cruelly placed but small. Everything else is flat enough that world records have repeatedly been set here.
The subtler features matter more than the profile. The early miles run between tall buildings that can scramble GPS - runners chasing their watch in the first 5 km are often chasing a fiction. And a course this flat offers no terrain changes to break up the effort: the same muscles work the same way for 42 km, which is its own kind of fatigue.
How to train for it
Chicago rewards metronomes. With no hills to force variation, even-paced long runs at goal effort - longer at that rhythm than feels traditional - are the most specific training you can do. The course will not slow you down; only optimism will.
Learn to pace by feel and by the course clocks rather than GPS, at least until the buildings thin out. And because flat courses concentrate load on the same tissues for hours, calves and hamstrings deserve specific strength work - the flatness that makes Chicago fast is also what makes its final 10 km cramp-prone for the underprepared.
Weather and what to expect on the day
October in Chicago is usually cool and quick, but it swings: editions have ranged from near-ideal single digits to genuinely warm. The lake keeps mornings crisp; the wind decides the rest, and there is little shelter on the wide avenues when it blows.
Expect enormous crowd support through nearly every neighbourhood - Chicago has none of New York's silent bridges. The noise makes the first half feel easier than it is, which on a course this fast is precisely the danger. Bank nothing; the flat back half returns even pacing with interest.
Which distance are you running?
Official site: www.aims-worldrunning.org/races/1143.html
// SAMPLE BUILD
What a 12-week Marathon build looks like
A typical outline for Bank of America Chicago Marathon. Your actual plan is built around your level, schedule and goal time - this shows the shape of the training.
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