When Sunday began, Bryan Duffy, a 29-year-old Chicago real estate agent, was just like you or I. By the end of the day, he was a hero.

Bryan Duffy spent the morning digging up flowers. Does it really matter whose flowers they were? When a person decides to get his hands dirty, reacquainting himself with the rich Illinois soil, should we really trouble him with questions like "sir, are those your flowers?"

Chicago police officers decided Duffy's hard work was behavior warranting questioning, so they approached him, DNAinfo reports, wanting to talk. We can only imagine what was going on in his head, but fear—fear that the cops might discover the secret payload in his pocket, plus they probably weren't his flowers—is as good a guess as any. For an ordinary person, that fear might have led to panic, or surrender, or a violent outburst. For Duffy, in ways even he might not fully understand, it led to ingenuity.

Sunday, as the running sports enthusiasts among you already know, was marathon day in Chicago. And the flower pots were not just in any stranger's lawn—they were right along the route. Before the moment of ecstasy, Duffy must have seen the contestants racing by as the cops approached. He joined the pack and started running.

How free he must have felt, throwing off the guise of the dutiful property broker and inhabiting the mind of the outlaw! Shooting across Jackson, up LaSalle, untethered from the concerns of ordinary men! He's disappearing into the herd now, with the police, those goons, in hot pursuit. Feet, don't fail Bryan Duffy now!

If he remained along the marathon route for the duration of the chase, from the beginning, on State Street, near the starting line, to the fateful end, Bryan Duffy likely traversed about 2.5 miles. His path, before the officers tackled him, would have looked like this:

Given the looping nature of the course, however, it's possible that he went significantly further—10 miles!—before reaching the 200 block of West Superior Street, where he was floored and arrested with 10 MDMA tablets inside an Altoids container and $531 in his pocket. Naysayers will claim that the shorter route is much more likely, but I, like Bryan Duffy, prefer to dream the impossible dream.

[Image via Chicago PD]