Phthursday Musings: Running Around Illinois, Part 1

Six Septembers ago, I started a new job and I ran my first 5K. These things track closely together. With the new job, I was working from home, and was able to do things like go for a run at lunch or immediately after the work day was done. And similar thought processes had driven me both to find a new job and to start running.

I was one of those kids who was not especially big or fast or strong, but I really wanted to be out there playing whatever sport was at hand. At age 12, I was average size, I was good at baseball. But at age 13, I was short and dumpy. I didn’t play any sports in high school and aside from softball I didn’t really do anything in the way of athletic competition.

I’d tried running before and it hadn’t taken. But this time around, it stuck for a few reasons. For me, my kid arriving when I was already 36, it got me to thinking about what it would take to keep up with him as he grew up. Today at 44, coaching kids, I find that I was right. It’s hard to keep up. I need to be in shape.

Where we lived in Chicago was in the middle of a neighborhood equidistant from four parks. One of them, Portage Park, was sort of ideal for running, in that the park filled a large grid square, and if you ran all the way around the outside of the park, you were running very close to a mile. Run around three times, three miles.

So I ran. And I was doing alright. That first 5K was actually at Portage Park, and my first 5K time was 30:24. See:

[Insert joke about sexplace here.]

So, 30:24, that was alright. I actually could have done better. I was more focused on finishing the race than on any particular time. I’d been doing the equivalent of 5Ks up until then but that was my first actual race and there was something… illuminating about it all. The sense of accomplishment was very real. It was something I’d thought would have been a lot harder to do well. And once I did it, I felt emboldened.

Over the next couple of months I ran a lot more. At one point my weight got all the way down to 153 pounds, which is pretty damn slender for someone 6’ tall. I was able to do 5K multiple times a week, and on other days I was doing stationary bike work. One Saturday I ran 8 miles. I felt strong, capable. I ran a second 5K that November, and my time was something like 25:30. I explained it to a friend in terms that I was trying to think in terms of how to transition from running being what I was doing to running being what I do.

The next year, I broke 25:00 - which means averaging less than 8:00 per mile - early in the year. I ran a 10K in about 51:00. I kept running through the spring and summer. When the fall rolled around and I did the 5K near home again, I pushed myself, and finished in 23:56. That was not long before I turned 40.

Well, since turning 40, it’s been rockier. I took a hard tumble at one point tripping over a bad sidewalk. Some other time I started getting weird knee pain, even got x-rays. Then at some point the arm / shoulder pain started, leading to a diagnosis of two bulging discs in my neck (between C-5/C-6 and C-6/C-7). But the knee pain had faded and I had the disc issue under control and I was trying to get back to where I was.

I did a 5K in February 2020, and, incredibly, crossed the finish line with an official time of 25:00. I could not believe I had run that well.

And… I hadn’t. My app told me I’d run something like 2.8 miles.

That was okay, though, I’d done alright, and was getting back into some sense of rhythm, and would no doubt be better yet the next time a race rolled around.

Well. A lot has happened since February 2020.

I finally ran that next proper 5K earlier this month. My time was about 30:10, not horrible. And I ran a second 5K the following weekend, and my time was worse… but, ahem, my app said the latter race my pace was better. Once again it seemed I’d managed to run a short course the one time.

My goal, for a couple of years now, has been to run a proper 25:00 5K again. It’s now been 5 years since I’ve accomplished that. I’m not sure I can do it. But I’m going for it. I’m running another race this weekend, my favorite one, the Fall Color 5K at Morton Arboretum, never mind that there’s no fall colors visible anywhere yet.

I’m going to keep going for it, because pushing myself for a fairly arbitrary goal like this is simply the only way I know to keep myself going at all.

This is a screen shot of the game Blasto for the TI 99/4A:

Blasto is not a great game. It is probably not even a good game. I mean: It is a good name for a game! But, no, Blasto really is you as a tank going around and blasting blue bombs. Blast ‘em all and the game is over. Not great.

Blasto is relevant here because to me it’s an example of a game where, yes, you can go for points, and yes, you can play two player and try to beat your cousin, but really, the only goal that’s any fun at all is to set a personal record for time.

I played Blasto in the early to mid ‘80s. Several years later, the equivalent game was of course this one:

Now, we all know somebody who, one day, magically got a Minesweeper board which cleared itself. (By “we all” I of course mean Gen Xers.) For us, that somebody was Lightnin’ Steve Daubs, the only person I have ever seen clear the board in 1 second.

Yes, you could compete against people in Minesweeper. But really you were always competing against yourself. You were trying to break 40 seconds in intermediate. There was no point to this. But you did it anyway.

I am not sure I can say I enjoy running. But the self-competition aspect of it is immensely appealing. It is, honestly, the thing that keeps me doing it. Otherwise I think I would limit myself to weight reps and the like.

This is why during the darkest months of the lockdown I just couldn’t get out there and run. I walked a lot but I had a very hard time getting out there and running. And it’s been hard to get it back at all. I needed the races. I needed them to give myself focus. I wish it weren’t like that, but I’m okay with it being that way.

There’s a guy I know in Delaware named David McCorquodale. He’s very tall, very lean. A few years back, he completed an astounding personal feat: he completed a marathon in each of the 50 states. Even more astounding: he didn’t start running until he was 48 years old. My admiration of his feat will never end.

Now, I do not see myself ramping up into being a marathoner. I know a lot of people who have done marathons and you all get my admiration, but that is not a bucket list thing to me. I want to focus on the 5K or maybe 10K, and be really good at it.

At this point I’ve run perhaps 15-20 5Ks plus a couple 10Ks. Mostly I’ve stayed close to home, but I’ve run ones in slightly far flung places, like Peoria and Belvidere. As I did more races, and started looking more afield for upcoming races, and increasingly realized just how many were out there, and schemed to run more, and drag the family along so that it could turn into post-race flapjacks… well, an idea kindled in my mind:

How could I scale David’s feat to something different, in its own way even more outrageous?

My answer: I would run a 5K or 10K in each of the 102 counties of Illinois.

Oh, I’m nowhere close. I think I’ve hit all of 4 counties. But I’ve got ideas, schemes which have been parked due to the pandemic, but which are bubbling up again in my mind.

This scheme was actually going to involve its own blog, which I was going to call Running Around Illinois. I wasn’t sure exactly what the point of it all was going to be but it seemed like a way to keep driving myself toward a goal completely nonsensical, except that it would very much keep me in shape.

I’ll write more about the Running Around Illinois concept one of the next couple of weeks, with less emphasis on the running and more emphasis on the Illinois. The main reason I think it wouldn’t work is that I’m not exactly part of any running community per se. Indeed it’s a little hard for me to wrap my mind around that idea: running community. It just feels like something that you have to do on your own.

Somewhere along this journey I came across “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”, a mid-century short story by the English writer Alan Sillitoe. I found it in some convoluted manner whereby I was able to download it to a first generation Kindle. Sillitoe, who was just barely too young for World War II, would have been writing at a strange time to be English, a time which happened to coincide with some lads in Liverpool getting to know one another. There’s also a movie adapation of the story which I haven’t seen, but I tend to be distrustful of movie adaptations of short stories. There’s a reason the story was short in the first place!

A couple decades later, a somewhat different work came out under the same name. It appeared on the 1986 album Somewhere In Time. This is the Iron Maiden song:

There was no video originally, of course; the video is actually pasted together from the movie based on the short story.

The Iron Maiden song made its way onto a running playlist of mine a while ago, along with other songs prominently about speed or running, metaphorically or otherwise. Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run”, Poster Children’s “Speed of Light”, the Stones’ “Before They Make Me Run”, and, of course, Self’s “Trunk Fulla Amps”.

It’s not really a great playlist to listen to while running though. For that, I don’t mess around with playlists. I have multiple go to rock albums. But four in particular.

These, um, are all meant to be played loud.

Joel R. L. Phelps & the Downer Trio, Blackbird

I could write an entire few editions of Phthursday Musings about the greatness of Joel Phelps. If x is how well known someone is and y is how great they are, his y/x ratio has got to the be highest of all time. Blackbird is his masterwork, and is pretty much the blueprint of what I want every guitar ever to sound like. Joel is far and away at the top of the list I people still living who I have not and most badly want to see live.

Polvo, In Prism

Easily my favorite album of the last 15 years, this to me is exactly where guitar heroics and noisy indie rock are supposed to meet. As is often the case, I had no idea a proper video existed for any song from this album. Where, besides YouTube, are such videos ever seen anyway? The video is kind of silly but I do like how they made a 1996 video in 2009 for no good reason.

Karl Hendricks Trio, The Jerks Win Again

I tried to pick a “nice” song here, as opposed to a completely cacophonous one. The track listing alone rivals anything Don Caballero ever came up with. Karl, RIP, was one of the greatest and most underrated guitarists and songwriters, and if his y/x score is lower, it’s only because he sold like 20,000 albums instead of Joel’s 10,000 or whatever.

Sugar, Besides disc two, issued years later as The Joke Is Always On Us, Sometimes

Don’t be fooled by seeing the album cover for File Under: Easy Listening; this is actually the lead track of the live set. It is a perfect song to start a run with.

As an aside, we were fortunate to see Bob Mould last week. The man is 60 years old, and he looks and sounds fantastic. Maybe if I keep running I can look half that good in 15 years.

Oh, hey, META-SPIEL readers. What’s your running playlist? If you’d like me to critique the suitability thereof I may just include that in part 2 of all this.