Running Around Illinois: Aurora

February 15, 2026

Couple Shuffle 5K

Aurora (DuPage County)

Chip Time: 25:47.43

A lot to unpack in the first race in three months. I have some actual good advice for runners - and not just runners - for once. I achieved a notable time which warrants some discussion. First, though, let’s talk about Aurora.

Did you realize that the Aurora municipal limits extend into four counties? And look, I don’t think it all stops there. There are admittedly long, but definitely unincorporated, swaths of land which would allow the Aurora tentacles to reach into Grundy and DeKalb Counties, plus there’s plenty of precedent in the wild for gobbling up existing municipalities. Aurora’s mayor is a damn solid guy named John Laesch, who I got to know many years ago when he and I were both in Normal. John is a progressive and not the sort of chap who I imagine would go on a mass annexation bender, but I tell you this, if he decided to go for it, the Aurora city limits would be butting up against Morris and Sandwich right quick.

As we all know, Aurora is the second-largest city in Illinois, having wrenched the mantle some 20 years ago, but that doesn’t mean we actually have an understanding of what it looks like. Friends, I have now seen it with mine own two eyes, and it looks like a bunch of houses flanked by signs announcing OAKHURST.

And it also looks like a tiny lake, with the name Waubonsie, attached to a creek of the same name, all of which finally led me to investigate and find that Waubonsie (spelled various ways) was a Potawatomi leader. There are of course a lot of place names around Illinois named for Native Americans, but it’s always interesting to me when a relatively obscure one becomes relatively prominent because the area surrounding a physical feature like a creek turns into an area of massive sprawl. It’s just such a strange juxtaposition.

Waubonsie Lake, or Lake Waubonsie, I’ve seen it both ways, it is itself very pleasant, apparently used for kayaking, though from the above photo, not on this particular day. Where the lake ends and the creek continues is this very unusual feature which is somewhere between a dam and a bridge and a ford and modern art:

The lake is surrounded by a walking / running trail (visible in the above photo) which served as the course for this run. Technically this was multiple runs: 1 mile, 5K, 10K, 15K, where the latter two were just the 5K repeated. The 5K had 165 finishers, the 10K had 39 finishers, the 15K had 15 finishers, plus an unknown number of 1 milers, all of which made for a very congested start, and I’ll get to that a little further below.

The last few years, Morton Arboretum has offered a program called Pine Pacer. It’s simple and clever: for the month of January, you sign up and pledge to walk or run 25 or 50 miles. In a month where it’s otherwise unlikely that most people would run that much, it provides a built-in goal to keep you on track, and then along the way you get a high-quality jacket or hoodie which turns into a wardrobe staple and reminds you to stay on course all year.

When I signed up this year I was a little skeptical because I knew that meeting the goal meant running (at the gym) more often than I had been, and I’d not been doing as well with day to day recovery. Well, I got started at the end of December, and managed to run fairly consistently every fourth day for most of January, and with better recovery than I’d had in years. I credit two major changes.

First, after I ran the Arboretum 5K in October, there were physical therapists present to stretch out runners, which is always a wonderful add to a race. And when I went to get stretched out, the PT commented on how tight my hips were. I mentioned all this when I wrote back on December 28 and said I’d found post-run yoga to do. I’ve now done post-run yoga after every run at the gym since. I also try to do yoga at least one day inbetween runs, while still maintaining my upper body regimen for my silly spine.

This 7-minute post-run workout is my go-to, and Adriene is now my primary yoga instructor, and one thing she does not do which a lot of other perfectly find yoga instructors do and which I do not like, is she does not have any music in the background.

The other thing though was inspired in part by something my wife said a while ago. The subject was fashion and comfort and the topic of high-waisted pants came up and she made a comment about how women are prioritizing comfort and why the hell shouldn’t they? And this stuck in the recesses of my mind and when Christmastime rolled around and I was asked what I wanted, I said I wanted compression socks. And I got a six-pack of compression socks and specifically alpaca wool socks from Hollow and I’ve spent most of the last six weeks wearing these socks with my thick cushioned Smartwool socks over the top of them, meaning I’ve had comfortable compression and comfortable cushioning, and I’ve relaced my everyday shoes to accommodate, and I’ve even been able to wear the Hollow socks to bed without them being too warm or irritating, and my calves have felt better than they’ve felt in many months.

From a fashion perspective, constantly wearing two pairs of socks like this would be a major faux pas, and I admit I’m not sure how I’m going to handle it in warmer months, but when I add up the yoga and the socks, I’ve been able to run more, and without having to take two naproxen before bed as a result.

All of this has allowed me to build my mileage back up even though January was brutally cold, and in the last week, I’ve been able to go sub-25 on 5K splits on the treadmill. All of this led to a lot of anticipation for a first race of the season.

If you’ve been following along with all this for a while, you know my target is to run a 25:00 5K again, which I haven’t done since 2016. Last year I got down to 25:42 in May. So for a first race of the season, 25:47 is pretty good! Ah, but there were circumstances… and yet they may have canceled each other out.

At starting time it was 39 degrees and sunny, with the temperature expected to rise, and I decided to go with short sleeves and shorts. This proved to be the right decision.

Alas, also at starting time, I needed to use the facilities, and there was a line. Without dwelling on it all too much, I decided to be safe and get in that line, and I wound up finishing right as the gun went off. This is not in and of itself a big problem with a chip-timed race, but as I noted paragraphs ago, there were over 200 people, and the race course was a park district walking / running path, so when I crossed the starting line, it was after at least 100 other people did, and some of them were only walking. The first half-mile then was an absolute slog, required going around people on the grass and waiting out a couple of pinches, and so what’s often the fastest portion of the race was done at an awful pace of about 9:30 a mile.

The field cleared up a lot after the first half mile, though, and the sun decided to hide out behind some clouds during this mostly eastward-bound stretch, and so the second half-mile was great, a pace of about 7:40 a mile, and the third half-mile was good too, and for the first time I can remember in ANY race I’ve ever run, once I fully established stride, I did not break it. There were portions were I decelerated, but I never got below a jog. This was astonishing to me. My splits according to the app:

• 8:42

• 8:39

• 8:34

These include the seconds immediately before and after the race, but the idea that my third mile was my fastest mile is wild, something I’ve never done before.

Now, the one unfortunate thing is that the actual course length was a bit short, the app recording it at 3.03 miles. If I add 30 seconds for the short course, though, I should also subtract 30 seconds for the glacial beginning. So I think I was legitimately at a sub-26 pace overall, and this even though I didn’t really feel like my breath was all the way there at the outset. (I acknowledge that the slow initial pacing may have helped some with that.)

In the end I finished 17th among the 5K runners, 2nd in my age group, which is pretty good for the number of participants. While I’m racing I don’t really think in terms of how I finish relative to others, but it’s nevertheless rewarding to see my name higher rather than lower on the list.

I’ve run enough races to know that shaving even 15 seconds off your 5K time is a tall order though, so I’m optimistic but also realistic about the big goal. I know I have to have a good overall run with a minimum of adverse circumstances, and I believe I need to knock about 3 pounds off. When I ran sub-25 at age 39, I was 25 pounds lighter. I’m not going on any stupid diet though. I’m focusing on getting my miles in, and on avoiding excess late-night snacking, which is often just stress-eating. That’s my approach and I intend to stick with it, which among other things means controlling stress, which - would you believe - is proving easier to do with the uptick in cardio training and the downtick in nighttime aches.

My next race will probably be some time in mid-March given lots of other things going on. Last year my best time was in May. I’m thinking along similar lines - like I want to try and post some 10 second improvements and get to maybe mid-April or early May and really go for 25. Plus, I need to get to some more far-flung places. I’ve already in all four of Aurora’s counties!

Close observers of META-SPIEL may note that, yes, I actually wrote about a race the very same day for once. If you were one such close observer, congratulations!

To close, a teaser that you might be seeing even more hijinks around Illinois in upcoming weeks… even if I don’t run a race. Hmmmmm, what could that possibly mean…