Running Around Illinois: Bloomington

March 1, 2025

Miller Park Zoo Stampede 5K

Bloomington (McLean County)

Chip Time: 28:04*

Miller Park and I have a verrrrry special history… but it had been a long time.

I was last there on Labor Day 2006, marching in the Labor Day Parade, the second time I ran for State Representative… I think. The two campaigns (2004 and 2006) blend together. The parade route went down Wood Street out front of the park and broke up around there. The incumbent, my opponent, not only had a lot more cash, but also had an absurd advantage: the printing office of the State of Illinois had printed up a lot of Illinois themed coloring books, which he was able to distribute with his name on it. I had no coloring books with my name on them to distribute!

My recollection is that somewhere along the route, some store front had a logo that was a character with two big beefy arms. Between that and the comic book, I decided that if I ever did manage to distribute my own Illinois themed comic books, my Illinois would have two big beefy arms, but also a big smile. Like… Jim Thome, but as Illinois.

The downstate cities of Illinois, like much of the Midwest, have tended not to do that well economically in the last 50 years. Bloomington-Normal has been the big exception, in part because of having the universities, and largely because of the presence of State Farm, a non-manufacturing Fortune 100 company.

The west side of Bloomington is older, though. It’s got a very throwback kind of feel, with older housing, that feels very different from the campus areas. Miller Park is the crown jewel in the middle of the west side. It’s a sprawling green space with a zoo, a bandshell, a huge lagoon with paddle boats, and the pavilion - a large glass events space overlooking the lagoon. Overall the parks is really terrific, well kept… a very nice place to be.

It’s large enough that most of the race went through the park, with a spur out into the neighborhood and back in the middle. To our confusion, though, more than half of the course managed to go uphill!

There was another source of confusion: the simultaneously running of both a 5K and a 3K. The latter was more for walkers, but the courses largely coincided, and… we’ll get to that!

When I was in college, I got involved in a goofy scene on the nascent Internet: the t-file scene. Before most people were online, before there were blogs, a bunch of us spread across North America were writing and submitting to each other’s “publications”. Literally, these were just branded text files, plain text formatted. When you write something like that, and there aren’t even fonts to distract the reader, you’ve got to figure out how to make something compelling with a minimum of words. (Insert your own comment here about my achieving a “minimum of words”.)

In 1995 and 1996, we held the first two installments of Dummercon, the “annual convention of t-file writers”, in Philadelphia. It was then time to shift venues, and so the 1997 and 1998 installments landed in… Miller Park.

I think there were about 40 of us for Dummercon 3, and somehow more for Dummercon 4. We held a spelling bee? We had a prom-style court? It was admittedly all ridiculous, but ridiculousness can be great fun. We could all probably use more fun ridiculousness.

Anyway, this is, I think, the best-known photo from Dummercon 3. Yeah, that’s me:

I know what you’re thinking… Yeah, this was 1997, before Office Space came out. Somehow, some way, they stole the idea of smashing the printer from us. We know they did. Somehow.

Race time temp was 30 degrees, and foe once, there was a little crew. My old pal Rusty ran the race, and our old pal Ritzy came to witness the spectacle. Thanks to Ritzy, you can maybe see the brightness I brought to the race:

What I really like about the photo, by the way, is that it makes me look like I have so little idea what I’m doing that I ran around the finish line. Don’t worry though, the reality was, this was just the end of a loop. I was doing it right! Until later on when I wasn’t!

Also what I like about the photo is how I completely forgot to take any of my own pictures that day!

I went with a hat, my thin long-sleeved lime jacket, a long-sleeved technical shirt, thermal underwear, athletic sweatpants, gloves, and my mid-length wool socks. I managed to forget my calf sleeves, which I don’t think affected my race, but I do think it made the recovery over the rest of the day a little rougher. This was a little less than I’d worn in Rockford when it was five degrees colder, and I think it worked.

This was a larger race than most I run. The final results show 243 people in the 5K, and there were a whole lot more who did the 3K walk.

I felt ready to go, except, I was concerned my breathing was a little short. I’ve had trouble on races when I haven’t felt like I had my breathing right.

In 2006, during my second campaign, I was invited to speak at an immigrant rights rally at the bandshell in Miller Park. I decided to go out on a limb and try to give a bilingual speech.

I am not fluent in Spanish. In grade school, we had an hour or so of Spanish every Friday. Then I had four mediocre years in high school. Overall I wasn’t great, but, if I only spoke, I think I sounded pretty good? But I’m not going to fare well in a conversation.

I’ve given a number of speeches over time, and presentations, and whatever else where I’ve spoken in front of people. My normal approach is to come up with themes, think through what I want to say, practice some of it in my mind, have some minimal notes in front of me, but then wing the actual speech. But there was no way I could do that in Spanish. So I actually wrote out what I wanted to say in Spanish. I figured I could rely on sounding good.

I don’t still have written out what I said, but it went like this… I gave a short prepared statement in Spanish, and then I winged some things in English, and then I got back into Spanish. This was 2006 and a point in time where in national news the discusion was about the racist and xenophobic idea that “immigrants” were “criminals”.

I said this - and I think even if you don’t know much Spanish you’ll understand:

Los inmigrantes no son criminales… pero, hay criminales in los Estados Unidos.

Los criminales estan en la Casa Blanca!

Never before, and never since, have I gotten such a huge, enthusiastic response to anything I have said. I could see people who were wondering where on earth I was going explode in excitement.

So the race started by going down around the pavilion, along the lagoon, and then on a little rise into the eastern section of the park. Things seemed alright - my app clocked the first half-mile at 4:15, and that’s including the seconds before crossing the start line. Then the second half-mile also came in at 4:15, which was slower than I thought I was going.

We went in a loop, and then went back around the pavilion, and exited the park to the east. Surprisingly the following three blocks were all slightly uphill. I maintained stride up to the mile and a half mark, but I knew that my pace was down. The app clocked the second mile at 8:57. The third mile began to wear on me, though I thought I’d done well in terms of taking breaks. We reentered the park and wound up back on the same loop, then when we got back near the pavilion veered off to run through the zoo some, then back to the finish line.

The thing was, it seemed like a lot of distance left to go when my app said three miles… and it was right. In the end the app clocked 3.20 miles, and Rusty’s app clocked 3.24 miles. What we figured out later was that, when reentering the park, we were supposed to go left, not right, but the person holding the arrows there didn’t direct us properly. Given how curvy the path inside the park was, the likelihood is that we wound up running about an extra 0.15 of a mile. Using the app-determined third mile pace of 9:26 (which was admittedly pretty bad), 0.15 miles would be about 1:25 in duration. Shave that off of my chip time of 28:04 and I’m at 26:39, almost exactly my Rockford time of 26:42.

Now, this wasn’t my first race of the year. On New Year’s Day, I ran a 5K in Itasca, which was a total disaster - a lot more people than expected, not enough bathrooms, I wasn’t even able to start the race on time, and two miles in my hip was throbbing. I had to take two weeks off and then really focus on some hip and core work. I don’t know what happened to get me to that point, but I seem to have it under control now.

It all threw me off from doing a race for a little while though, and I’d hoped the Bloomington race would be a little warmer and go a little better. The previous week I’d done a 5K time on the treadmill of 25:25, and that was without really going for it. I still think I can get on track to approach 25:00 in a race… but I also know I’ve got a lot more work to do to get there.

What I need to do, I think, is summon my inner beefy Illinois.

Also, I think I might need to hire a graphic designer.