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Running Around Illinois: Blue Island

Blue Bridges 5K 9/24/23

September 24, 2023

Blue Bridges 5K

Blue Island (Cook County)

Time: What is time, really?

So, I haven’t written one of these in months. I’ve run some races, but they’ve all been races I wrote about last year. Does that mean I can’t write about them? I don’t know. Who sets the rules for this publication anyway?

Since I’ve last written, I’ve run these 3 races:

4/30/23 - Run for 102 5K (Brookfield) - 27:43

6/9/23 - LaGrange Rocks 5K (LaGrange) - 28:55

9/10/23 - Brookfield Zoo Zoo Run 5K (Brookfield) - 27:20.4

The spring, what with my child on three teams at once, really made stealing away on a Sunday morning feel exhausting. Now that we’re into fall I think I’m going to get more running in. And I did finally get a new race in, and, well…

My app informs that the total race distance was not 5K but was instead 2.7 miles, which is about 4.3K. Why? Because somebody put a sign in the wrong place, I’m pretty sure.

My app informs that my total time was 24:32. This wasn’t a chip-timed race, which is totally fine, but also there wasn’t even a clock at the end, and so, well, I don’t really know exactly how to gauge the time, but the app does say my 2nd and 3rd mile paces were both 9:10, and I started the app before crossing the start line, so I’m going to estimate that I would have wound up somewhere in the 27:30 to 27:45 range, which would have been totally fine.

Look: That’s not a very interesting paragraph, except insomuch that it helps to lay the groundwork for my telling you that this may have been the weirdest race I’ve ever run, because it may have been the weirdest location I’ve ever arrived at to start a race: the south end of Blue Island.

This is the picture I took about a block away from the start of the race:

Now, I had written a fair amount here about Blue Island, including how:

  • It’s not really directly served by any highways!

  • It’s divided north from south by the Calumet-Saganashkee Channel, but you can just call it the Cal-Sag!

  • North of the channel is an old village dating to the 1830s, and south of the channel is… really weird!

  • It all reminded me of Centralia!

I’m going to condense it all a little bit though, because in trying to save the draft I lost a lot of text and I didn’t quite like it all anyway. So:

This particular run was to benefit Guildhaus, a halfway house dedicated to getting men back on their feet after working through substance abuse issues. I happen to think organizations like this are fantastic, because I strongly believe in a society based not on retribution but on rehabilitation.

Guildhaus is located just south of the channel, almost under the Western Avenue bridge, and the race began and ended right out in front. Walk away from the bridge to the end of the block and hang a left, and there’s a little business district there, where I found the sidewalks all missing, seemingly in a state where they were being replaced. That’s where I found the huge concrete cylinder telling me to STAY AWAY.

In writing this up I learned that Blue Island used to be not only a transportation hub but also both a brick baking center and the location of numerous breweries. And this little part of town, south of the old main downtown with its historic homes, felt kind of like some kind of old brewery district which never recovered from Prohibition. What exactly was the concrete cylinder telling me to stay away from, exactly?

The race followed the Cal-Sag Trail, turning to go over one of the big blue bridges over the channel, then back across the next one, with most of the time just on the trail itself. At some point there was a sign that said it was time to turn around, and clearly that sign was simply put in the wrong place, because it made the course almost a full half mile too short.

After the race I chatted with my friend Django about just how weird the South Suburbs are. The big streets like Harlem Avenue tend to be these massive monstrosities, many of the street names are still carried over from Chicago, and then you just find yourself in these big weird areas which feel like the geographic equivalents of storage closets, and then other areas which are quasi-industrial and full of warehouses, so they’re literally gigantic storage closets. But then in the midst of all this there are historic little areas, the downtowns of places like Blue Island or Homewood, really incongruous with some of their immediate surroundings. There are certain shared qualities with the North Suburbs, like how almost everything is built to cater to the automobile, but there’s a little less… intentionality? I’m well aware that generally speaking there’s more affluence to the north and more pockets of poverty to the south, but I’m talking about an urban / suburban planning layer which just seems a lot less adaptive or responsive to the south, and I wonder how much of that is because of the overbuilt transportation infrastructure around the bottom of Lake Michigan and up into the city and how maybe it just kind of gouged up the potential for some of these communities to more naturally develop.

You call that “condensed”?

Yes. Yes, I do.

Anyway! I’ve written very little about the running here. And that’s okay, because this upcoming weekend is the Fall Color 5K at Morton Arboretum, and that’s a good time to check in with more about the actual running, what I’ve been doing on the treadmill, etc. I’m aiming to run 5 more races this year, to bring me to an even 10, which I hope will include at least one more new county.

As for Blue Island, downtown (uptown?) seemed interesting and I think it’d be interesting to more properly check it out sometime. That area below the channel, though, I think maybe it’s for the best to heed the concrete cylinder and just stay away.

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