Running Around Illinois: Bolingbrook

August 23, 2025

Parkie’s 5K

Bolingbrook (Will County)

Estimated Time: 28:10

First race in three months, and it showed… but it was really nice to get out and while my time wasn’t great, it had come at the end of what had been an exhausting week and I felt alright about it. And like I had set myself up to do better through the fall.

Parkie is the Pelican, as in Pelican Harbor, the aquatic park run by the Bolingbrook Park District. Bolingbrook is bigger than you think - 73,922 at the 2020 census - and it’s one of those places where the park district is very important to the municipal identity. While there’s a Bolingbrook High School, residents might go to high schools in five other districts, and Bolingbrook is so young (incorporated in 1965!) that it hasn’t really forged an identity. A number of larger suburbs like this have found an identity by developing top-flight park districts, and I actually think this might help explain a lot of the changing politics of some of these places over time.

As a kid growing up in northern Illinois, the southwest suburbs were never a destination, but Schaumburg was, and it was kind of understood as an archetypal large suburb, a place with no particular history, not even a downtown, but so much shopping! Bolingbrook, I think, is kind of an evolutionary take on Schaumburg, and then I wonder if there’s really going to be another one. You get to where the biggest growth has been over the last fifteen years - places farther out like Huntley or Plainfield - and I think they’re just so far out that they’re necessarily different. Bolingbrook is young enough that it still feels very new, but old enough to have a sophisticated park district that can function as a glue to something which otherwise might not feel so much like a community. And, weirdly, because it doesn’t have the history, it also doesn’t seem to have baggage that some exurbs can have, with sharper tensions between the old and the new. One thing that helps is that Bolingbrook is a very diverse municipality. Now if only it could get some rock clubs…

It was high 60s and overcast at the start of the race, but 89% humidity, and at the end of the race the sun peeked out. I hadn’t slept well, and it had been a very stressful week, and it was an 8:00am start, which is usually a little harder for me!

The race was almost entirely on streets, through a subdivision just north of the park district building, plus a little part on a bike path. It was fairly flat overall, with one long steady uphill part and one long steady downhill part. Water stations and clocks were set up at the one and two mile marks, and my app thought that the mile markers were right on, big pluses for the race planners. It drives me a little batty when the only water station is one mile in!

The first mile went well, sub 8:00, but figuratively it went downhill from there, because my breath just couldn’t keep up. My second and third miles went 9:29 and 9:48 according to the app. I think that my legs are in better shape than my lungs (yet again) and this is making me think I need to focus more on bike and elliptical time at the gym. I don’t actually see this recommended in things I read - generally the recommendation is to just go run more - but I feel like aerobic endurance is the number one thing holding me back from performing better, and there’s more than one way to build that back up.

(Somehow my official chip time was 27:09, but this was definitely wrong. 28:10 is my estimate because I didn’t get the gun time.)

The Bolingbrook neighborhood was nice, probably built in the 1970s. Places like this have arguably only recently started to gain what I might call a municipal patina - you’ve got to get to where you’ve got 50 year old trees to properly age your neighborhood, right?

This race seemed to be about 500 people, and it seemed like a pretty good mix of super hardcore runners all the way down to people for whom this is the one race they do. I was able to keep pace with people for a while but after about the 1.5 mile mark I just couldn’t do it and I saw a lot of people pass me who I’d previously passed.

The thing is that while I was bushed at the end… it felt nice to be running a race, which isn’t how it always goes. Sometimes it just feels like I’m making myself work!

Like I said, first race in three months, and it showed. My last race of the spring went really well (25:42) so why such a dropoff?

It’s easy enough to blame how busy the summer has been. Since that last race, I’ve been away from home a fair amount, and it can be hard to fit running into all of that walking around. But I’ve also found it a lot harder to run in hot weather, and I’ve even found it harder to run at the gym when it’s more hot and humid there. So I know I lost my running shape a little over the last three months, but I think I’ll be able to find it pretty quickly.

So how many races will I actually pull off this fall? How much of a priority will this wind up being?

In 2023 and 2024, I ran 6 races the latter half of the year. I’m actually hoping to be at about 7-8 this time around. Racing keeps me focused on running and running is what I’m using to maintain exercise balance, and I’ve felt a little off balance in recent months. The flipside is, it’s soccer season again, making Saturday mornings difficult, and I’m now coaching fall baseball. It’s going to be a busy fall.

But as it so happens, as of publication time, I’ve already gotten another one in, and I’ll have more to write about that one this week. And I’m eager to back out there again. So just maybe I’ll see you around somewhere!