Running Around Illinois: Cicero*

Lions Run for Hope 5K 9/25/22

September 25, 2022

Lions Run for Hope 5K

Cicero* (Cook County)

Chip Time: 27:16.9

Yes, there’s an asterisk up there. We’ll get to the asterisk very soon. And, yes, if you’re paying close attention, that’s my best YTD time. We’ll get to that too.

First, though, let’s talk about Cicero.

The race began and ended along the edge of Cicero Community Park. It’s a big greenspace, flanked by the Bobby Hull Community Ice Rick, complete with a statue of Bobby Hull to look over everything:

I have to assume that, in the not so distant past, something else was on the site of the park, because the surrounding environs are… most unusual. Consider the race path:

This is the boxiest race I’ve run. Only six total turns. Entirely flat, except for dips at two train viaducts.

We started off along 34th Streer in the park, and turned right onto Laramie. That huge green thing in the lower right, as the map shows, is none other than Hawthorne Race Course, and yes, it is still active, and yes, at some point, you get the distinct whiff of horse manure. What, you thought you had to go out into the country to run a horse poop race?

The next turn is a right onto Pershing. You can’t see it on the map, but the other side of Pershing, that’s the back end of the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant. That doesn’t smell, but it truly is a bizarre thing to be running next to.

The next turn is a right onto Central. Greater Chicagoans are by now recognizing all of these street names, and may be wondering how these could be places we’d be running. I was wondering that myself. That’s Morton College in the lower left. So we’re not even halfway through the race, and we’ve gone past a horse track, a wastewater treatment plant, and a community college.

The longest straightaway is up Central all the way to 31st Street, and as the map suggests, once you’ve cleared Morton College, you’re in a residential neighborhood. Most of the rest of the race was through Cicero proper, about which I have more to say below.

The simplicity of the course, the nice weather for running (cloudy and 60 degrees), all that no doubt helped me achieve my better-than-usual time. The weird thing was that only about a half mile in, I was a full 10 seconds behind a group ahead of me, and a full 10 seconds ahead of a smaller group behind me. I almost certainly broke out too hot, and I guess I settled in to a decent first mile pace, but since I was running in the rightmost lane of a major east-west artery, with a wastewater plant off to my left, no runner within 100 feet of me, and this was in the first mile, I really had no meaningful sense for how I was doing. It felt like the Iron Maiden song. But in Cicero. Technically.

And here’s where the asterisk comes in: the Lions in question here were the Stickney - Forest View Lions Club. This was the ninth annual such race, and every previous year, the race had been held in Stickney, which, well, why wouldn’t the Stickney - Forest View Lions Club hold their 5K in Stickney? But this year, apparently their permit was denied without explanation (that’s what I overheard). Even the list of sponsors didn’t include the Village of Stickney. (It did include the Village of Forest View.)

And so somehow the race not only wound up in Cicero, but with the main sponsor being Larry Dominick, Mayor of Cicero. Or maybe the Town of Cicero, Larry Dominick, Mayor. I’m not really sure. Except that I am very sure that only with Larry Dominick personally on board do you cordon off even a single lane of traffic on Pershing Road or Laramie Avenue.

Cicero, I think, is one of those places which is remarkably poorly understood by almost everyone. Yes, it’s a place with, mmm, a checkered past. Today? It’s supermajority Latino - 89% according to the 2020 census. It’s a central part of a large Latino (and specifically Mexican) population which extends from the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago out into numerous west and southwest suburbs. It has a look and feel that is more throwback - more “classic Chicago” - than a whole lot of the city proper at this point. It moves at a different pace.

Stickney also moves at a similarly different pace. But Stickney is smaller - only about 6,600 people. Forest View is only 800 people. I’ve written about Stickney at some length, of course, if you haven’t read it, this is one of my favorites:

It is hard for me to imagine what exactly the Stickney - Forest View Lions Club might have done to fall out with the Village of Stickney. But Cicero came to the rescue.

Speaking of the Lions Club itself: Stickney and Forest View adding up less than 10,000 people, you know this isn’t going to be an especially large Lions Club compared to most. And it being a Lions Club, you can easily imagine that it’s a group of people who have been around for a while. The emcee of the event, Lion Dan, looked like the sort of guy who had spent the last 20 years primarily being known as Lion Dan, and I suspect it’s a good gig if you can get it.

About 120 people finished the race. Some of them were walkers, and even at that, I very much doubt the last handful of people walked the full 5K. It was an interesting assortment of people overall: Stickney old-timers, some randos like me, and, very prominently, TEAM DZIUBEK, a group of maybe 10 Polish speakers who are maybe all associated with a gym out of Bridgeview, centered around one Grzegorz Dziubek, who won the overall race with a 5K time of 17:59.0. Grzegorz Dziubek is not a big guy, but when I saw him collect his medal for winning the race, I thought, I am not messing with THAT guy. He could have knocked me over from ten feet away with just his intensity. TEAM DZIUBEK swept a lot of the highest places, and in the process probably skewed the overall competitiveness of the race greatly.

Consider my own bracket, men 45-49. The best time in the bracket was 21:45.4. The third-best time in the bracket was 33:43:0. That’s a huge difference between a dude with an excellent time and a dude with a perfectly fair time.

I slotted almost halfway inbetween them at 27:16.9, for which I won this:

Now, I’m not sure I ran well enough to “deserve” a medal. But I don’t think that’s the right way to think about the Lions Run for Hope.

In the men 75-79 bracket, there were two finishers. The guy who finished first had with him a small, plump, very friendly beagle, who I believe was with him the whole time. The fellow he edged out was blind, and was very proud to receive a medal. (He also won a free pizza!)

Where else today are you going to find a nominal competition that brings together a team of intense Polish racers and a happy old hound, to catch a whiff of horse manure, under the beneficence of an old school politician?

Anyway: This was my best race of the year to date, and my legs were good throughout, and it was only my breathing which I think kept from me at least breaking 27:00. One trick I’ve used for a while is to run with a cough drop, but this time I felt like it wasn’t really working at all… like maybe I should try a different kind of cough drop. Which I think I might look for in the next week.

This upcoming Saturday is the race I’ve done most often: the Fall Color 5K at Morton Arboretum. It’ll be my sixth time. 26:28 is the best I’ve ever run there, but that was an eternity ago, in 2017. Hopefully this is when I break 27:00 this year!

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