Running Around Illinois: Herscher

September 4, 2022

Herscher Hare & Tortoise Race 5K

Herscher (Kankakee County)

Gun Time: 28:58

When I had the idea for this series, this was the kind of installment I had in mind: chronicling a race through a town I’d never been in.

Herscher is on Illinois Route 115, a little west-southwest of Kankakee. Here it is on the map. Unless you live within 10 miles, it’s unlikely you would ever have occasion to go through Herscher, because its state highway takes you from Kankakee to… nowhere.

(Google actually routed me off of the state highways, so I wound up on a county road through Kankakee County. This was neat though - for the first time I can remember in over 20 years, I saw a bald eagle flying overhead!)

Herscher is a little bigger than most towns dotted along obscure state highways. It’s got about 1,500 people, and a high school which seems to serve a pretty large geographic area. Herscher, facially, seems fairly comparable to the town where I went to high school, Winnebago: no stoplight, but it does have a grocery store, a bank, a smattering of businesses, a couple of restaurants, an old-school downtown consisting of a long block of 100+ year old buildings.

This particular race was held at a highly unusual time - 5:30pm on a Sunday - but it being Labor Day weekend, this actually made it a convenient time for me to take a longer-than-usual jaunt. Remember, the long-term gimmick behind the Running Around Illinois series is that I have a ridiculous goal of eventually running a race in each of the 102 counties of Illinois. Kankakee County means I’ve made it to a whopping 6. 96 to go!

The race started on the street that’s between the high school and the high school football field. From the starting point, looking left, here’s the photo I took of the high school. Note the presence of a greenhouse - I have not seen that before at a high school!

The staging area was in the football field parking lot. Once you get past the football field, you are past all of Herscher:

There’s a fence that runs around the track, and on the fence are a number of those green signs you might see when you enter a town that say things like STATE VOLLEYBALL CHAMPS 2005 or whatever. Most of the signs were for individuals, and most if not all were for track or cross country. There might have been other signs elsewhere that I just didn’t see, but a high school where what they’ve most excelled in over time is running? That also feels like Winnebago to me.

I of course did not run in high school. In ninth grade, I was short and dumpy. So I didn’t do anything sportsy in high school. If I could do it all over again, I think I would have played soccer. It’s way too much of a stretch to imagine me at age 13 thinking I could be a distance runner though.

This was the 40th annual installment of this race, so while I imagine there’s a back story to the name, I didn’t see anything explaining it. Even though I was a walk-up registrant, the cost was only $14. The website suggests that the main entity putting the race on is the Kankakee River Running Club, and in turn, their website suggests the existence of a small but hardcore group. I’d estimate there were 120 people at the starting line, and I was surprised by how many of them seemed hardcore.

How can I tell when another runner is more hardcore than me? Here’s a handy inventory of things:

• Shorts that look like they were bought at a running store and not Target

• Shirt that’s from a running store in a different state

• Overheard passing reference to “Boston qualifying”

• Much more tan than me, especially in the legs

• Bandana or headband

• Chunky calves, like they’re trying to be Xherdan Shaqiri

Above all else though, there is this:

• Visor

I do not think I have ever finished ahead of a runner wearing a visor.

There was an oddity to this race: there was no actual start line. There was a yellow pole off to the side of the street which I assumed was the starting point, but nobody ever said that, and so the start of the race was kind of a weird jumble, as people weren’t really lined up well. But the street was wide enough and there weren’t too terribly many people and I was right at the yellow pole, so, it was weird, but not a big deal.

We started off running south along Elm Street. We ran across some old school tracks where the crossing was made of wood. At some point there were two high school kids pointing that everyone should go left. Had they not been there, and instead we would have just kept running, we would have wound up immediately in the middle of a soybean field, so bless those high schoolers.

After two more turns we crossed over Main Street, and we were suddenly in a subdivision. This was the weirdest part of Herscher that I saw, because half the lots in the subdivision were empty, and felt like they’d been empty for a while. There were some houses, to be sure, and the houses seemed nice and all, but it did kind of feel like a tiny slice of the American housing market crisis: the lots were simply too big. We need smaller houses - not tiny, just smaller - what once upon a time might have been called “starter homes” - and Herscher seems like a perfectly logical place for there to be more smaller houses like this. If you can’t even get a modest but nice home in a small town, though, where can you ever hope to get one?

By the time we got into the subdivision, I was already toast. I could actually tell early on in the race that while my legs felt fine, I did not have a lot of power. The conditions were good - at race time it was 75 degrees and cloudy - but it was also 81% humidity and there was an off and on breeze that I swear was only ever a headwind and never a tailwind. My first mile was 8:15 but I was really dragging after that. 28:58 is not what I’d hoped for.

To be fair to myself, this was my first race post-Covid - thanks to that novel virus I didn’t do my normal weight work for about two weeks, and I’m still not back up to previous strength at the gym. I also spent a while earlier in the day hacking away rogue Rose of Sharon trees, shrubs, bushes, whatever, they’re all over the damn place, or rather, they were, and now they’re just tiny woody stems peeking out of the ground. But I digress.

At the conclusion of the race - and remember, it was only $14 for walk up registration - there were waters and bananas and watermelons (!) but also a sign noting that your bib would get you $1 off ice cream and also a free beer. Where exactly? Well, as it turned out, Herscher had a small Labor Day weekend festival going on. I went to the other side of town (six blocks away) and at the town park I found some deflated inflatable somethings, a couple of food trucks, a typical carnival concessions thing with funnel cakes, a beer tent, and, much to my surprise and confusion, a 16 inch softball tournament going on. I had no idea anyone played 16 inch anywhere outside of Cook County!

I assumed the free beer would be some kind of light beer, and as I walked over to the beer tent, I saw Miller Lite signs. Then I got closer though and found there were like 9 different choices, including cans from a local brewery. I rarely drink beer anymore but after an early evening race seemed like a good time for one and I got this:

This was from Brickstone Brewery in Bourbonnais, and I do give it an enthusiastic thumbs up. (At least three of you are thinking: Yeah, but what does Beer Advocate have to say? See for yourself.)

The most magical find in all of Herscher, though, was at the edge of the park, near the field, for that is where I found the lion water fountain:

I am pretty sure - now it has been a very long time so I can’t be totally sure - but I am pretty sure that I have seen this lion water fountain before, at Sunshine Park in Byron. I do not think it is there anymore, and I am not even sure Sunshine Park is really there anymore. But look: things like this are simply wonderful to encounter. They are ridiculous and all and yes one can never be too sure what’s going on with the pipes going to a park water fountain but come on! This is the kind of thing which is missing from today’s playgrounds. Not that the cookie-cutter playground equipment isn’t frankly better than the weird dangerous metal shit it replaced, mind you. But playgrounds are supposed to be weird and funky, and what’s weirder and funkier than going to get a drink of water and having to put your head in a lion’s mouth to do so?

While briefly exploring downtown Herscher I also noticed this:

This plaque, commemorating founder Woolfe Leiser, was at Leiser Furniture, which, presumably, is not the only Leiser Furniture, though the thought did rather quickly occur to me that it might very well be the only one, the only one also being the first one. (Immediately available information online is inconclusive!) Pro tip to Leiser Furniture though: your outdoor plants are obscuring your commemorative plaque something fierce!

Next race up is this upcoming Sunday, the Brookfield Zoo Zoo Run. If things go well I’ll get a few more races in before the end of the year, and hopefully knock at least two more counties out in the process. Who’s joining me out there?