Running Around Illinois: Hinsdale

December 10, 2023

Hinsdale Juniors Jingle Dash 5K

Hinsdale (DuPage County)

Chip Time: 28:45

If you follow the Metra BNSF line west from Brookfield, you get to La Grange, then Western Springs, then Hinsdale. Disembark at any of the downtowns, wander a little way off into residential blocks, and you’ll notice that in each successive suburb, the houses seem to magically get bigger. Hinsdale is where all of this culminates.

When I was young, I had no idea where Hinsdale was. But it’s not really a place which has grown or changed much at all, except maybe at the very edge against the interstate, where there’s a lot of medical offices. Downtown is one of those unusual places which feels permanently gentrified. It’s a nice place to go for lunch and do some light shopping. It’s harder to get a read on what it’s like to live there.

Would running a 5K provide crucial insight?

Of course it would, why else do I do these crazy things?

This was the last of 9 races I ran in 2023. It would make for odd sequencing to write a summary here, though. So I won’t do that. I’ll just note that I thought it likely I wouldn’t make another race, so I ran kind of assuming it would be the last one of the year. The year-end summary, that comes later.

Robbins Park is a typical nice big suburban park a few blocks off the edge of downtown Hinsdale. The race started and ended at the far corner of the park, in the middle of an affluent residential neighborhood, but a couple of blocks away from the more ostentatious homes.

The “Juniors” sponsoring the race were the Hinsdale Junior Woman’s Club. I always find it weird when the word “junior” gets attached to a group of people who are in their 20s and 30s, but English is a weird language and America is a weird country and I understand this is all something which dates back many decades. I just thought at first when I saw the event that it was an event mostly for kids!

It was 34 degrees at race time. This was cold, but I actually got the attire right, wearing a short sleeve race shirt under a thin wicking running jacket under the long sleeved shirt for this race, which I got in an XL because that’s what they had left, and which worked well given it was the third layer. I had my thin athletic pants plus shorts and also calf sleeves, and thin gloves and a short winter hat. I never got too hot, never got too cold. So… I can’t blame the weather for running a crap race.

One thing I’m going to blame is that I spent the day before filling six bags of yard waste, which was really tiring. And the reality is that I’ve felt exhausted for about five weeks running. I still felt tired when the race was about to start, and usually by then I at least have had enough adrenalin going to overcome any latent sleepiness. Not this time though.

At gun time, someone had what I assume was a megaphone, and until right before the start I could barely understand what she was saying. When she was like, okay, everyone ready? I was not ready. I mean, I was ready, but I figured we’d be told one minute! or something like that. Instead I think we got a countdown from 10. I was hovering toward the back, and so when I got to the start, it was a little cramped. That was fine though. I figured I was going to start a little slower and try and build my way up.

About three blocks up, something happened which I’ve never experienced in a previous race: we were running on a brick street. The day before when we’d gone to get my packet, I remember turning onto that street and saying to my son:

Guess what?

What?

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrick!

I didn’t realize we’d be running on that same street though. Now of course this being Hinsdale the brick street was well-kept. But this being a brick street, it wasn’t some super smooth thing. You had to pay close attention the entire time to make sure you weren’t landing on some weird little rise. A couple people just went and ran on the sidewalk instead.

There were also numerous intersections where no volunteers or police were stationed, and there were most definitely cars which wanted to get through. I didn’t see anything bad happen but it was a little unnerving. I’m used to it being a lot clearer to drivers that they need to go around. This contributed to a race which felt just a little off in a couple of ways. I understand that sometimes the immediate neighborhood for a race may not be “participating”, but this felt particularly non-participatory.

The course overall was close to one long rectangle, kind of like running around the face of a DVD player. I kept stride for about the first 2K. But when we got to around the halfway mark, something else unexpected happened. It turns out that Hinsdale has hills. Where did these things come from? Nobody else has hills. How did Hinsdale get hills?

Well, between hitting the first upslope and hitting about the 1.5 mile mark, my momentum totally crashed. I had a hard time maintaining a run over the last half. There were at least significant rises and on another day I might have welcomed the novel challenge, but on this day… no.

Adding to the weirdness of it all was that this was a jingle run. As part of the swag bag, everyone got a jingle bell attached to a tied ribbon, which could have been worn on the wrist. I didn’t do that, most people didn’t do that, but some people did, and the result was that at times, while running the race, it sounded like the Salvation Army was giving chase.

In the end, my final time was pretty bad at 28:45. Not the worst race I’ve run this year, but very close.

Back in, I think, the fall of 2016 or 2017, a couple of friends had stopped by, one from out of town. The conversation turned to running, as one of them had been a cross country runner in high school, and the other had done a marathon a couple years earlier. It so happened that earlier that day I had run 8 miles, and I talked about the idea of transitioning from running being “a thing that I’m doing” to being “a thing that I do”.

I have literally not run 8 miles in a day since. It’s been over 6 years since I so much as ran a 10K. But, I did run 9 races this year. And I write this series. So has running actually become a thing that I do? Or am I something of a poseur?

To be fair to myself, I’ve had some setbacks. 2015 was the year I first started running races. One spring or summer, while running at a fair clip, I tripped over an uneven sidewalk and landed hard on my hip, and it knocked me out of action physically for a while but mentally for a little while longer. Some time after that, I started getting intense pain in my right knee while running, which got diagnosed as IT band syndrome. The way I got through it was to just not run for a while. When we moved in 2019, I wanted to try and get more serious again, and I did run 4 races that spring / summer / fall, but then when Covid hit, even though running was arguably the one activity I could still do, I kind of let Covid shut that down too. And then of course last October, I broke my clavicle a week after my best time in five years.

One of the things which most separates humans from other intelligent animals is excuses. I don’t claim any special zoological information, but I’ve spent enough time around dogs and cats that I feel it’s reasonable to say they may have reasons but they don’t make excuses. No cat has ever started a sentence with “Well…” and you know it.

Running, or maybe running-as-a-subset-of-exercise, lends itself remarkably well to excuses. I’m tired. My knee is weird. It’s cold out. It’s Tuesday. I don’t know how I feel about sidewalks anymore. Who has the time for that? I can’t find that one jacket, never mind that I have three other equally functional jackets, I envisioned myself running in that one jacket, and now I’m all thrown off. It gets dark early. What about the children? WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?

For me, the largest category of excuses is usually along the lines of I can’t get the timing right. This is a major category for me. I legitimately struggle with daily sequencing. When my daily sequencing is thrown off, I never seem to adapt correctly. I have too much caffeine. I have not enough food. And in the midst of all of that any number of excuses pop up which are basically alternative forms of Well, now just isn’t the right time.

This very paragraph came into existence at 3:01pm on December 31, 2023, and as I look out the window, I think: My calves hurt. I ate too recently. It’ll be dark too soon. Is that actually snow? All excuses.

My calves hurt, though, that one has been popping up a lot lately, and it’s kind of half-excuse, half-truth. I’ve written about wearing compression socks and compression sleeves. This is legitimately an ongoing Thing I’ve been dealing with, to the point where I actually went to a podiatrist a couple weeks ago looking for a way to get the whole thing in better control. I was given a prescription for a mild NSAID, I was told to wear a night sleeve on one foot each night, I was told to go to physical therapy, and I was told to get one of two pairs of shoes. And I’ve done the latter - I now have a paid of Hoka Bondi 8 running shoes with a high arch insert, which I’ve just started wearing as a replacement for my everyday shoes. If it goes well, I’ll replace the running shoes next, though honestly, they’ve been pretty good. (They’re Saucony Triumph 13s.)

So I’m attempting to approach 2024 from two perspectives. First, I want to clear out the half-excuse-half-truths like this calf tightness thing. I’m going to approach it more seriously and get it under control. Second, I’m going to attempt to be better in not listening to the Excuse Man in my head.

And so along those lines, my intention is to train more. I actually think 9 was a decent number of races and I have a hard time imagining it being a whole lot more than that given all of the other silly things I do. But the mileage logged inbetween races wasn’t enough, and the time spent on other cardio / endurance training also wasn’t enough, and not just for achieving better race results. I average getting to the gym more than 5 times a week, but I’m often there for only 20-30 minutes. This year I’m going to figure out how to improve upon that.

This is all of course a setup for deciding to hell with it, and going out and running 2.5 miles in the snow at the park. I’ve never actually run in the snow before!

I’m a counter, and the end of the year is a counting time. This year I went to 22 concerts, I went to 6 MLB games, and, somehow, I made 5 separate trips to Wisconsin. (Maybe I could have run more races had I managed to stay in Illinois…)

It’s the running which has captured my counting imagination most recently. But sometimes things go in a different direction than intended. My whole weird idea of running a race in all 102 counties of Illinois was a complicated challenge to myself, because I felt like I needed a push to maintain running. But then this year, I found that I wasn’t really aggressively going long distances for running, and I was just fitting in fairly local races as they came up.

Self-challenges like that are a prime mechanism I use to overcome excuses. But we all have different mechanisms, don’t we? Mine might just more convoluted than most. Or, maybe they’re not, it’s just that you all don’t write tomes to double down on the convolution.

My hope is that through writing about things like this, I’m not just Working Some Things Out, but that I’m also striking a chord with others. Maybe it’s selfish or conceited, though I kind of think it’s just human condition, but I’d like to be able to reach more people. I’d like to connect with more people. And I’m hopeful of finding new ways to do that in 2024.

As for running itself, I have two specific numeric goals, besides the admittedly wacky idea of getting to all 102 counties of Illinois. My big goal is still breaking 25 minutes again. And my goal after that is breaking half my age, whenever that might come. What’s built into that second goal is the idea that this really is Something I Do, and will continue doing it for a long time.

Wherever META-SPIEL winds up in the near future, I hope you’ll follow me on these admittedly wacky quests, and I hope you’ll consider recommending it all to people you know. It may be an outrageous pipe dream but I believe we can have some kind of virtual community, not necessarily centered specifically around what I’m writing, but where META-SPIEL is part of a web of other creativity that people are sharing with one another and interacting over.