Running Around Illinois: Lisle

It wasn’t exactly planned like this, but the last two races I ran in 2025 were both in Lisle. I expected I’d run at least one or two more but for a number of reasons it didn’t work out that way.

This is going to be a bit of an odd entry… I’ve been mulling over what to write about Lisle for a while, but then I also have a lot to write about (relative) aging and running and other things, which has all been informed just this week by reading the book The Inner Game of Tennis. So this post sort of serves as a break-the-seal for what I think will be a mini-flurry here at the end of the year.

I’ve written about running the Fall Color 5K multiple times. This was my eighth time, and it’s really the best race, except it’s also a frustrating race, because if you’re not there super early you may run into a roadblock just trying to get into the parking lot, and then you might have trouble getting into what passes for the chute in the place you want, and that happened this year. But it’s all good. Morton Arboertum is an eminently pleasant place to be, I ran a perfectly average race, all good.

The second Lisle race was a new one for me. If you’re a runner at all, you know that leading into Thanksgiving, and even on the morning thereof, there are a LOT of turkey trots around, and they almost all have logos like this:

The idea of running a race on Thanksgiving proper seems a little wacky to me though, because in my mind there’s no way to fit in a race in the morning, the day is necessarily fully booked. Admittedly this is because our typical Thanksgiving meal is at noon and almost two hours away, and when I was a kid I think I had three different places to be on the day, but even if you’re just staying near home… isn’t there a lot to do? Don’t you want to not be tired that day? Someone else will have to explain that one.

The Lisle race was a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving which worked well for me. It was held primarily in and around Lisle Community Park, across the street from Lisle High School, and it all begged the question:

Where do people actually live in Lisle?

Seriously, I go through Lisle multiple times a year, and I don’t think I’ve seen more than seven houses. I don’t think I passed any clump of residences on the way to this race, and I think in running we only saw three or four. This is a municipality of some 23,000 souls and for the life of me I can’t figure out where they could possibly live.

The park is like a lot of similar suburban parks: big and beautiful and immaculately kept and certainly a centerpiece of the community, if such community in fact exists. But you literally have to drive to get there. The more of these places that I see, with similar sorts of arrangements, the more interesting I find it all, because it’s a very different approach to community than, say, where we lived in Chicago, where we were about six blocks away from four different community parks, including a large one (Portage Park), but not nearly so large as this grand park in Lisle. And the thing is that I’m not totally convinced that this turns Lisle into less of a community… I think it’s just structured in a very different way. In the city, while there was a lot more of a walkable neighborhood, it rarely felt like the community was organized around the schools therein. In a lot of suburbs, though, the community is often ultra-organized around the high school especially, and what passes for local political intrigue is often centered around schools and parks. Now of course that suggests a lack of political reckoning around issues like wealth imbalance… but, sigh, is anyone properly reckoning with issues like that anywhere else?

I think that the traditional (and appropriate) read on “the suburbs” as white flight destinations is long overdue for modernization. These non-places became places and there’s a community culture evident even though there’s no apparent residents and I don’t think this is well-appreciated. I don’t mean to overstate it all but I think a lot of these places have changed greatly from the stereotypes they once may have been.

The actual course for the Turkey Trot started in a park district parking lot, went along Short Street and Ohio Street past small commercial buildings, then cut back in to a walking / running path which went back toward the park. It was a flat, simple course, well-suited for the number of participants (250 maybe), and with the feels of something that had been successfully pulled off for many years. It was cold, in the high 30s, but sunny, so one of those races where you start off cold and end up hot.

My splits were not great. The app claims 8:10 / 9:14 / 9:42 and an overall distance of 3.06 miles. By contrast, my Arboretum splits were very weird, 9:26 / 8:42 / 8:56, which probably means I didn’t cross the start line for 30+ seconds but which also means my second mile was my best. Indeed my first mile that day was terrible, in part from being back in the pack, in part because the first mile at the Arboretum is largely uphill. But not so with the Turkey Trot - like many races, everyone takes off hot, so it’s all a guy can do to keep pace.

In the end the Turkey Trot time of 27:22 was my median time of the year, with an overall range from yuck (28:11) to yay (25:42). I ran 9 races, down from 2024 (12) but even with 2023. I had been thinking as of late that this was a down year but the overall numbers tell me it was actually quite an average year. It’s funny how we think about things.

As it happens, I think back upon this race though with a certain ambivalence which I don’t like. It’s not a statement on the course or the setting or the weather or the time of day, it’s more a statement on me and what I find to be a recurring difficulty with motivation. Running is a curious thing, in that it helps you feel better overall, but in the moment you don’t tend to feel very great at all, or at least I don’t, usually. I’ve settled on running as a sort of trick to keep myself going, to make sure I’m getting cardio workouts, but then I’ve also had to concoct a lot of elaborate tricks around the running… tricks like writing about something which I don’t really know a lot about and which I’m not all that great at, but being able to lean in on those realities to talk about it all in a different way!

The elusive goal which has kept me somewhat focused is the 25-minute 5K, which I last achieved in 2016. That I actually broke 26 this year tells me that the goal is not impossible. Adding to the calculus is that my friend Jormak, about my age, managed to accelerate his own running this year, completing a half-marathon at an average pace below 8:00/mile. He and I were at about the same level back in 2016 when I ran my best-ever race (10K in 50:36) but he managed to unlock something which I haven’t. He’ll talk about running for a longer distance and being able to get into “the zone”.

Any observant META-SPIEL reader will have long since figured out that I’m a chronic overthinker and something like running provides fertile terrain for the unquiet mind. Ah, but, the thing about running, and even more so racing, is that at its best, it quiets the damn mind. That, I think, is the hallmark of “the zone”, the quieted mind having given itself over to the engaged body.

A couple nights ago I finished reading W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis. It is a short book and it is, but mostly is not, about tennis. Tennis however is an ideal sport for considering “the inner game”. To oversimplify greatly, it is about the idea that mental and emotional comportment matters, perhaps as much as pure athletic performance. Indicative of how odd this book is, it has forewords from NFL coach Pete Carroll and general scumbag Bill Gates, and it came to my attention because it was recommended by Tyler Mahan Coe, he of the Cocaine & Rhinestones podcast. These people… have nothing to do with one another.

Tennis is ideal for considering “the inner game” because we can all easily imagine the frustrated tennis player smashing their racket. Golf is also ideal for similar reasons but the thing about tennis is that one of the most important statistics is literally named “unforced errors”. It is a deeply, deeply mental game, and the greatest competitors in the sport often win not simply through superior physicality but through a superior ability to perservere.

Running is a lot like tennis or even more so golf. You might find yourself on a challenging course, but the limitations of your success are effectively entirely personal and have nothing to do with any external opponent. Indeed when I run a race I’m not concerned about where I place, except insomuch that it provides me a benchmark. The challenge is purely a personal one, to see how well I might perform.

After finishing the book what I recognized is that, very recently, but not just very recently, I have been avoiding running, and it has a lot to do with seeking to avoid my own harsh judgment. Such judgment is not necessarily limited to and maybe not even primarily about my times. I am a person who, if I get sick, I often get upset with myself, as though being sick is a sign of weakness. I am known to apologize profusely for being sick and in the process potentially bringing burden upon others. Well, this plays well into aspects of running, notably how I physically feel, how my lower legs have a tendency to ache (even when I haven’t been running!), how I might finish a race and it be an okay time but I think that I should feel better. I think the people in my life would all agree that I am not a cruel person, but if there is anyone which I am at times unnecessarily cruel towards, it is myself.

Well, so it goes often with tennis players, and I can see a lot of myself in Gallwey’s telling about how tennis players chide themselves, and in Gallwey’s explanation of how thoroughly counterproductive this chiding often is. Gallwey preaches the idea of complete focus on the tennis court, and the player who is having an internal (or external) meltdown is not focused. I am also able to readily understand this from the perspective of a batter in baseball (such a similar role as a returner in tennis). I am even able to see this in terms of the difficulty my son had this past spring and summer, diligently trying to follow all of the coaches’ instructions at the plate what with where to put his feet and where to put his elbow and what to do with his hip and how to distribute his weight, but absolutely none of this actually helped him hit the ball - it was all a distraction from see-ball-hit-ball, which was the thing he really needed to focus on.

The recognition that although I inched closer and closer to my goal of the 25 minute 5K that I was still pretty far from it, and that I’ve got less than a year to get there (as my goal was to reach the target before turning 50)… this combined with a can’t-completely-let-it-go self-chiding over how my calves hurt or my hips don’t seem right… well, the self-abuse here is stupid and I need to get the hell over myself already!

I am accordingly going to start trying some other things. Today for example I went on YouTube and found post-run yoga to do, and learned that after running 3.6 miles, pigeon pose feels like somebody has ignited a previously unknown part of my hip. And I’m going to try to rev back up in early 2026 like I did at the beginning of 2024.

I’d very much like to hear from other people who have read The Inner Game of Tennis though. For that matter I’d really like to play tennis again! It’s been 20+ years since I played a full tennis match. And I’d like to hear from people who might connect with some of what I’m saying here. I think a lot of how we as humans beat ourselves up could be alleviated if, you know, we were talking to each other instead of spending so much time in our own heads!

Do I think I can break 25 minutes in 2026? Oh, probably not. But I’m going to try… and not get mad at myself if I don’t get there!