Running Around Illinois: Lyons Township

I got a couple of races in this spring, but didn’t manage to leave the township. So this installment is a little bit about the idea that a township is even a thing, and mostly about the running.

So that I don’t bury the lede here: the Tower Trot is a fairly well measured course, and this is the first time I’ve broken 26:00 on a full 5K course since 2016, which is awesome. I’ll get to all that.

First though, a little bit about “township living”:

This is where Lyons Township is within Cook County:

And this is a municipality map for the township (with Stickney Township thrown in for good measure!)

So there are a lot of municipalities partly or fully within the township. And then the main high school around here is Lyons Township High School, but it doesn’t really serve the entire township. Or maybe it does. Honestly, it’s all pretty confusing, because townships in Illinois are super weird.

What I really like is how, in explaining township government, the website for Lyons Township lists as the very first power:

• A township may sue and be sued.

This is such a wonderfully abstract and circular thing to list, especially to list first.

In more rural parts of the state, townships tend to be responsible for road maintenance, and that’s the main thing they tend to be associated with. Here, though, where very little of the township is unincorporated, it seems that the primary function of the township proper is to facilitate transportation for disabled seniors.

We’ve been in the southern part of Brookfield - the part in Lyons Township - for six years now. We’ve been in all of the municipalities, including the super weird ones. Hodgkins. Indian Head Park. McCook. I forget sometimes that Justice and most of Bridgeview are also in the township. That means SeatGeek Stadium is in Lyons Township! I’m probably paying more for that mess than I realize!

Crammed into this township, we have the Portage, we have very recent development, we have multiple municipalities incorporated in the 19th century, we have a lot of forest preserve land, the parts below I-55 feel very different from the parts above it… it’s really not a homogeneous area at all, aside from the lack of hills…

Somehow in the middle of a perfectly flat region and a perfectly flat neighborhood, a street has a wacky slope you never realize until you try to run its full length. Such is the case in Countryside, even more in Western Springs.

The Countryside 5K was a small affair - maybe 100 people - unchipped, and as it turned out, not very exactly measured, but I kind of expected that. When it’s a small race like this and inexperienced volunteers are trying to pull everything together, this can happen pretty easily. (The race was to benefit the foundation for the local elementary school district.) Smaller races can have their charm but can also lead to situations where you’re racing without anyone within 100 feet of you, which makes pacing with someone else very difficult.

Countryside wasn’t incorporated until 1960, and its subdivisions definitely feel like they’re of that vintage. This particular one is sandwiched behind big box stores, making for the odd effect that it’s a place with no downtown, but Best Buy and TJMaxx are both within walking distance. I’ve found that villages of recent vintage like this, snuck inbetween major thoroughfares, can have very similar feels. There might not be any 100 year old family businesses, but you can wind up with a number of places that seem to have stuck around since they opened. Even the big box stores can feel that way - shopping centers which have persisted for 40+ years become the core of “the local community”.

This particular subdivision adjoining Countryside Park is tall and thin, and so that’s how the course was, with multiple segments used twice, and two places where the course called for running into a dead end and turning around. Sometimes when such a place is laid out, streets are given signifcant cambers to handle rain runoff, and sometimes everything is lightly graded to sort of slowly push water down the street, and I think both phenomena were in effect. It makes a lot of sense - use gravity to help control water flow - but it isn’t always the best running course!

For whatever reason, this particular morning, I just wasn’t totally feeling it. The 24:11 time seems great, but the course was roughly 2.8 miles, so my 5K time probably would have been around 26:45. I felt like I was lumbering toward the end. Aside from a gnarled very beginning to the course (two quick turns within the park with a lot of kids up front), there was nothing about the race which should have held me back. I’ve kind of come to understand though that this happens to me sometimes, I can’t completely control being at 100% when it’s time to start running.

The Tower Trot, though, went a little different.

Western Springs and Countryside are nearly adjacent municipalities, but Western Springs is 74 years older, incorporated in 1886, with a classic along-the-rails downtown, but with very little large commercial and nothing industrial to speak of. The town centers around its old stone-and-brick water tower, which as I’ve written before is the most beautiful structure anywhere around here.

I ran the same race in 2022, in 28:54. I remember it being a hard race, it was sunny and warm, and a relatively late start time so the sun really got to me. And this area of Western Springs is surprisingly rolling, making for more uphill time than most Illinois races might offer.

This time I think I was more mentally prepared for it. I hadn’t planned on the race, but by odd coincidence, the boy’s Saturday soccer game was at 8:15 in Western Springs, less than a mile away from the race starting line, and the race took off at 9:30. I definitely do better with later start times so long as they don’t also involve too much sun and heat. See: I… am not a morning person.

The timing was great, though, and the temperature was decent, and although it was fairly sunny, I didn’t let it get it to me. I also didn’t get consternated when I hit the gentle uphill portions of the course. I kept stride as best as I could, and I could tell early on that my legs were ready for this run.

The app recorded the total race distance as 3.06 miles, and there were enough turns that this makes sense. It also had my splits at 7:50 / 8:40 / 8:57, but adjusting for the time to start and stop the app, my actual mile splits were probably more like 7:40 / 8:40 / 8:40. It was a really good start, and I was able to maintain pace for a while after that. By contrast, the app splits for Countryside were 7:59 / 8:56 / 9:06, and that last one was actually for less than a mile. And the race before that was 7:59 / 8:50 / 8:37, also with a short third mile.

From discussions in the past, a nominal goal is to not overdo it on the first mile, and to maintain strength for the second and third miles. I actually try to work on this at the gym sometimes by starting slower and gradually ramping up and then trying to maintain pace for the entire second mile, but this is a lot harder to do in a race when I’m not looking at my speed and I’m more so trying to judge what I’m doing through half-mile split times and keeping pace with people around me. I do also find though that I tend to pass a lot of people in the second half-mile, and then tend to get passed by a handful of people in the third mile. So some people start off faster than me and I eventually overtake them, but other people are able to maintain stride for longer. Finding that balance is one of the challenges which keeps all of this interesting to me.

In the end, 25:42 was my first sub-26 race since 2016, and this on a hillier course than most, on a warmer and sunnier day than average. When I last did it, I was at least 25 pounds lighter, too. This was a legitimate breakthrough years in the making, something I was really keen to build upon.

Well…

The Tower Trot was 4 weeks ago. I haven’t gotten another race in, and I also haven’t gotten a whole lot of treadmill time in. Summer gets busy and then gets hot. Odds are there won’t be another race until September, because that’s how the calendar has gone the last three years.

What worked for me through the end of the spring, I think, was mixing some lower body strength training in with running. Not that I’ve done a whole lot, but I’ve been doing lunges with dumbbells and squats with kettlebells, and I think my legs are stronger today at age 48 than they ever have been. The flipside of that is that recovery is a lot harder - it’s gotten to be difficult to run more than twice a week because of sheer leg fatigue. Getting a little older and encountering this weird mix of being stronger and weaker raises a lot of questions about what it should really look like to take care of your body going forward.

My high level goal remains the same: I’m going to break 25 minutes again. It’ll take a lot of work to shave 45 more seconds off of my 5K time, and I know that it’s only going to happen if I can further boost my race endurance. But I’ve also seen how I can keep on improving even at my age and even without panicking and trying to lose weight to do it. My short-term focus is going to be to learn more about recovery, so I can figure out how to get back to running more frequently.

The next race might well be the annual Zoo Run the weekend after Labor Day. The last three years I ran it in 27:35, 27:20, and 26:22. I’ll be aiming for another sub-26 day and then building off of that in the fall!