Running Around Illinois: Maple Park

August 30, 2025

Romp in the Park 5K

Maple Park (DeKalb County & Kane County)

Gun Time: 26:08

For me, this was a first: a race that spanned two counties! And this even though it was the smallest town I’ve run a race in yet!

Maple Park has just under 1,500 people and sits on Illinois Route 38, this stretch of which is part of the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental automobile road in the United States, from New York to San Francisco. It wasn’t long after it originated that the U.S. highway system came online, and across much of the country Lincoln Highway was usurped by U.S. Route 30.

Ordinarily I would not share a municipal zoning map but I found this town’s geography to be particularly interesting:

The north-south line through the middle is County Line Road, so that’s Kane County on the east and DeKalb County on the west. The big blue and green chunks are still farmland and you can kind of see a longer term play for growth.

The next town east is Elburn, which was a small town but quadrupled in size between 1990 and 2010, so now it’s sort of a middling town. Maple Park has just about doubled since 2000 and per the map you can see a plan to keep growing. It’s still going to be small in relative terms, but think of this: most rural parts of Illinois are in aggregate contracting, and Illinois as a whole has not been growing, but these even-beyond-exurban towns keep adding subdivisions. And it’s not because things are cheap - new houses going up right now are selling for about $440,000. And it’s also certainly not because of the prevalence of nearby services. Now, I went to high school in a place not much bigger than Maple Park is today, and I do understand some of the perceived benefits, but for us that meant things like being able to walk or bike to school. Maple Park doesn’t actually have any open schools within the village limits!

What they do have in the old part of town is the old school building from 1921, which now holds the municipal offices and the town library. It’s a smart case of adaptive reuse the likes of which I’ve never seen before:

I find the juxtaposition of a bunch of new 2,200 square foot homes and the tiny old core of this old farm town to be very interesting. I walked along the business district and it seemed that there were only about seven businesses and four of them were bars (or bar-and-grills). Is this the direction more small towns have gone in recent years? If you’re a 12 year old kid, or a 17 year old kid, is there anything to do that doesn’t require being driven somewhere out of town?

Race time was 8:00. I was driving over from a hotel in Saint Charles and I knew I was going to cut it close. But I got to the Maple Park fire department and registered right at 7:50 and while I knew I’d have to hurry through my stretches, it seemed like I did well. It was low 60s and overcast - very good conditions.

This was a combined 5K and also 2 mile walk. The walkers were going to start after the runners, and I was stretching back around the walkers. I had kind of overheard something about a truck starting the race but I hadn’t really heard anything. All of a sudden, a siren went off, a pickup truck pulled out, and people started running after it! No start line, no ready set go, it was kind of wild. So I was way behind the pack at first. My eventual gun time of 26:08 was probably realistically sub-26, though the race was just a bit short (the app logged 3.07 miles), so… hey, all good.

The fire department is on the west side of County Line Road, and when the race took off, it was from the fire department driveway straight across the road, so we literally jumped from DeKalb to Kane County at the outset. I was bib #150 and I guess that’s a good estimation of how many people were there. I passed a bunch of people in the first half mile and only really got pinched at one turn, in the old part of Maple Park. It wasn’t long before we were in the first newer subdivision, and it was interesting to see how you could tell the relative age of a neighborhood from what the road looked like… and, I think, how big the houses are.

My first mile was actually slower than the previous week in Bolingbrook at about 8:10, and maybe this set me up well. Not long after the mile marker, we ran back across County Line Road, and it was around the 1.25 mile mark that the water station was set up. I broke stride for water and picked back up thinking I wasn’t really doing that great. But although I decelerated, I didn’t actually break stride but two more times, just after the 2 and 2.5 mile marks, and I didn’t have to break for long. This was way better than the previous week. (Because the DeKalb side involved a loop, we actually went back past the water station a second time, but it was at about 2.8 miles.)

My right knee was asking questions about a mile and a half in, but for once I went an entire race without any side or shoulder cramping. Was this aided by the Gatorade I had on the way to the race? I thought in the first mile that I didn’t feel a lot of power, but aside from the knee questions, my legs stayed pretty good throughout the run, and afterward as we did a fair amount of walking in the late morning and early afternoon.

I really like these kinds of races. There are always a handful of serious runners from surrounding areas, and then people who are super local, and even if it’s a fairly small race (maybe 150 people) there’s enough that it has a nice critical mass. It’s also the one time of year that people are sitting at home in the morning and there’s suddenly people running around on the streets. There should be a lot more running around on the streets!

A softball tournament was about to get started across County Line Road and it looked like fairly serious 12 inch players. Alas, I had to get back to the hotel, as our itinerary for the day was to walk around on Third Street in Geneva. Somehow I still haven’t actually run a race in Geneva…

As it turned out, instead of this being a springboard to a lot of fall races, I’ve gone all of September without racing. There are a handful of reasons for this, not the least of which being seeing Silkworm four nights in a row, plus I somehow have a three-sport athlete in the house so a stacked schedule continuing into the fall. But If things go well though I’ll get at least two races in this October and hopefully I can build back to that 26 minute mark. And I’d love to get further out one of these weekends, more likely if it’s a Sunday. Hey, there’s a race in Patoka on November 2… who wouldn’t want to go to Patoka?