Running Around Illinois: Palos Hills

October 28, 2023

MVCC Halloween 5K

Palos Hills (Cook County)

Chip Time: 27:04.37

Cook County is home to approximately 5,173,000 people, about 2,697,000 of which live in Chicago. That means that if suburban Cook County were its own state, it would be smaller than Kansas but larger than New Mexico.

There is an understandable perception about suburban Cook County that it is simply a gigantic flat terrain of sprawl, from Glencoe to Hanover Park to Sauk Village. And even though everyone knows that this is what Cook County is, this does not stop practical jokers from giving suburbs names like Rolling Meadows.

Moraine Valley Community College is located on the outskirts of Palos Hills. Now, that sentence implies a whole lot of topology, doesn’t it? But it’s in Cook County! What topology could possibly be involved?

Here is a topographic map of Palos Hills and the surrounding area, thanks to our good friends at topographic-map.com:

As it turns out, the community college is in a valley after all, relatively speaking! That blue streak that runs from the west to the southeast is our old friend the Cal-Sag Channel, and either side of that, you see that the surrounding forest preserves occupy notably higher terrain, until it spills out right at the site of MVCC.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking: This fool is trying to trick me into a geology lesson! But, dear reader, I am doing no such thing, because I know almost nothing of geology. Indeed, I myself was just trying to figure out exactly what the “Moraine Valley” was, to provide greater context for where I was on Saturday, at this huge, beautiful campus, hidden behind the Palos Preserves in southwestern Cook County, on the outskirts of one of those mysterious Paloses. (Note that the topography shows that Palos Hills has no hills; and while Palos Heights is of a higher elevation than Palos Hills, Palos Park is higher than either one of them!)

I must confess that I spend very little time overall thinking about the community college as an institution. They are, at once, incredibly vital, and hideously overlooked. The U.S. Department of Education notes that in 1999, community college enrollment was 5,590,000, which was almost exactly 2% of the U.S. population then. The most stunning thing about this number to me though is that the U.S. Department of Education, on the most relevant website I could find, has not bothered updating its community college statistics in twenty years, a reality which I think speaks volumes to the level of attention this level of education gets from the federal government.

Over the course of a chilly morning at MVCC, and while letting my thoughts wander as they are prone to do, I came up with an idea, one which I’m sure others have had, but which I have never heard before. And I am proposing it, right here and now, to Governor Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly.

I propose that the State of Illinois grant all Illinois residents one free community college course annually.

I am not concerned about the details of how to write the law at the moment. I am well aware that some courses are a lot more expensive than others because of the equipment involved or whatever. We’ll figure the details out later.

I am also not pitching this as a replacement for the general idea of tuition-free higher education. I am and have been a proponent for free community college for degree-seeking students.

What I am talking about is a free continuing education voucher. Something which would allow people to finally take that geology course they never took. Or statistics, because it sure seems like the federal government could use some people who could generate some updated statistics. Or foreign languages. Or whatever! America should be a place where people are encouraged to keep learning, to keep growing. As a public service the cost would not be too extensive, and the potential benefits could be manifold if some smart people would put their minds together and figure out how to administer this in the right way.

I know a lot of community college classes are virtual today. That’s fine! Let people take those courses, or take courses on campus. I’ll bet you that a lot of these facilities are under-utilized right now because of the strong preference so many people have for online courses. But here’s an opportunity to reenergize community college as community hubs, and actually to expand the notion of who that community truly is.

What do you all think?

I wasn’t sure I was going to run this race until nearly the last minute. I’d been exhausted all week and didn’t really want to get up at 6:30 on a Saturday. But the night before I started giving myself mental chest bumps, or, uh, whatever that is where you start telling yourself c’mon pal, c’mon pal and so forth.

It was 40 degrees when I got to campus. I had been super unsure about attire, because although it was going to be cold, it was also supposed to be sunny. What I wound up doing is bringing three different jackets with, thinking that I’d wear a short-sleeved shirt technical shirt under a running jacket, and that I’d wear a winter hat with gloves.

As it turned out, at registration, they were giving long-sleeved shirts and small winter hats, so I wore the short-sleeved shirt under the long-sleeved shirt, the hat they gave me, the gloves I had, and athletic pants over a pair of shorts and compression sleeves. This all turned out to be pretty much exactly right, as by the end of the race, I didn’t feel cold, nor was I sweating buckets because I was over-dressed.

Some people of course were in costume for the race - this was a Halloween 5K after all! There was the guy dressed like a banana, and I guess a couple of yoga instructors, and who knows what all else. I have such a hard time figuring out what to wear in normal settings, I don’t know how you can figure out how to manage a costume on top of all of that.

The race course went around and slightly through campus. There was a walking / biking trail around the campus, which made me wonder exactly where people were biking from to get there. Most of the run then was along these normal campus sidewalks or paths on a morning where, best as I could tell, absolutely nothing else was happening there.

For whatever reason I thought I was going to do very poorly.

Early on in the race, I was behind a short blonde woman, and there were a couple of young preteens who ran up, and I don’t know if one was her kid or what, but she was telling them what she was intending to do and basically warning them what it would be like if they kept up with her. I thought I had heard her say that she was aiming for “eight minutes”, which would be an overall pace of a 25 minute 5K. A little later I thought I heard her say after looking at her phone (which was attached to her arm with one of those clear phone band things) “eight forty” which I interpreted to mean that we were all on an 8:40 per mile pace. I thought, well, I guess that’s about what I’m trying to do myself, so I just tried to let her be the pace setter.

I kept pace during the first mile, not actually knowing what the pace was. As it turned out, my app said I ran the first mile in 8:24. I had to take a couple of breather breaks in the second mile, but it turned out, that was at 8:48. I slowed down in the third mile to 9:22 but that was from having to take more breather breaks. In the end I clocked in at 27:04.37, and the recorded distance was about 3.05 miles, which given the turns of a 5K is pretty common for the app to show. It turned out to be my best time of the year.

After reading up on it a little the night before, I tried to do a couple slightly different things with my breathing. First, when I got past the first mile and needed to regulate better, I tried to do 3:2 rhythmic breathing, with 3 breaths in and 2 out. The idea is that an odd rhythm means that you’re alternating which landing foot coincides with which breaths. I also made a point of trying to expand my belly (and therefore diaphragm) when breathing in, and related to that, I tried to breathe in with both my mouth and nose, and out with my nose.

When I was at my absolute peak, my approach was to do 3:3 rhythmic breathing for as long as I could, in with the nose, out with the mouth. While it seems like there’s different opinions out there, and while 40 degrees is literally not freezing, I read in a couple of places that breathing in with both nose and mouth would be more helpful with cold air, and also more helpful in accessing more oxygen. And I guess I did well enough that it suggests the overall approach was working. I was very close to beating 27:00, and I’m confident I can get back to that mark yet this fall.

After the race, I was at a booth where a couple of guys were talking up solar power. One of them was explaining how MVCC was offering new classes both in solar basics, and in solar installation. The other guy was an agent for the IBEW union and helpfully explained to me how in Illinois, only the utilities can put up electric vehicle charging stations and sell power by kilowatt-hour, but almost anyone can put up stations and sell power by the hour. I had been wondering about this - it is actually useful information to know for my job - and, well, it’s proof positive that if you just go to a community college, you might learn something.

I’m expecting the next race to be in two weeks, place undetermined, but there’s a non-zero chance it will be at another community college. Maybe we can all learn something more together!