Running Around Illinois: Rockford

November 30, 2024

Stroll on State Dasher Dash 5K

Rockford (Winnebago County)

Chip Time: 26:42.1

It was just a matter of time before I managed to run a race in Rockford, but I wasn’t expecting that it take me in front of a place I actually lived. It was a very weird morning for me. And a very cold morning! And somehow this all took me three months to finally get around to writing about!

Here’s the Forest City, as seen from the air. The Rock River here flows from right to left, from NNW to SSE. From the right moving left along the flow of the river are the bridges for Jefferson Street, State Street, and Chestnut Street. The clump of trees visible near the top right is Beattie Park, and the race started and ended just down the block from there.

The course actually took us across all three bridges, and then across the pedestrian bridge below Jefferson Street. And on the east bank of the river, there’s quote a slope. So what with the rises and drops of the bridges and the riverbanks, it was actually fairly hilly!

Although I’ve had better times, I really felt like this was one of the better races I’d run overall. And it was such a surreal setting for me to do that.

I couldn’t very well take pictures while running, and I got to the race site very early, so I warmed up by walking across the river to 1st Street, where I found our old apartment, a half block down from Haight Park. Haight Park is a square block with diagonal sidewalks approaching a gazebo, which back in the day had a big jungle gym, but now has more normal playground equipment:

What surprised me about the vista was how sparse the city seemed looking across Jefferson Street. Jefferson is a busy street and I didn’t remember thinking of it that way.

Back in the day my sisters and I would walk from the apartment down through the Riverview Ice House parking lot, across the Jefferson Street walking bridge, and to the main branch of the Rockford Public Library. We’d use the Apple IIs in the children’s library and we’d get Cheetos and Coke in the little snack area when we’d leave. I had probably just checked out the next volume of the Marshall Cavendish Illustrated Encyclopedia of World War I.

On the walking bridge, I found that we had a very special guest present to cheer on the racers:

Oh, it was cold. At race time it was about 25 degrees, the coldest race I’d run. But it was also sunny!

I wasn’t sure what to do about layering. I wound up wearing a long sleeve technical shirt, and my thin lime jacket, and a hoodie. I wore thermal underwear and athletic sweatpants. And I wore a hat and gloves. At race time, I definitely needed all of it. Two miles in, I was getting pretty hot… but I think I chose well. I think I might do all that again if it’s that cold.

I had been through downtown Rockford once about six years before, but otherwise not in decades. It felt familiar, but I also felt kind of like one of the Four Puppies from the old Little Golden Book. Was everything smaller, or was I just bigger?

Mid-sized cities tended to go one of two ways when the interstates came in. Peoria had Interstate 74 go right through the middle of the city. Rockford went the other way, sending Interstate 90 on a bend around the far eastern outskirts of the city. Decatur, Springfield, Champaign-Urbana, and Bloomington-Normal all made the same choice as Rockford. In all cases, growth was attracted to the highway. Springfield though has the capitol complex, and Normal and Urbana have the universities. Rockford had enough critical mass that it didn’t shrink like Decatur, but downtown Rockford grew increasingly irrelevant over the decades, in favor of explosive growth out east.

It’s taken a long time, but Rockford finally started to go on a little upswing last decade, and this was the first time I’d seen some of it. And what I saw is that the east side of the river seemed to have some real activity going on, while the immediate west side of the river seemed like it was holding on, but, maybe, waiting for something more to happen?

A lot of people were at the race, over 1,000 runners. But you just got the distinct impression that the vast majority of them never went to downtown Rockford for anything else except this race.

The race began in a large crowd, and after only about a block, we turned left to go over the Jefferson Street bridge. Between the cold and crowd and the rise of the bridge, I started off pretty slowly, and only picked up a little when we got to the middle of the bridge. I tried to settle into a nice pace without pushing it too much, and I wound up maintaining pace for a while, across 1st Street, down to Madison, all the way to the Chestnut Street bridge. The two mile mark was somewhere in the turn around the MetroCentre (today they call it the BMO Center, but that name isn’t fun) and it was neat running around that.

I wasn’t anywhere near an 8:00 pace, but I felt pretty good, like I was maintaining well, even though I’d started to get hot. My app says the second and third miles were at 8:51 and 9:03, but I think I actually ran a slightly lesser pace than usual, and needed fewer slowdowns.

I had been really iffy about the cold, but I think I liked it? I don’t think I would have liked it if it had been an 8:00am race though. I actually got to thinking after the race that I would get better cold weather racing clothes and run more in cold weather. (Spoiler: hasn’t really happened.)

At the end of the race, confusingly, there were no bananas or anything of the sort. There were only cookies!

But there was also an after-race about three blocks away. The race was actually the first of many activities in downtown Rockford that day, with a parade later in the day. The after-race had some food around, and some beer around, and, well, this thing:

So, um, yes, that’s a snow gun arm on one side, and on the other side an arm kind of like the crazy air things outside of used card dealerships.

Rockford has some fancy public art, like this exciting structure in Beattie Park:

I always thought of Rockford as a real city, a minor league city, but a real city. Milwaukee is major league, and Chicago is a metropolis, but Rockford… still a real city, with a number of different neighborhoods, traditional ethnic enclaves (which may have rolled over), etc.

Wikipedia gives us this fun list to consider, ranking Midwestern cities by size. Rockford comes in at 28th, and I think if you look at the cities above and below it, you see what I mean. There are 50 cities in the Midwest above 100,000 people and Rockford is right about in the middle of them. Go back in time 50 years, and Rockford would probably be closer to 20th, but that’s not much of a slip. It’s only when you start looking at national rankings, and how so many places in California and Texas and Florida are larger now… and in this respect Rockford does really stand in for much of the Midwest, doesn’t it?

One thing which separates a lot of these Midwestern cities from equivalently sized Sun Belt cities is that they were never suburbs. They’re older cities, with older housing stock, and with a lot of urban problems, without “urban” being only a short hand way for saying that people of color live there. One of Rockford’s urban problems has long been how the downtown had emptied out and how it kind of unanchored the city. It’s great to see some of the attempts made to bring it back, but you wonder what the limits are, what employers would be willing to go there, etc. Can a downtown in a city like Rockford become just an entertainment district? What might it mean for shopping to return? Do you need more density near downtown to help keep it viable?

The sheer size of this race though, and how many clumps of cross country runners I saw from multiple area high schools, tells me that the critical mass is very much still there. It was actually exciting that, along the course, most of the places I ran by seemed to be in better shape than I expected. The stretch of 1st Street looked better than I’d ever remembered it. I hope things continue to move in a positive direction for downtown Rockford and for the surrounding areas. It’s been a long time coming.