Running Around Illinois: The Rookie

April 12, 2025

Run for 102 5K

La Grange (Cook County)

Chip Times*: 24:50 & 36:27

Run for 102 is the annual race put on by the PTOs across our school district. There’s a 5K and also a 1 mile for the kids. In 2022 and 2023, our school hosted it, and in 2024 and 2025 it’s been hosted by Cossitt Avenue Elementary over in La Grange.

The last three years, I ran the 5K and my boy ran the 1 mile. This year, though, he was intent on running the 5K as well. That’s why you see two chip times at the top!

There’s a small caveat to the times: the course was not quite 5K. My app said I’d done 2.98 miles. That’s close, but not quite close enough for me to celebrate breaking the 25:00 mark. I’ll have more to say on this later. First I want to talk about the preparation involved in making this dual 5K a reality.

We weren’t 100% sure we could run the race until a few weeks ago, because we thought there might be a soccer conflict. Turned out spring soccer season starts a week later. When I figured that out, I went to sign us up, and was told: he wanted in on the 5K.

In past years when he’s run the mile, he’s gotten side splits, he’s finished well behind some of his friends… distance running hasn’t quite seemed like what he’d excel at. But I’m sure it would have been much the same had I tried running races when I was young.

I decided to put him through training.

Now, this wasn’t like a boot camp or anything like that. What I did was I took him to a nearby park which has a crushed limestone loop that’s about 0.6 miles long - a place I like to run on my own if I’m running outside instead of on the treadmill - and I tried to get him used to the idea of doing a lot of laps, maintaining pace, etc.

We got three sessions in. The first one, we had to take a break in the middle. The third one, somehow when it was time to go run I found him napping first, and I don’t think that one went so well. But the middle session, we did actually get 3 miles in, though at a fairly slow pace.

I went through all of the stretching I do before a race, and tried to emphasize the idea that if I need to break stride and walk, I still try to walk as fast as I can. I didn’t talk too much about running form, but I did try to get across the idea that your arms matter a lot when you run, and I also talked about how to deal with cramps if they arose - which they very much did in training.

What I determined through all of the training was that, when it was time to race, he really needed to be hydrated, and he also needed electrolytes, and he should try using my albuterol inhaler. I actually don’t use the inhaler… for the longest time I thought I had exercise asthma, but what I’ve come to believe is that I had poor lung capacity, and that this has been one of the things most problematic for race performance. Now, if I’m being honest, I don’t really know what “poor lung capacity” means. It sounds like a good explanation for things though!

So for race day, I was very anxious. I had all kinds of stuff on the kitchen table. I bought a second running water bottle for him to use. We had two bottles of Gatorade on hand. We hemmed and hawed about what to wear based on a race time forecast of 40 degrees. (It actually wound up being 38 degrees.) I had him wear the race t-shirt with a hoodie over the top, and thin gloves. I myself wore the race t-shirt with a thinner jacket over the top, and also worse gloves.

I got up at 6:30 for an 8:00 race (it helps when the race is a 5 minute drive away!) and he was already up and ha apparently already chugged Gatorade. He was ready to go long before I was.

The plan wasn’t for us to run together - he told me to do my thing. So we got to the site, we did our warmups, we got lined up. The lineup was a little goofy, because this year for the first time, the 1 mile was simultaneous with the 5K, so the front of the race was overloaded with younger kids. We were in there somewhere, and as is the case with so many races, the person with the microphone could barely be heard, and then all of a sudden there was a countdown. I started my app on the count of 10, he tried to get his watch started to keep pace, we were told to go, and it was like 10 seconds of peak chaos as way too many kids surged through the chute. One adult runner actually pushed his way past me early on, but I figured running over a kindergartner probably wasn’t a good idea!

And so we were off, and it would be a half hour later before I knew what was my kid was doing, which was kind of a crazy reality.

The course was a little weird, because there were a lot of turns:

(Somehow I don’t have any actual photo from the race itself… except a photo of us… where I look like a perturbed kumquat… sorry…)

My app said I was at a half mile at 4:10, which actually meant I was doing slightly better than 4:00, so my starting pace was good. And then it had my mile at 7:59, and I knew that was actually more like 7:45. That seemed pretty good!

I managed to maintain stride up until about the 2.5K point, though I did decelerate during the second mile, which logged at 8:50. I was into two in, two out rhythmic breathing earlier than I expected, but I also managed to maintain it longer than normal. I had to break stride a couple more times, and during the third mile my lower legs were surprisingly aching, but I was able to perservere through some patches which I think in the not-too-distant past I would have had to walk more through.

As I noted at the top, the course was a little short… but it seemed like it was going to be a lot short. Last year, with a different course, it was only 2.7 miles, and this year, the 1 mile and 2 mile signs were way ahead of what the app told me were the true miles. But then there was a sign for mile 3 which was well more than 1/8 of a mile before the finish line. In the end, 2.98 miles was fairly close.

And here’s the good news - the math is very friendly! 24:50 is 24 5/6 minutes. Get this:

24 5/6 × 3.12 / 2.98 = 26 exactly

So I was on a true 26:00 pace, something I haven’t hit since October 2016. And knowing that I was hamstrung by how tight my legs were - I mean, my hamstrings weren’t tight, but I can’t say I was gastrocnemiused, can I? - I know I had a better time in me. I actually wonder how much I should or shouldn’t run between races so as to keep everything ready…

So I crossed the finish line, took a little cool off walk, found my wife, gave her my jacket, went and got my end-of-race banana, and then walked back up the course to make sure my kid wasn’t lying in the middle of the road somewhere.

I found him on the last main stretch, and he looked in good shape, jogging some, walking some, exactly what I’d hope during the third mile. I called out to him, he saw me, he kept on doing his thing, I walked back toward the finish line, and got there pretty much when he got there. His pace wound up being about 12:10 a mile, which, if you ask me, is pretty damn good. He was breathing well, he wasn’t completely wiped out. He did great!

Now, I made a pretty good choice of the thin jacket over the race t-shirt. I was a little hot toward the end but never uncomfortable. But it turned out that he was very hot by the end wearing that hoodie. Race time temp may have been 38, but it was sunny the whole time, and it wasn’t very windy, so it was one of those weird times when even though it was not much above freezing, it felt hotter.

In the end, I finished second among people I actually knew, behind… a different 11 year old.

After the race we went straight over to eat at Blueberry Hill in downtown La Grange - one of eight convenient Chicagoland locations! - and then we hurried home because, get this, the boy had a two hour baseball practice starting at 10:00. I’ll have a lot more to write about his new team at a different time, but I’ll say here that he held up really well having a practice in the sun for two hours almost immediately after running a long race. It really is something how these kids grow and change.

I don’t know when my next race will be, and I really don’t know when our next race will be, but I’m super curious as to whether he’s going to want to do this with me more often.

I guess I’m the kind of parent who thinks like this: I don’t need my kid to be better than everyone else, but I’m happy when he tries to be the best he can be. I hope he’ll run another one, and I hope he’ll improve, but I don’t care if what place he finishes or anything like that. Just get out there and do it. And if you don’t like it, get out there and do something else.

There’s a lot of extremely stupid things going down in the world today, but there are still a lot of good things going on too, and if you have no ability to do anything with the stupid things except get angry, then find something good to do, even if it’s just a small thing. Our kids have a lot of crazy things to deal with, some of which we did, some of which we never could have imagined, and it really does matter to just go out there and be decent and do something positive with them.