Running Around Illinois: Vernon Hills

November 2, 2024

Hawthorn Hustle 5K

Vernon Hills (Lake County)

Gun Time: 27:00

The late October / early November time of year is one of the sweet spots for finding races. In theory it’s going to be cool but not cold, and there are fewer other competing events. This helps explain how I can go from running one race in four months to running races in different counties on consecutive weekends!

Lake County has always seemed weird to me. It’s got Lake Michigan, but it’s also got extensive forest and a chain of lakes, but it’s also got some wild sprawl and some super affluent pockets. For the first 20 years of my life the only reason to have ever gone there was Great America, and in more recent times, it’s mostly just been on the way to Wisconsin.

Vernon Hills has about 27,000 people, and it’s not on the interstate proper. Only once prior did I have occasion to be there when for some reason my friend Charybdis and I ate at the Kuma’s Corner that used to be there. Vernon Hills is headquarters for a handful of companies you’ve maybe heard of, including CDW, Cole-Palmer, and Rust-Oleum. It also used to be the HQ location for Tiger Electronics, creator of this wonderful machine which has been in my family for 40+ years:

Last installment, I wrote about shoes. Hey, here’s my New Balance 1080s:

The shoe dance came about because of the hip pain I was having. Was this just because of shoes though or has something else been going on?

Over the last few months, I’ve gained 10+ pounds, though some of that has been muscle. Earlier this year I started putting protein powder in my morning smoothies, and more recently I’ve also been adding creatine. At the gym, I’ve been able to increase both weight and reps for my typical upper body work, and I’ve had a good go of managing my silly bulging discs. But as I wrote last installment, I’ve been having hip pain I didn’t used to have.

The way I’m trying to handle this is to change up my routine to include more leg and core work: lunges, squats, etc. Adding more of this is a little challenging though because I’m getting to where I almost want to spend an hour every day at the gym to take care of everything, and while exercise is good, it’s also tiring. Trying to find the right balance is an ongoing challenge. It’s easy to imagine being a lot more intense about fitness, to where it almost displaces leisure, and maybe that works for some people, but that doesn’t seem like what I ought to be doing.

There’s also this: exercise for me is a very solo endeavor. There might be people around but I’m engaging very little with them. As I’ve written about recently, I’ve been thinking about all of the things that keep us isolated. That weighs into the balance equation as well.

The race was held in Century Park, a huge park with a couple of lakes, right in the middle of Vernon Hills. The sponsoring / benefitting organization was the PTO for Hawthorn School District, and it was interesting to find that there was just one big PTO for the whole district. One nice thing is that, this being entirely within a park, they were able to have a later start time than most races. Running at 11:00 instead of 8:00 is very appealing to a non-morning person!

The race was fairly low key, maybe 120 runners, a lot of them students, the vast majority of everyone seeming to be a student or parent. One thing I’ve noticed with races like this is that kids really take off fast, and sometimes slow down very early, because they’re not used to races like this. So there can be a lot of early dodging.

The race path took us around the northern lake one and a half times, and I would have expected this to be simple, but it was not. It so happens that there are a number of bridges over sections of lake and connecting channels, and some significant drops and rises in the lake-hugging paths. One of the bridges we ran across was at least 15 feet above the underlying water. As I’ve frequently pointed out, Illinois is an especially flat state, and most races are on fairly flat terrain. Not this one. This was actually the most difficult 5K I’ve run in terms of elevation changes!

It was a nice day, low 50s at race time, partly sunny, conditions which I thought would have worked well for a good time, but those drops and rises were exhausting. The app gives me splits of roughly 8:30, 9:00, 9:25, but I’m pretty sure there was at least one really bad half-mile in there.

Century Park is a huge, beautiful site. I walked around it some after the race was done and I just haven’t seen places like this in most suburbs. On the west side are a lot of apartments and townhomes, and on the east side more townhomes, many of them essentially having the park as a backyard. It’s not an approach I’m used to seeing. Nothing else is walkable for the people who live there, but they have this whole huge park.

Vernon Hills didn’t incorporate until 1958, so essentially all housing is less than 50 years old, with the business districts only flanking huge roads. But you wouldn’t call this new sprawl either. Unlike an edge exurb like Oswego which can just keep growing into the country, Vernon Hills has little to no unincorporated land available to annex, as it’s surrounded by other suburbs. I find it interesting to consider how a relatively young municipality like this will handle getting to a point where its housing stock is older.

I mentioned walking around a while after the race was done. It’s not formally diagnosed, but I’m quite sure I’m one of millions of Americans who can experience SAD: Seasonal Affective Disorder. It does seem to show up fairly consistently right around Halloween, and it makes sense. The weather gets cooler, the days get shorter, there’s less sunshine even during daylight… and every year I’m caught off guard by it. And no, it doesn’t help that the timing coincides with the final approach to Election Day. I can wind up with awkward days where I’ve got a lot of nervous energy and almost no other energy whatsoever.

Being able to spend extended time in the sunshine two weekends in a row was very helpful for me, and I’ve been thinking in terms that these races can be helpful not only in terms of physical health but also mental health. It’s so easy to imagine retreating from the world as we enter the period that Kurt Vonnegut called “the locking”. Even though running isn’t an especially actively social activity for me, if it’s the thing that’s going to get me outside and at least around other people, then so be it.

It so happens that this was my first Lake County race, so I’m now up to a whopping 9 out of 102 counties: Boone, Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kankakee, Kendall, Lake, Peoria, Will. I’m going to try to get to at least one more new county by the end of the year. Any suggestions out there?