Running Around Illinois: Western Springs

Yeah, this series continues. You lucky, lucky people.

May 28, 2022

Western Springs Tower Trot 5K

Western Springs (Cook County)

Chip Time: 28:54

Took a couple weeks longer than I expected to get a second race in for the year. This one wasn’t literally in the neighborhood, but close: Western Springs is two towns to the west.

The tower in question is the retired water tower, which is my favorite manmade structure anywhere nearby. It’s truly a beautiful tower:

Western Springs is one of those towns where the train line splits downtown in half. The tower is on the north side of the train, most of the shops are on the south side. It’s a very nice place. Rick Valentin and Jim Valentin of the Poster Children grew up there, and years later, they wrote a song about it… I think:

Now, this was kind of a double race. There was a 10K starting at 8:30, with the 5K starting at 9:30. And I thought, hey, that’s cool, I don’t have to get up super early for this race. But dig this big crux: Sunrise was at about 5:20am. So a race with a 9:30am start time meant the sun was already up for more than 4 hours, unimpeded by any fluffiness. And while it wasn’t super hot at race time - it was mid-60s - well, read on.

I had set a very simple goal: Better than the last run, which I ran in 27:30.

Early on, I really had no idea how I was doing. I felt like we’d started kind of fast, but there were a lot of people still around me.

A word about the people: Everybody in Western Springs seems to be impossibly fit. For a town race, there were a lot of people out there, and no matter their age, they were FIT. Now I’m used to the idea that people near the front of a race are fit, that people running a race at all are fit, but even the people standing on their lawns watching the runners go by looked like they were the pinnacle of health.

The course was just running around the streets of the northwest part of town. And at some point, we turned a corner, as we’d turned four or so corners already, and… wait a minute, where in the hell did this hill come from?

A word about Illinois: Everywhere in Illinois seems to be impossibly flat. You ever heard the joke about how Kansas is flat as a pancake? Yeah, technically, speaking, Illinois is flatter than Kansas. It is FLAT. (The only less flat state is Florida, but… I’m not talking about Florida here.)

And yet, all of a sudden, I’m going up a hill, a hill that is confusingly steep, and my lungs declared that they’d already had enough of this bullshit, thank you very much. The race went downhill from there. Metaphorically, mind you. This seemed to be one of those sadist courses where somehow you were going uphill twice as long as you were going downhill.

Unfortunately, I could never really get to a good place with my rhythmic breathing, and I had to take a surprisingly number of gasp-walk-stops. One odd thing I found is that when I’d start back up, I couldn’t seem to just maintain at a slow jog. I’d wind up passing people who had just passed me, and I just couldn’t get a simpler rhythm down.

My app claimed that the first mile went 8:22, which is actually pretty good especially considering I struggled so much with the first hill. It’s faster than I’d run the first mile in Brookfield four weeks earlier. And, for whatever it’s worth, my legs seemed okay. Legs good, lungs not so much. The second mile didn’t go great, and the third mile was a wreck.

This was the first race I’d run with the weird thingamajig around my left knee:

I got this about three weeks ago from the nearby running store. I’ve been having intermittent problems with my right knee, but an x-ray had shown nothing in particular, and the advice I’d gotten was physical therapy, and while I’m not opposed to physical therapy, I just felt like that wasn’t really an explanation, and that a lot of people wear some kind of brace or another on their knees, and those things must do something more than provide placebo effect. And, well, I wound up with this thing, which looks like it must be completely pointless.

But: It seems to work. What is it, exactly? It is this:

So the nominal idea is that it’s supposed to “keep your tendon in place” or something like that. I am a little fuzzy on the mechanics. But it does legitimately seem to help. I don’t think I would have been ready for this race at all if I hadn’t been wearing this several times over the last few weeks.

I also modified my gym regimen to start doing more leg work. I usually focus on upper body work to deal with my dumb neck, but I’ve been doing more of those weird leg curl things, and have been trying to be more diligent about basic stretching.

Alas, for a better run, what I really need to do is more cardio work. And that’s where stealing the time feels harder and harder. Most work days I can get away to the gym for about 30 minutes but finding a full hour is a lot harder.

For the time being I think my goal is to try and run a race every 2-3 weeks. I had been thinking I could do weekly, but that’s not seeming realistic right now. (It might also help if I lost 5-10 Covid pounds.) This is all good though. More stretching, more cardio work, more built in recovery time, this is all doable.

Now if only I could do something about that mean old sun. And those dastardly hills.