Running Around Illinois: Belvidere

Hug an Athlete 5K 2/26/23

February 26, 2023

Hug an Athlete 5K

Belvidere (Boone County)

Chip Time: 27:25

I’m going to write about the race itself first, and then about Belvidere. As I write, I’ve just learned that the long-serving Chrysler plant there idled as of the February 28 shift, and I’ve got quite a bit to say about that. But this was my first race of the year, and my first race back since breaking my collarbone, so I want to start with the race itself.

It’s an unusual name for a race, right?

The Hug an Athlete 5K benefits Belvidere Park District programs for kids with special needs. The name gimmick is that, at the completion of the race, some of those kids are there to give the racers a high five, fist bump, or - as I’m sure was more common when the race started 10 years ago - a hug. (I got a couple of high fives and fist bumps in at the end.)

I actually ran this same race back in 2020 - the last race before the pandemic. I posted a better time then, but it was a colder day and a harder race to run. This time around I felt pretty good and it was 45 and sunny and race time, which is pretty ideal.

There were 154 participants, and from the surrounding vibes, I’d say there were a lot of serious runners, and also a very tight-knit community presence, which makes sense given who the race was supporting.

The course starts at Doty Park in downtown Belvidere on the south side of the Kishwaukee River, crosses over the river, and follows a riverfront path west. While it’s mostly flat, the nature of a riverfront course is such that there are short, quick rises and falls, and those tiny elevation increases are not so much fun. It’s also a trip to start off on a footbridge - when there are dozens of people all running on it at once, it’s got a very weird kind of wobble!

I broke my clavicle back in October, and it’s still not fully healed, but I’ve been able to do most weights for a while, and I’ve been on the treadmill since December. The thing about the treadmill though is that you know exactly how fast you’re going, it’s utterly predictable. With a race, you start off with a little clump of people, you’re not really sure how fast you’re going, you’re looking for a pace setter… I’ve had races where the first mile went 30 seconds faster than I thought, and races where the first mile went 30 seconds slower than I thought, and this one was closer to the latter.

I use the Map My Run app and I try to have it set loud enough so that when I hit the mile marks I can hear the split times. This course, I got to the mile mark probably 45 seconds before the app told me I’d hit a mile. When it was all done the app only logged me for about 3 miles. I noticed the same thing in 2020 - my chip time then was 25:01 but I knew I hadn’t run anything close to that kind of a 5K pace. This time though I thought 27:25 seemed not all that far off? (I’d note here that I think it can be especially difficult to get a good measurement on a course like this, which follows walking paths that wind and wend around a lot… and I usually find that Map My Run says that races are around 3.05 - 3.10 miles, a little less than a full 5K, which can also be explained a little by taking tight corners.)

For this race, I made two tactical changes. First, I swapped out cough drops and swapped in lemon drops. I don’t think this made any difference and I’m not sure I’d do it again, but I do find that having something like that keeps the saliva flowing and - I think - helps just a little bit. (There may be a lot of runners who would be horrified by this?)

The bigger tactical change was to wear compression socks. This was not for performance but rather for recovery purposes. My calves have been absurdly tight and the last time I went out and ran they were so sore, even after a lot of stretching, that I had to put the socks on at night. I read up about the idea that compression socks during the race could help with post-race recovery so I gave it a shot. And I think it worked remarkably well. I’m absolutely doing this next time.

In terms of stamina, I definitely need work in the broader cardio / lung / breathing realm. I used to be able to settle in to rhythmic breathing of three beats in, three beats out, until I got more tired, and then I could do two and two. I can’t really get to three and three anymore, even fairly early in the race. I’m thinking I should consider focusing specifically on breathing while on the treadmill next.

Overall though it was just really nice to be back out and running a race. Going through physical therapy, falling into “winter shape”, simply getting older… the apprehension is real and I’m glad we were able to swing this February race.

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Belvidere is a small city. It is definitely not a suburb, although it’s in the broader Rockford media market. My observation has been that across the Rust Belt, the communities which have often been hit the hardest by various factors are small cities. One excellent example, and a fairly comparably sized place, is Galesburg, which took a huge hit when Maytag left town.

Boone County is, by area, the smallest county in Illinois. It’s a skinny box consisting of nine smaller old-school township boxes. The county has about 53,000 people, and roughly half of the county population is in Belvidere proper, and probably a good chunk more are in unincorporated areas surrounding the city.

As a small city, Belvidere has real city problems, but lacks a lot of city resources to combat those problems. Just driving through a little bit, you can see how a surprising number of the homes are in rough shape, a phenomenon I’ve seen in other small cities, from smaller ones like La Salle to larger ones like Rock Island.

Boone County is very conservative, one of those places where it’s very rare to find Democrats as countywide elected officials. Belvidere proper though is now about one-third Hispanic, and in microcosm, Belvidere is to the county as a whole not unlike how larger cities are to larger rural states as a whole.

Having run this race twice, and having been through downton Belvidere one other time in the last few years, I’d observe that this is a small city with a real downtown up against a scenic small riverfront. It’s a place which, so to speak, has real bones to it. But it’s got a worn out feeling. Downtowns like that aren’t the centers of commerce they used to be, and any incremental civic improvement is against the backdrop of an infrastructure that really needs more than incrementalism.

At the same time, among metropolitan areas, Rockford often ranks #1 in terms of housing affordability, which almost certainly means that it’s even more affordable in Belvidere. This is a double-edged sword because it speaks to an area’s potential but also means that if things do meet more than just incremental improvement, you’re probably gentrifying out people who can’t afford housing in most places.

Against this backdrop, the news that the Chrysler plant is going idle has got to be hitting pretty hard. There are a lot of articles about the Belvidere Chrysler plant. Here’s one which provides some good context. It should also be stressed that with large plants like that, many hundreds more are usually employed by feeder companies. The jobs in and around the plant are almost certainly the best-paying the area has had to offer, and organizations - most notably the UAW - form critical civic infrastructure as well. With the plant idling, Belvidere and the surrounding communities have got to be very concerned.

(In the 1980s, Belvidere Assembly was where Chrysler made the Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon. My family had three of those cars - my dad bought a 1985 Horizon that was a shade of shiny brown orange which no longer exists on the planet, and as I’ve mentioned before, my grandmother had a blue 1981 Horizon, which she traded in for… a blue 1989 Horizon, just a different shade of blue.)

Belvidere might be in for a struggle, but the city has something very powerful going for it: a strong sense of itself, and that certain kind of civic culture to match. Before the 5K began, a race organizer read the list of sponsors, and by the time she was done she was as out of breath as I was after running the race!

What communities like Belvidere really need, I think, are novel programs designed to pair what the community has with what the community needs. Clearly, right now, the big topic is going to be jobs. At the same time, there are absolutely a lot of structures which need work. Get some people transitioned into some other lines of skilled labor, and find novel ways to fund neighborhood-based revitalization. Many of the houses in rougher shape are on fairly large lots. Could they be ideal candidates for geothermal? Help homeowners fund such improvements with novel financing where they’re borrowing against long term energy savings. Help small businesses fund solar improvements along similar lines. This is a way to help address some of the issues of an old housing stock, of a lack of equity being created, and of creating good jobs, all at once. Communities with bones, which have five-generation-or-more families around, should be able to think in terms of sustained development like that, and state agencies should be able to show up and support such efforts.

What communities like this don’t need so much, I think, are gobs of money tossed to developers who can build fancy-arse buildings here or there while the surrounding infrastructure needs help. That’s the typical way so many novel financing approaches work - think of the insanity that most TIF districts are - and they often fail miserably because the results are so imbalanced, and because the people actually pocketing the money aren’t often members of the actual community.

I’m talking about the need for broad-based, community-involved, hard work, involving a civic infrastructure that is potentially robust but maybe not in the same form that it was 50 years ago, when the anchoring business entities would tend to be places like local banks or insurance agencies or the like.

What you absolutely can’t do is try and solve the problem via sprawl, which I suspect is one of the things which has really impeded Belvidere and places like it over time. Subdivisions dropped on the outskirts of town with no immediately available services aren’t places that foster community spirit. Subdivisions could be better - think of requiring that that new subdivisions also build in some basic services, the ability to walk around, etc. - you know, that subdivisions also be neighborhoods - but that’s not how construction has tended to work for decades.

Ahh, but now I’ve gone too deep into an urban planning discourse. I’ve run well off the trail!

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Adjacent to Doty Park, there’s a coffee / ice cream shop called Sips & Sprinkles. I haven’t partaken (I had races to run!) so I can’t vouch for the quality of the hot dogs, cheese dogs, chili dogs, or chili cheese dogs, but I’ve parked my family there twice now while I ran races, and I’ve got to say, this is at least the kind of place which I think every community should have.

Both times we’ve been there, I’ve gotten my hands on a truly weird publication: the Boone County Journal, the byline for which is “Real Journalism for a Real Democracy”, and which offers “Local News, Opinion & History”.

The main article in this edition of the Boone County Journal is, as you might expect, a tribute to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

Most of the news is state news sourced from Capitol News Illinois; the op-ed is sourced from Illinois Times based out of Springfield; I counted 6 legitimate advertisements; and the paper is clearly funded only by virture of being able to post two pages of legal notices.

The existence of the Boone County Journal is wonderful.

It’s the stops like this, finding a business which sure seems like an excellent model for other places, and finding a newspaper which is just marvelous to know still exists, which are at the heart of the whole Running Around Illinois conceit. If some urban planning forces its way in… well, that’s META-SPIEL for you.

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We’re not done with communities on the banks of the Kishwaukee River. Stay tuned…