Monday, September 05, 2005

Park Forest Scenic 10 Mile Run


Here I am this morning on the historic Lincoln Highway, (scroll down a couple of posts about this historic road) post race.

About the race, the Park Forest Scenic 10. It's awesome. There are musicians scattered all through the course, including a string quartet in the woods.

That course is rather hilly, on Chicago area standards, it is extremely hilly, but the race serves as an excellent tune-up for the October 9 Chicago Marathon. Speaking of which, I was quite gratified that twice, Carey Pinkowski, the race director for the Chicago event twice spotted me in the crowd of runners to offer encouragement.

I started out running a tad slow, but began to find my rhythm after mile 3, from that time I pounded out successive sub-7 minute per mile splits to the end of the race. My finishing time was 69 minutes and 30 seconds. I've run 10 miles faster than this, but I'm very pleased with the time, since I ran 20 miles yesterday morning. My legs were not well rested. I'll take tomorrow off.

One sour note: At mile 9, a sixty-ish human hangover from the 1960s decided to camp out and hold up a "US Out of Iraq" sign. Leave it to the left to politicize and ruin everything.

I yelled back at the guy, then chanted "Bring Back the Rape Rooms!" Runners and bystanders cheered me on. Okay, so maybe that incident was not a sour note.

Oh yes, last year I did run the Park Forest Scenic 10 in a "Run for Bush" shirt. Scroll back down two posts. Those shirts were created and sold by Patrick Brown of Denver in response to the Deaniac group, "Run Against Bush." The latter was a registered Section 527 PAC. Run for Bush, was pretty much just Patrick Brown, with my helping out with some media interviews in the Chicago area. In short, I'm not a hypocrite. Or I don't think I am.

But I still have my "Run for Bush" shirt.

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