Wellness Plans Make the Paper!

Some coverage of the the Wellness program in today's Daily Herald. They took a picture of me as well, but I have not plowed out my driveway yet to discover it.

They were size 48 pants, and I wish they had not mentioned the 300 number so prominently!

NOTE: I slogged out to get the paper and found this picture, which I had to scan because the Daily Herald has fiendishly clever write protection on its pictures.

Wellness-- Tenatative 5K dates and "Run with the Mayor"

I spent the morning trying to figure out a schedule that works for my life and 4 Saturday's for the Mayoral 5K series. I think I have come up with something that might be workable.

The Mayoral 5K series will be 4 races held in the 4 majors areas of the community. (Valley Lake's, Lakewood, Madrona, and Downtown.) The dates will be Sunday's February 11, May 13, July 22 and September 23. These race dates are up in the air still, if you have an event for your HOA that might partner up with me, I would love that.

If I can get sponsorship to cover it, I am going to try to make the race free to Round Lake residents and $15 to non-residents or something like that. I also would like to award trophy's to the winners and the overall champions in the various age groups.

I am setting aside the first Saturday of every month at 7am for the run/walk with the Mayor. My goal is to run 2 miles from 7:00am to 7:20am at a nice steady 10-12 minute mile pace (closer to jogging) that way I can talk (assuming anyone wants to talk) and run at the same time. The from 7:30 to 8:00 walk the same course. So if you compete in both you will get four miles in. I am going to move these around from neighborhood to neighborhood. I think its an excellent venue for people from other areas to learn about and meet there neighbors, plus I can listen to issues and hopefully solve some of them.

The first one will be January 6th at 7am and I will do it in Madrona, meeting at the park.

Happy Thanksgiving (600th Post as well)!

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone in Round Lake has a wonderful filling day with family and friends. I know I am going to. I am running in a 5k for a food bank in Crystal Lake that I actually ran in last year in the cold. NOTE: I have sore knees today from a run earlier this week when I pushed to hard and fast so I may not go, its a game time decision! NOTE NUMBER 2: I did not run, but rather walked the distance instead.

Today is the 600th post of this blog, I thought I had missed the actual date, because I actually have 624 posts, but I counted earlier this week and 24 of them are drafts. I have so many draft posts, because until the events are over, I will not reveal my thoughts. Its awful when you have a big mouth and you have to learn to keep it shut!

Huge blog traffic this last week, I will reveal its reason on Monday's post I think, although I may write something sooner.

Is a Healthier Round Lake Possible?

For quite awhile I have been mulling around a Mayors Fitness Challenge series of events. I always am a fan of wellness programs for companies. I looked into some national programs for wellness and got some ideas. The central thing was fitness and exercise.

Which got me thinking about having a series of 5K Run/Walks. I spent a few minutes diagramming a couple on this marvelous google based software that I use called www.mapmyrun.com that measures runs using GPS. I designed three 5K routes and would propose a fourth, there are some logistical issues route design must take into account as I discovered when I worked on these.

• Tour de Lakewood & Prairie Walk (route here)
  
• Tour de Madrona (route here)
• Tour de Valley Lakes (route here)
• Tour of Old Town and Bright Meadows (not done yet)

Would you run or walk in a 5K in your Neighborhood?
	Yes
	No
Free polls from Pollhost.com

I also would love to have some feedback on other ideas for health based programs in the community. One excellent suggestion I got from local business man Doug Dortch of MVS Molding was to have a run/walk in the various neighborhoods with the Mayor on Saturday mornings or some predetermined date.

Would you join the Mayor for an informal run in your Neighborhood?
	Yes
	No
Free polls from Pollhost.com

If you have any other wellness ideas please forward them to me at bgentes@eroundlake.com

Thoughts on Blogging

I have been reading the comments and have been wondering what I should do about them if anything. I have had this discussion before on the blog about comments and I still think that as long as you follow my relatively simple rules its okay. I do cringe at some of the comments about people on here but I do believe it's a free country.

As a rule of thumb I never respond to comments in the comment section, but I did notice that a thread was broached a few days ago about this blog being a personal vehicle for me. I do recognize that I have an ego, and I can tell you that you better make sure the next mayor has one as well. I digress. I went and counted the last 300 posts I have done which went back roughly to December 2005. I looked for something that did not talk about the village and I counted them.

I found 25 posts or 8% that were all about me with no village influence, and I was scoring generously since I would argue that I appear as the Mayor in a few of the 5K races which made up a few posts and of course the fantasy football posts which are self serving. Most of these posts appear on a weekend as well. The most over the top one is of course the butter post and the egg post that along with this post have gotten me the most comments and traffic.

I also have been told that some people believe that I am going to use this blog as a place to grind home my political agenda during the upcoming trustee elections. Tempting as that is I made a conscious decision a long time ago to say nothing pro or con about trustees, I have broken that rule a few times but I generally think twice and take it down or edit it quickly. I try to just list people who attend events and besides this blog is about me not them. I will write nothing here about the local elections other then a post reminding people to vote.

As many of you know I participate in partisan politics at county, state and federal levels so I went and counted how many posts had a partisan bent to them, I found 2 of the total out of 557 total posts since the inception of this blog that's less then 1%. Those posts by the way were listing a "meet the candidates" before the primary.

I think these numbers indicate that I am meeting my original goals of what the blog should and could be.

Lastly this blog is hosted by Blogger a free software on the internet, we use a pointer off of eroundlake.com to get to it. When I decided to do the blog 2 years ago I could not make up my mind if I wanted it to be attached to the village web site or not. My choices were as follows:

• Link off the eroundlake.com page (the current format), the challenge here was that since it would be hosted "quasi officially" I would have to be under control therefore no partisanship, no venting about trustees etc. I ultimately decided that this was the best thing for what I wanted to do with the blog, the blog is about the village and me as the village's Mayor. I think the blog has changed to something different over time which I actually appreciate more then I thought. I also thought that this way would hold down my readership because it would be more corporate.
• The second method was to do it off site via blogger as something like mayor.blogger.com and vent what I really think. Those of you know me well enough know that with friends I have a sly sense of humor about village business. I ultimately thought the sly, acidy, "call it like I see" it blog would be much more popular. However I also thought that it would not be as effective towards what I wanted to do which was inform people about Round Lake and the surrounding area and let people know what its like to be Mayor.

If you have an issue with what I am trying to do then I am sorry. However I can tell you that I have never received one negative comment to my face nor other then a few comments negative comments about the blog in any other forum. I get more people coming up to me saying "I love the blog keep it up". Or better yet giving me ideas for posts with there questions and concerns. Which of course is ultimately what its all about.

T-Shirt Raffle

The Village sponsors many things, among the recent things we sponsored is the Grant Township 5K Field of Dreams race. As a perk of sponsorship they sent me an extra shirt. Its a white XL T-shirt with the race logo on it, and the sponsors in back. I got one for my plodding finish in the race 49th out of 120, and don't need another T-shirt in my closet.

So if you look good in white, promise to use it for its intended purpose, and are the 3rd emailer, its yours!

Please note the winner was Tom Lake who was emailer number 3 out of 15.

Round Lake 5K Yesterday-- Huge Medal Haul for Village Officials

We shoveled some serious hardware out of the Round Lake Park District 5K on Sunday morning. From left to right, Village Engineer Erika Frable holding her gold medal won her age division and finished 13th overall. Michael Blum holding his silver medal for his age group, Al Villasenor holding bronze for his third place and his 17th place finish, lastly me clutching my silver medal in my age group, which is one color better then last years bronze medal.

It was wet and chilly, and I was slow, but still smiling at the end as you can see. As always the Park District did a nice job!

Round Lake 5K Coming Soon

Just a friendly reminder that the Round Lake Area Park District has its 6th annual 5k Run/Walk coming up on September 10th at 8am. It's tons of fun and I will be back to defend my 45-50 age group third place medal (see picture). By the way that's former Trustee Dale Multerer Current Police Commission President and Round Lake Park District Foundation Board Member in the background. Hopefully I can better the time of 30:47 that I had last year! Proceeds from the race benefit Special Olympics for the Round Lake Area as well. So it's for a good cause as well!

The Frosty 5K on the same course earlier this year was not very good for me, as I was soundly whipped by the entire distaff line (all 3 of them) of Trustee Bob Del Prato's family.

If you are interested in registering for the Run/Walk here is the link to a PDF of the entry form. A few hours later there is a doggie walk as well! I will write more on that later.

More Bike Racing Today

Interesting day today, I am going to see the 1 day Inaugural Grayslake Cycling Classic at Prairie Crossing in Grayslake. It's Chicagoland's newest and most unique criterium, featuring a fast, flat horse-shoe shaped 1.1 mile course! There are all sorts of age group and gender related races throughout the day with the professionals riding last around 4pm.

I have often thought the village of Round Lake should sponsor a race, although my thinking was a 5K run through Round Lake's neighborhoods, the logistical problems are bigger then you would imagine. How do you cross Fairfield, and 120? I think it would be cool to race right down Cedar Lake through Bright Meadows, Madrona and into Lakewood, or then up to Valley Lakes. Although that might be a 10K. The other thought I had before one of the parades is run the Round Lake Mile...start at Washington and Cedar Lake and run north of Cedar Lake right over the hill and down into Round Lake Beach. Be kinda cool with all the people lining the route waiting for candy. I tried convincing the park district about that one, but no takers there!

I also thought of a beat the Mayor race for charity, but that might be to charitable, judging by my slow run this morning!

Award from NICASA

A few weeks ago I ran in the first annual NICASA 5K and fun walk at Independence Grove (recording a personal best in the 5k I would note). The village sponsored a couple of kids to participate and I volunteered to be beaten by most of them. On Thursday I was invited to the District 116 to get a very nice plaque that looked like Nanci Radford who presented it to me had made with a stamp kit. It is the single coolest plaque I have recieved as Mayor!

Running, Washing and Relaxing

Yesterday I was up early to participate in the NICASA 5K run which is part of the 40th anniversary celebrations they are having. The race started at 8:15 at Independence Grove in Libertyville. For those of you who have never been there, do, because its spectacular. I am embarrassed to say I had driven by it hundreds of times and never once gone in, and I am the poorer because of it.

Back to the race, I saw quite a few people NICASA Executive Director, Judy Fried, Bruce Johnson, Nancy Radford, Dr Jeff Brierton and countless kids from Round Lake. In fact I sponsored a few of them to be there. The race had about 40 competitors so a top 50 finish looked likely! Plus I have been upping my mileage recently and doing quite a bit of speed work, so my goal was to run under 28 minutes. I did! 26:17 which was so suprising that I actually checked to see if the race was 5k long at the information center on my way out. It was.

On my home I was able to pick up a big gulp and got the Round Lake Area Queens to wash my car at their carwash at the same time! Now that's convenience! I then lay on the couch most of the afternoon and read until the Kentucky Derby came on which I enjoyed right up until the part where the horse I liked started going backwards!

NOTE: I just read the Daily Herald article and it said I walked, wrong I ran! Must be the anti runner media bias!

A Whole Lot of Eggs Today!

Today had a whole lot of eggs in it! First a nice two egg omelet prepared by yours truly, with mushrooms, ham and cheese in it. Then off to Madrona's Annual "Running of the Eggs" where I would guess 100-130 people attended. Many of those same faces then hopped directly over to the Round Lake Park Districts Egg Fest held at Hart's Hill. 20,000 eggs were laid out across all the playing fields. Then within 2 minutes all 20,000 eggs were hoovered up by kids.
I saw numerous people Trustee's Brian Brubaker and Bob Del Prato were the first I spotted! I also saw a the Easter Bunny, Michael Blum, Al Villasenor, Liz Nelson (twice), Nancy Mantell, and John Stowers. Forgive me if I met you and forgot to mention you here however. My mind is an uncluttered place sometimes!

I then went and ran a 5K time trial in 29:20 which I was very pleased with. I have been running more the last few weeks then I have in the last few months and it showed. Of course the ability to walk may return sometime soon, hopefully this afternoon!

Frosty 5K Results

Long story short I stunk! 9:15 first mile, 10:00 second mile, 12:00 minute third mile. Finished last in my age group as well, thanks to Dale Multerer for pointing that out to me. As for the race within the race me against the Del Prato family, the three ladies got three age group medals! They all talked smack to me as they blew past me as well!

I was pleased with my speed until mile 2 when the stinking occurred. I lumbered home from the 2 mile mark, with a set of dead legs. I am not sure why but when you hit my age you can't complain that you can run 2 miles in under 20 minutes I suppose! Back to sprinting however in two weeks I am going to the USTAF Master Indoors Track and Field Championships held in Sterling, IL.

Busy Weekend So Far as I Race Through It

Yesterday I attended the democratic gathering of candidates in for Lake Villa, Grant, Antioch and Avon township. There was a nice crowd of people, and a nice crowd of candidates as well. Democracy and the two party system appears to be thriving in Lake County.

I went from the Democratic gathering to the Round Lake Area Chamber of Commerce's Annual Installation Dinner, where we had a nice turnout of trustees. Trustee Don Newby, Trustee Jerry Shaw and his wife Liz, Trustee Brian Brubaker and his wife Lori, Trustee Sherry Perkowitz and her date Kevin Hedlund, and last but not least Trustee Patricia Blauvelt and her husband Mike. Patty was honored with a plaque for 15 years of service to the Chamber of Commerce as a Board Member! Congratulations!

Today I am running in the Round Lake Area Park District, Frosty 5K. All proceeds from the race benefit the senior fitness programs. The race kicks off with a 10 a.m. registration and 11 a.m. start from the Sports Center located at 2004 Municipal Way in Round Lake Beach. Hot soup and awards will follow the competition. As we all know I run in a few races throughout the year with some success and some races with no success. However my goal today is to get under 28 minutes and 30 seconds.

First Ever 5K Frosty Footrace!

Join the fun and walk or run in the inaugural 5K Frosty Footrace. The event is scheduled for February 26, 2006 with all proceeds from the race benefiting our senior fitness programs. Race day kicks off with a 10 a.m. registration and 11 a.m. start from the Sports Center located at 2004 Municipal Way in Round Lake Beach. Hot soup and awards will follow the competition. For more information contact Kristy Nacker at the Round Lake Area Park District at 847-740-9826 or by email.

I am running in it and I hope to see many of you there. This is the cold version of the park district's fall 5K. I have a grudge match with a Trustee's wife, with dinner riding on the outcome as well.

Turkey Trot Today was More Like an Ice Trot

Well I drove to Crystal Lake and warmed up by stretching in the car. I also put every stitch of warm-up clothing I had on to run to the palm tree! Ha! The only palm tree I saw was when I was hallucinating while my hair froze through my ski cap. Talk about cold!
Anyway for those keeping score (I am) I finished 158th of roughly 350 people with a time of 32:30. Slow, but it was into the wind for the first two miles and exposed so it was slow going and the best I could do was get the first two miles in 21:00 minutes, I did better in the last 1.1 miles which was a positive but it was also downwind!

Happy Thanksgiving Day!!!!

On behalf of the village I hope everyone has a marvelous Thanksgiving day. I am getting an early start on burning the calories I will consume by racing. I am running in a 5K race in Crystal Lake at 8:00 am sharp hosted by the Hillstriders Running Club at Lippold Park in Crystal Lake at 8:00 a.m. sharp. There is no registration and the entry fee is any non-perishable food items which will be donated to the Crystal Lake Food Pantry.

For those of you who know I am goal oriented I want to get under 28 minutes. Which is roughly a 9 minute mile pace. The course is flat but it is also a path, so it might be muddy which is not good but you deal with the hand you are dealt. Cool weather is conducive to going fast (relatively speaking in my case) so all signs are pointing upwards.

Confucius says.....

Do not ask a 16 year old High School cross-country runner and swim team member to go for a 3 mile jog when you are a 46 year old man. Because a jog for them is a run for you, and an all out run as well. 27 minutes and a handful of seconds. One member of the "joggers" was not winded, the other was gasping. No points for guessing which runner is which in the above scenario. At least my daughter had the decency to not go for a 2 mile run as a cool down right in front of me.

I am running in the Crystal Lake 5k Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving day. So this was to be a blow out and I am going to taper down to Thanksgiving morning. My goal is under 28 minutes for the 5K. On the basis of this run I think I should be able to get it done.

Round Lake Park District 5K today!

Today I am running in the Round Lake Park Districts Annual 5K race at 8am at Hook Lake. Today's goal is getting under 30 minutes and beating Trustee Bob Del Prato's wife Laura if she is able to run today. So its two goals in one! Two years ago, the fatter version of Bill was able to walk the route in just over 60 minutes, last year the slimmer version (minus 70lbs) ran it in 38 minutes this year the even slimmer version (minus 93 lbs and able to hurdle small dogs) will run in ?? minutes.

Grant Township-- Picnic in the Park is today

Today is the Grant Township "Picnic in the Park" which kicks off at 8am with a 5k race that yours truly is running in. This ought to be a personal disaster! Because of the heat and a very busy schedule I have not run much, and have focused on lifting weights at the air conditioned gym the last few weeks. My goal is to run in under 30 minutes (9:40 miles) over the 5K distance. We shall see, I am not hopeful. The backup goal would then be to survive the race!

I would urge runners and non runners to stop by the event held at the township headquarters on Molidor road. There are softball games, volleyball and of course a picnic. Say hi to Kay Starostovic the Township Supervisor who does an excellent job as your supervisor and as an organizer of the picnic!

UPDATE: Okay the race was run I ran in 34:05, I saw a few Round Lake area friends and residents running, Jose Velarde and his family, Steve Berwanger and his family, Len Dam and dispensing water Fox Lake Mayor Cindy Irwin. The highlight for me was the assigned number (1) how cool is that. The lowlight was the hills that I plodded up and down and seemed to never end.

A Day at the Races?

My daughter and I ran in the Waucounda Fest 5k race this morning. I ran in 29:45 and we are not sure of my daughters time. My goal was to break 30 minutes and I did. By this fall I want to be around 24-25 minutes. The second race of the day was a sail boat race on Long Lake, where I crew on the "Slick Willy" sail number 13 in your programs! 14 boats came out today and we finished a fast closing 3rd. One of our better finishes in three years.

Later on this evening I am going over the concert event held in the Valley Lakes park.