Take Me Out to the Ball Game--and Score an Entry to Strike Out ALS 5K

Just me and my media team buds after last year's race.

Baseball and beer? They go together: You’re most likely going to sip—or slam—a brew when you’re at the ballpark. Baseball and brats? Maybe it’s a brat or maybe it’s a hot dog, but it’s the meat in a bun that you’re ordering at the concession stand before the 7th inning stretch. But baseball and running? Sure, there’s plenty of running on the field between rounding the bases and sprinting for fly balls. But if you really want a connection between the two sports, or just run a 5K anywhere besides the lakefront or Lincoln Park, you’ll find it at the Strike Out ALS 5K, which does a riff on Take Me Out to the Ballgame that any runner can appreciate.

The Strike Out ALS 5K trades the typical Chicago 5K backdrop—the lakefront, the park, the city streets—for one of the ballpark variety with a course that starts outside U.S. Cellular Field, home of the White Sox, and finishes inside with a loop around the warning track (or at least that's how the course flowed in 2012 and 2013, but more to come on that.) And as its name would imply, it’s a race that sticks with the baseball theme from its location to its beneficiary. The 5K serves as a fundraiser for the Les Turner ALS Foundation, which is “Chicago’s leader in research, patient care, and education about ALS,” according to its website. ALS, short for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Gehrig was one of the most iconic and respected players in baseball who unfortunately had to quit the game far too soon.

The Hardest 5K I've Ever Run

I've been running 5Ks since I was 14. Sure, it was only one a year up until I turned 20, when running became fun and not swim team dryland torture. After running my first 3.1-miler ever, the distance got easier as I ran longer and trained harder.

But at the turkey trot I ran this year, you may as well have turned the clocks back to 1994 and put me right back on the course of my first Birmingham Lions Club Run for the Blind 5K. Yes, that's how tough it was--and it was only a 5K (which I'll get to explaining).

When I learned that the Chicago turkey trot I ran last year had been shortened from an 8K to a 5K, I scoffed, knowing I'd barely burn off my holiday dessert at that distance. When I knew I'd be running a 5K in Colorado Springs where the elevation is roughly 6,800 feet above sea level, I was thankful that the city's largest, and only, turkey trot wasn't any longer. A 5K at altitude is an entirely different animal.

When you run a 5K at altitude--and you're not even close to adjusted to the added elevation--it hurts. A lot. Every step of it. You can't wait to cross the finish line because it means you can stop running and the burning sensation in your lungs can finally subside. That lingering idea of a 5K not being far enough to run on Thanksgiving Day to make up for the food frenzy? The thought of doing a second workout to put more calories burned in the bank sounds preposterous. And the workout itself? Abandoned.

Strike Out ALS 5K: Where Baseball and Running Mix

Running the warning track at the 2011 Strike Out ALS 5K

I’ve walked three miles (or what felt like it) in the pouring rain to watch the Home Run Derby. I’ve scoured the internet for tickets to a face-off between the Cubs and the Yankees—and then begged and pleaded for a friend to sit in what could be Wrigley Field’s worst possible seats. I’ve biked from Chicago’s North side to U.S. Cellular Field to finish the Nike Rock ‘n’ Run 5K steps from the outfield. I’ve read more baseball-themed books than I can remember—Campy, the story of Brooklyn Dodger Roy Campanella, is currently on my nightstand. I’ve run around the warning track of U.S. Cellular—and up and down its ramps and steps—mere days after getting cleared to run post-stress fracture.

I love baseball almost as much as I love running. So when the two come together as they do at the Strike Out ALS 5K, it doesn’t take much convincing to get me to go. Even if I barely arrived before the race started (yeah, I completely underestimated the traffic). Even if I didn’t know what my legs would do after not running since April (it was July). Even if it was hot and humid and not letting up as day turned to night. Even if part of the course involved running two loops around the ballpark’s parking lots (some might be turned off but I was too happy to try running again to care—and this year’s course promises to be different).