Yesterday, while driving the 72nd seafarer of the day to the mall (our driver is on vacation for 3 weeks, which means that the chaplains get to take turns filling in. Being an intern, I get to experience this unparalleled joy rather more often than anyone else seems to...) and daydreaming longingly about the run that was to be my reward for making it through an endless day of chauffeuring, I had a revelation: riding the subway and running need not be mutually exclusive. Don't worry, I have not been overcome by the suicidal desire to jog along the subway platform. But it did occur to me that it is completely possible to hop on the train for a few miles and run home from there. Which opens up whole new frontiers of route possibilities, chief among them, Central Park.
The fact that I have lived in this city for 3/4 of a year and not run in the Best Freaking Park Ever is almost criminal (I blame my godforsaken achilles tendon, which has kept me sedentary for a maddeningly long stretch of time). But seriously - street running and Central Park running ought to be classified as 2 completely different sports. As I've previously blogged, running in Harlem involves lots of obstacle dodging - cars, strollers, people, stray cats, overflowing trash bags, etc. Park running also features obstacles, but on a much larger scale. There you'll be, merrily jogging along, when all of a sudden you'll come to a pond. Do you turn around and double back? Do you try to run around the pond, assuming that the path will eventually resume in the direction you wanted to go in? Decisions, decisions! And then there'll be a giant hill that you won't feel like running up. Or some stairs. Or a baseball diamond. So you keep taking random forks as you see fit to avoid all the obstacles in question, and pretty soon you realize that you have absolutely no idea where you are.
Which ties nicely into the second major difference between street and CP running - the difference in the likelihood of getting lost. Unless I am a) functioning on 3 days of no sleep or b) in the West Village, it is near impossible for me to get seriously lost in Manhattan. It's just too logical. But the minute I step off the grid and into the lush foliage of Central Park, my sense of direction flies out the window. I am notoriously incapable of trying to walk crosstown without ending up 10 blocks north or south of where I started; it's truly embarrassing. Thus it should come as no surprise that, what I had very neatly mapped out as a 3 miles run from 86th street back to Harlem, wound up taking almost an hour and god only knows how many miles. And, if my very life depended on it, I couldn't tell you where all I was (though I can tell you that I was, at one point, so turned around that I was running due south instead of north...excellent).
But it was SO GLORIOUS! It was quiet, a good 10 degrees cooler than on the streets, and breathtakingly gorgeous. There is nothing in the world like running around the reservoir at sunset and gazing up at the illuminated skyline to make you feel like you're in a movie. Plus, the beauty of being fantastically lost is that it leads you to all sorts of nifty little CP nooks and crannies that you had no idea existed: a waterfall, a Gollum's Cave-esque little grotto, the problematic pond... needless to say, I am hooked. In fact, I find myself incapable of thinking of anything besides my next Central Park escapade.
It's almost like the city of New York knows I'm leaving in 2.5 months and is trying to entice me to stay by saving the best for last. If I hadn't already signed a contract in Connecticut, I just might be persuaded. At any rate, I plan to avail myself of as much New Yorky glory as possible for the remainder of my time here :)
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