Track Woes

I know President's Day was last week, but allow me to invoke our founding fathers for a moment (God knows the presidential candidates have been invoking them on an hourly basis). Our founding fathers recognized that we have certain unalienable rights--the right to due process of law, the right to just compensation in cases of governmental takings, the right to religious freedom--but it's obvious none of our founding fathers was a runner.

If there had been runners in that first Congress at Federal Hall in New York, surely one of them would have included the right to a track!

What am I talking about? It can be really difficult to find a good all-weather 400 meter or 440 yard track. In New York City, there are a handful of tracks, but most of them fall into one of four categories:

(1) Weird distance - It's hard to run 800 m repeats on an unmarked 330m track!

(2) Weird shape - It's tricky to maintain speed on a track with 90 degree angles (plus, these tracks usually also fall into category (1))

(3) Limited Hours - Some of the nicest tracks are only open certain times of day, times that don't really allow people with jobs good options for getting in a workout.

(4) Pay-per-use tracks - There are a handful of indoor tracks in the city, but these require you to pay each time you want to use them and they usually fall into category (3) and sometimes categories (1) and (2) as well.

There's also a fifth category for tracks that are just too far away for me to get to on a weekday. There are great tracks at McCarren Park, the Redhook Recreation Area, Van Cortlandt Park, and Forest Park, but there is no way I can get to those places before work. There are two tracks close to me, one that's approximately 320 meters with 90 degree angles and one that doesn't open until 6am. I guess when you have Manhattan real estate prices to deal with, tracks just aren't a winning proposition.

For now, I'll continue to make due with the Central Park reservoir loop but I'm not going to stop dreaming about a day where I can live across the street from a pristine all-weather track!

Getting lost, or the joys of trying a new route.

During the week, it's all I can do to get myself out of bed in time to squeeze in a run in my neighborhood before work. On the weekends, however, there's usually more time for runs that go further afield. Often, I'll do what I did Saturday and run to some far off point and take the train home. Once in a while, however, I'll take the subway to some new place and run there. Yesterday was one of those days.

I do a fair amount of runs in Astoria and Long Island City, but I've only ventured deeper into Queens on a handful of occasions. For a while now, the siren song of Forest Park has been calling me, so with the skies clear and the temps hovering around 40, I decided to go for it.

I got off the E at Kew Gardens - Union Turnpike and had little trouble making my way to the Forest Park. Forest Park is a nice middle ground between the well-manicured but urban feeling Central and Prospect Parks, and the wilder stretches of Van Cortlandt Park's wooded trails. It also has some pretty decent hills (which I guess you should expect when one of the surrounding neighborhoods has "hills" in its name!).

Because I didn't plan out the run too carefully before hand--the idea was to "explore"--I ended up getting turned around a couple of times. Oh well, at least I got to see more. I ended my run at the area's main commercial strip and picked up a Sicilian slice at Portofino. Nick's Pizza, which is just a couple blocks away, is supposed to serve one of the best pies in the city, but they don't sell slices so I'll just have to visit them next time.