Finding a Place to Run

Have you ever found yourself tired of running the same old routes day after day, week after week? Or maybe you are on the road and find yourself in a city you don't know. You can take off on a follow your nose run, and sometimes those are very interesting as long as you don't get lost. Unfortunately, my sister will never let me forget the time I went running late in the afternoon in a park near her home in Garland, Texas. The route was partly on sidewalks, but also along some heavily wooded trails. When night fell, it didn't creep, it just got dark. I ended up lost, turned around and made dizzy by the experience. When I sheepishly walked through my sister's front door an hour past due she was on the phone filing a missing persons report. Yikes!

Thankfully, MapMyRun.com can now take the guess work out of finding a new place to run. An internet connection, seemingly everywhere these days, is all you need to find a match between where you are and how far you want to run. Check it out the next time you are on the road or are simply bored with the same daily route. Oh yeah! It beats the heck out of the treadmill at the hotel or a short indoor track at a health club.

You can also share your own routes with other runners via MapMyRun. I guess I ought to do that with a couple of runs I did last week while I was back in my home town of Victoria, Texas, but instead I'll just tell you about them. I grew up in Victoria, but was never really a runner during those years. However, I spent a lot of time walking and much of that walking was in Victoria's Riverside Park. This is a maze of pecan groves, picnic tables, public grills, baseball diamonds and river bottom. There's no spit and polish on this park. It would never hold since flooding on the Guadalupe River is practically an annual ritual. Nevertheless, Riverside Park offers some great running. I followed my nose and invented a nice 4.3 mile loop which could easily have been made into a 5 mile loop.

Riverside Park works fine as long as there is natural light. However, after dark I believe it might be a bit risky since lighting is not especially generous. That's why I took my one evening run on the track at Victoria Memorial High School. Things have changed since I was a student there. At that time it was the only high school in Victoria, it was known as Victoria High School (VHS), and we were the Stingarees. Now it's the Memorial High School Vipers. Another major change is the quality of the track. In my day at VHS, I'm not even sure they had a track. I seem to recall that the runners were bused over to one of the junior high schools, where there was a quarter mile track. Now, one finds at VHS a wonderful Tartan surface track. My feet thanked me that night for taking my 6 miles on the track and that was almost thanks enough to make me forget how much I dislike logging my miles on a track. I would much rather pound pavement, as we say, and next time I find myself in Victoria, needing a night time run, I will probably look up someone's running route on MapMyRun and run the streets. Either that, or do speed work on the track, and that's something I always hate to do. Yeah, yeah, I know if I ever expect to get faster I need to run wind sprints, but I would much rather jog for 10 miles than sprint for a quarter mile. Just me....