Favorite Runs Outside of Pittsburgh #3

Hickory Hill
I moved back to Richmond after graduating in 2004 expressly to live with Jon Lauder and Tim Caramore and train like beasts. I got a job in November and moved after Thanksgiving, which coincided with my taking a lot of time off of running hard. When I started up again, Tim was in relatively poor shape and Jon was pretty much training a lot because he didn't work steady jobs.
In the meantime, I became incredibly involved in my job. I was one of three reporters at a weekly paper based in Hanover County, all of whom were 22.
Our editor was hired to replace the late publisher who lead the Herald-Progress to prominence in local news reportage. The new editor was not quite up to the task of continuing the high performance of the paper, nor was the new management. After buying the H-P, management fired the photographer and wore down two reporters until they left. News coverage was in shambles, and the editor was in over his head.
After a few weeks of orientation and getting to know the county, I started getting more aggressive and ambitious about how the paper would work. With an editor who was a few months longer tenured than I, I didn't have the luxury of institutional knowledge on which to rely. I took bound copies of prior years' papers home with me to study in the evenings and on weekends.
I started experimenting with photography and found, for an amateur, that I had an eye for it and the patience to find the right shot. I dusted off my layout skills and started designing more dynamic pages for the paper. Before long, I was scouring the county, writing the news, shooting the sports photos and putting the paper together. In the face of 60-70-hour weeks, running wasn't a realistic pursuit, and what running I did manage was on my own and usually in Hanover.
Sometimes I'd run in Ashland, sometimes I'd run elsewhere while waiting for appointments, but it was almost always more as a chance to clear my head when the responsibilities I was taking seemed daunting. I didn't have to do all I did, but I found it hard to not try my best to make it a great paper. That's what the readers came to expect for years before. It was hard to hear people decry the drop in quality, even though it was true. It weighed on my self-valuation, and if I wasn't working hard enough to fill the paper with diverse and relevant stories, I was failing.
I immersed myself in the county, and luckily for my running, I saw how many viable routes there were to get away from traffic and people and just run.
Reber Dunkel, sociology professor at Randolph-Macon College, Green Party congressional candidate and limited-growth advocate brought to my attention the huge undeveloped 3,200-acre Hickory Hill property east of Ashland and the threat that it would someday be subdivided. I lacked the basic comprehension to figure out how big it would be based on numbers alone, so I had to see it for myself. On foot. Running. There was a train station there, for goodness sakes!
Chances are it's private property, though I think the signs refer to the land on either side of the road. People who have seen me running there haven't said anything to me, so they either don't care, don't have any authority, or else they wanted to try to take me by surprise.
Wickham and Hickory Hill Roads eventually degrade into gravel and dirt, so the footing gets softer.
From the Hanover County Information Officer Tom Harris: The Hickory Hill plantation spreads more than 3,000 acres between Ashland and Hanover Courthouse and is still owned by members of the Wickham family, who built it in 1820. Trees on the property are believed to have been brought from Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry as a result of his historic visit in 1854. General William H.R. "Rooney" Lee, son of Gen. Robert E. Lee, was captured by Union soldiers on the property but his younger brother escaped capture by hiding in the plantation's famous box hedges. The property is the largest still in the hands of one family in Virginia. The main house of this plantation includes an 1857 wing and an 1875 front section built to replace an 1827 section that burned.
I left the Herald-Progress in July 2005, to work at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I feel like I gave up a little bit, because I knew nobody would put in the kind of work I once did, and the readers would begin to accept, then expect less from their paper.
Sunday after the Monument Avenue 10k, I headed up to Ashland to run Hickory Hill with some changes to make it 18 miles before I took a train back to DC. I managed to get lost, however, taking the wrong turn on Wickham, and ran 19.6 miles instead.
Emily Ward was waiting for me at Ashland Coffee and Tea, planning to follow my route backwards if I did not make it back in a little more than two hours, so I'd be ready for my train. Realizing I was five minutes slower than I would have run the first nine miles at 7:00 pace, I stayed relatively on pace on the way back, not wanting to be scooped up by the sweeping car. I made it.
For 26 minutes as I ran along Old Ridge Road, I saw nobody- no walkers, no dogs, no cars. It was eerie, but great, because I could run down the middle of the roads.
Afterward I grabbed a copy of the current Herald-Progress. I was unimpressed.

Favorite Runs Outside of Pittsburgh #4

C&O Canal Towpath Trail- Hancock, MD, Mile 124

There are 184.5 miles on this trail, so plenty of places to choose. I personally like the section around mile 124.

I can't remember when I first started running on the towpath, but I first came across it in June 2001, while waiting for my then-girlfriend to be dropped off in Hancock by her mother so I could bring her to Pittsburgh. It was a little more than halfway between Pittsburgh and DC, so I made it a regular stop on my trips.

The canal is a National Historic Park along the north bank of the Potomac, so in addition to increased maintenance, the trail has numerous educational displays, though I am rarely in a position to stop and read them. The parking lot in Hancock has a permanent bathroom building which is also maintained well. The dirt trail is soft but firm. I've rarely been crowded when running, and I often see other runners out there. Most of the route is shaded, and although the slope is very gradual, every now and then a quick hill breaks the monotony.

It's an easy 2.5 hour drive from Pittsburgh and 1.5 hours from DC, at the juncture of I-68, I-70 and US 522.

I typically run east and turn around, though that leaves me with a slight uphill on the way back.

In 2004, I started noticing a correlation regarding my runs on the Towpath. When I ran on the towpath after interviewing for a job, I would either get the job or advance in the application process. It was enough to make it part of my traveling routine.

The GRC frequently runs on the towpath, and one runner did nothing but Towpath runs for a while, giving him a nickname, but the stretch close to Georgetown feels distinctly different from the Hancock portion I enjoy so much. Maybe the eastern section is too close to the Clara Barton Parkway, maybe it's that I haven't traveled for 2+ hours to get there, but it isn't the same.

My coach Steve Taylor told me stories about workouts on the trail, which he also recalled in a Running Times article on his training partner Steve Spence:

"A month before the trials, Spence and Taylor completed a memorable 3-hour run. Starting comfortably, the pair gradually dropped the pace and really pushed the last 4 miles of what ended up being a 30-miler. "We were down in the 5:30 range for the 40 minutes leading up to the last 4 miles," Taylor recalls. "I ended up averaging 4:56 for the last 4 and Steve left me with a mile and half to go and averaged 4:51. After that run we knew we were ready." "

When I run my next marathon, I will likely do a point-to-point long run, assuming I can find someone else with whom to drive out there and either run or bike with me. I am excited to see more than eight miles at a time, since I have only done out-and-back runs so far. Although the trail has mile markers, I am not sure how accurate they are, so I would prefer to do that pre-marathon run with someone who has a bike-mounted odometer to confirm mileage.

I vividly remember a 16-mile run I did to the east Nov. 7, 2005, when I kept picking up speed on a perfect Sunday afternoon, on my way to Westminster, MD for an interview. That autumn, I spent a lot of time considering living in western Maryland, so it might have become one of my training mainstays, rather than a treat for when I travel.

Favorite Runs outside of Pittsburgh #5

Cuyahoga River Towpath Trail, Cleveland, OH-

Ohio is famous for its long expanses of nothing, punctuated by the morass of ego in Columbus that subsides after a semi-regular defeat to the University of America's Wang. The state was named after Gerrard Ohio, first governor of Colorado. If you're looking for significant hills, you're generally out of luck, because Gov. Ohio refused to export any back to the east.

In this wasteland of broken dreams is hidden a gem, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Centered around the Cuyahoga River, it's never cold, because the burning river keeps runners and bikers warm year-round.

In all seriousness, I enjoy Cleveland. I haven't run this one in a while. My grandmother used to live in Brecksville, a great suburb to the south, with an arm of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park nearby. The towpath trail has accurate mile markers, pleasant surroundings, and low traffic. Even a few inclines dot the terrain.

The trail is mostly paved, but open 24 hours. It stretches more than 30 miles between Cleveland and Akron, but I frequently started around the 17 mile mark and headed seven miles south to Penninsula and back.

The last time I was there was not to run, but to take my then-92-year-old grandmother for a walk. Her mobility was limited at that point, but her short-term memory wasn't great, so I was able to convince her that we had just started walking, when we had really been out for a half hour or so. If this in anyway accelerated her decline a year later, I am still glad I pushed her, because it was a beautiful day and she told me on several occasions that she was having a great time. We sat down at a bench and toyed with an inchworm. We would let him walk across our hands, then onto another hand, putting him on what amounted to a treadmill. My grandmother remarked about how it tickled when the inchworm walked across her hand, and she laughed about how he walked so much but didn't get anywhere.