Someday

they'll make a marathon out of this run.

Yesterday, I linked to the route I was planning to do. It was developed by Ian, who basically took all the Rocky movie landmarks and connected the dots into a loop. If you're willing to run 15 miles, you can start at the Art Museum and go up through North Philly up to Front and Dauphin Streets where the gym is located where Rocky trained, down into Center City past Independence Hall and into South Philly, where you go down 9th St. - the Italian Market - and past the meat lockers like those where Rocky worked on his form. Then its west on Morris St. past the church where Rocky and Adrian got married and back to the Art Museum. I passed on going up the steps. I ran down to the Art Museum and back home to make it a long 20. Was looking to stay on my legs and not out to do speed, total time was 2:53:25.

This run shows much more of Philadelphia than the marathon course does. While over half of the marathon course is run in Fairmount Park where the purpose seems to be to cover the city's grit with green, this course flaunts that hard-scrabble (I should say hard-scrapple) character that most of us residents (outside of Center City and Chestnut Hill) are proud of. Thats not to say that its all slum and ghetto. The loop has its stretches like Front Street, where junkies and prostitutes walk around like they still haven't grasped that its morning, but the course also has a good dollop of luxury and mostly working class blocks that comprise the heart of this city. Furthermore, in every part of the city we ran through there was building - development, revitalization, gentrification, whaddevayawanna callit - which most marathoners would miss, but for a trained eye shows a city on the uptake (not just on the take). So, extend this loop down to the only major Rocky landmark we missed - the Spectrum - where Rocky fought Creed and where the Rocky statue now stands, and you have a marathon course which will give people a true taste of Philly (hell, it even goes by Pat's and Geno's cheesesteak joints), a taste they just don't get on the current course.

This was a good run for several other reasons. First was the company. Six others - Erin, KJ, Jim, Chemistry Steve, Marita and Mony - showed up to do all or part of this loop. For Marita it was the longest she'd ever run, and she hung with us until Center City, when she cut back on Pine St. as the rest of us headed South. It was good to see Mony, who has been scarce lately, but his training was also not up to the full run. KJ was MIA after he hung back with Marita, so there were four of us who finished up the loop, not quite as it was laid out but, hey, this is Philly where even the best plans are merely guidelines. I don't remember having run with Jim before, he has a form that looks like he's jogging until you realize he's taking you down to what feels like mid or lo 7 pace, which is what we chugged back to the Art Museum doing. And Chemistry Steve wanted to get in extra miles and was good enough to give me company on my run back to West Philly before he cut back to Center City. Like I always say after these things, it takes a village. . .

I liked the run because it took me out of the Fairmount-Manayunk-West Philly paradigm of long runs. Going up north and east led me to neighborhoods I'd only gawked at through a windshield. Then in South Philly it was fun to run through places that I'd only been to before through driving. However, the tight grid layout, especially in South Philly, is not conducive to running steady and my legs, which felt good this morning, got extra beat up over the course of the course. Foregoing speed today for time on my feet. The breathing was easy but the walking is a little unsteady now.

This has me resolved to do more long runs in a northeasterly direction in the future, and do some exploring like we did today.