City livin'

For the past couple months, I've been waiting for our mileage to build up before taking on a full scale city run.  Living in Southie, it takes a couple miles of L St/Summer St before you get to anything worth looking at, and the fact that I walk the route every day to work makes it less than appealing for me.  That said, 14 miles seemed to be enough length for me to play around with and really explore the city.  After all my time thinking we needed to be in the suburbs to have a nice peaceful run, I forgot all of the emotions that are felt running through our own historic city.

Saturday morning the weather was perfect.  It was 70 degrees, maybe even a little cooler, with no humidity when we stepped out the door, geared up with water belts and GU.  We wasted no time running out of Southie.  In fact, we hit Harpoon over a mile in, and it felt like we had just left the house.  We ran through the Seaport and around the back of the courthouse where we marveled at the view of the sailboats in the harbor.  The rusty footbridge pulled us along toward the Marriott Longwharf where the hotel guests sat on the restaurant deck getting ready for what I can only imagine to be a day of heavy tourist activities.  As we ran around to the aquarium and past the Landing, I had memories of the guppy bowl from Kelly's bachelorette party... much of our route up to this point was actually the exact bar crawl, so running it is a bit different!

The next part of our route was the North End, Max's old stomping grounds.  Running around the back of this tiny neighborhood only took minutes, but it was enough to catch a festival being set up on Hanover Street, a baseball game in progress with quite a few spectators, and to see a number of people bustling about.

The big excitement of the route for me was running along Storrow Drive.  There's an area where you can run/walk/bike/suntan right along the river that is quite removed from the street.  Multiple docks jut out into the water, and plenty of people lay out on the grassy areas and benches, enjoying the serenity.  We saw a number of other runners, some fast and tall and skinny like that are actual elite athletes, others pushing along looking like first timers.  Either way, all of the runners were extremely motivating, and I loved looking at all the little foot bridges and pathways intersecting us along the way.

Things got a bit confusing around BU with construction, closed roads, a missing stairway (that Max THEN told me was "not very sturdy" to begin with)... finally, we found our way across the BU bridge and into Cambridge.  Following the bike path, there were a few boat houses, and a lot of runners and people with dogs.  This one guy had his dog jump into the Charles River to fetch a ball, and we had worries the dog was incapable of swimming back out!

By the time we rounded the canal around the Cambridgeside Galleria, we realized that this was a true long run.  Further impending on our progress, the bridge connecting the Museum of Science to the West End was up and made us wait a few minutes to cross.  Dodging the families with strollers and all the tourists, we made our way across the bridge, straight back through the city... and home!