Flashes of Panic

This morning I ran in the Jardines de Turia, a long park about 150m-200m wide which runs in a broad arc around the historic center of Valencia. It’s a pretty decent place for a run; I had expected the park to end, eventually, or to be constantly stopping to wait for lights at major road crossings. Instead I found paths which apparently run somewhat more than five miles (I didn’t reach the end) and largely pass under bridges at major roads. In fact, the whole thing was, oddly, ten or twenty feet below the rest of the city. A minor stream ran along the park, but it’s a domesticated thing with pools and, I imagined, pumps somewhere to keep it flowing.

I saw quite a few runners down there, many apparently running with groups. (I also spotted a few Kenyans in town for the meet, so I knew I was in the right place.) It’s mainly concrete paths, but there are some dirt paths of the sort which have been hammered into stone by the tread of however many hundreds opted to avoid the too-hard concrete. (In other words, not much improvement.)

I discovered later that the park was, in fact, the old bed of the River Turia, and that the river had been rerouted to the south of the city after a catastrophic 1957 flood and turned into a massive park, not unlike if Boston drained the Charles from, say, Watertown to the sea and turned it into a park (though narrower, I suspect.)

One of these days I plan to run over to the port where the America’s Cup bases are (with the Swiss winning again last year, the expectation is that the next Cup will be held here as well, so the bases haven’t been dismantled—though the shop at the Alinghi base was running a 60% off sale when I walked there yesterday.) My hotel is as far as they get from the meet venue, but as close to the sea as any of the official meet hotels, so I’m happy to ride a bus back and forth. You can enter the beach there, which also goes for miles, but today the wind was brisk enough that I might have been sandblasted had I tried to run there.

Now Playing: Singing In My Sleep from Feeling Strangely Fine by Semisonic

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