Natural Habitat of the City Runner

The city streets call you, O City Runner. Resist the tradewinds that carry the rest of the flock to the unnatural habitat of park pathways.

An ironic contradiction or merely pragmatic? That the road runners of New York Road Runners find their home base near the greatest urban park in the country. (To be fair, the park has plenty of roads.) The club's office is on 89th Street a block from Central Park, where the first New York City Marathon was held, in 1970. The park remains the site of many of the club's races, as well as the five-borough marathon's final few miles.

I won't deny, when coming to Manhattan the northeast runner thinks of Central Park.

Nor will I deny the joy of a brisk park loop, though I prefer it in the off season when the skyline is visible through the leafless trees. Park running serves its purpose, but a city run should take place in the city.

A true city run harnesses the energy of the honking taxis, the wide-turning buses, the sidewalk food stands, the construction crews, the shuffling business people, even the tourists, wide-eyed and curious, not to mention the glorious hulking masses of concrete, steel and glass that flash in and out of the peripheral vision of the city runner.

The problem: Unless you time your run perfectly, you're gonna hit a stoplight — which is perfect if you need to rest, but for any momentum it's a killer.

Jane Jacobs, the late-great Greenwich Village resident and philosopher of city planning, wrote in her seminal "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) that short blocks are one of the essential components of vibrant city neighborhoods, because the increased potential for twists and turns brings people deeper into the diverse neighborhood. Rockefeller Center is a better stroll than the long blocks between Fifth and Sixth avenues found in the rest of Midtown.

"It is fluidity of use, and the mixing of paths, not homogeneity of architecture, that ties together city neighborhoods into pools of city use," she writes.

But Adams' pools of city use were for workers, residents and pedestrians. Runners have their own modes of urban appreciation that aren't easily accommodated by even the best-designed neighborhoods.

If park runs are too removed and neighborhood runs too congested, then an appropriate alternative would be a run that takes in the urban landscape from a distance.

I recently felt my calling as a city runner during a five-miler along the Hudson River from Midtown to Battery Park. The paved running and biking path between the river and the West Side Highway is close enough to the traffic to feel the energy, but the runner's momentum is rarely threatened, except by the occasional cross-traffic. Glance off to the left and the Empire State Building towers over the lesser buildings nearby. Glance right and there's New Jersey across the Hudson. Ahead, the Statue of Liberty slowly comes into view. And with it, Lower Manhattan and World Financial Center and Ground Zero and Castle Clinton and Battery Park, where people wait in line for the boat to Liberty and Ellis islands.

Catch your breath, wipe the sweat and appreciate the city surroundings — before you duck into the subway to rejoin the flock.