I am a bit suprized to see the OP is in NYC (and where I happen to be at the moment). Most if not all of the curb lanes are occupied by parked cars. A jogger would have to be in between the parked cars and moving traffic. That’s just begging to become street pizza.
In DC that narrow strip of road is reserved for cyclists.
Slight tangent but I really had a hard time finding hot weather running clothes that also had reflective stuff on them. Midwest summers are way too hot IMO to run during full sun hours, so I run early (like 6 AM). Well it’s still dark here then.
Try here.
Runners’ World magazine did a piece a while back comparing running surfaces. It showed that concrete is *eight times * harder than asphalt, which gives us a very good reason for runners to run in the street.
Did they leave it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions or did they actually come out and encourage/endorse/recommend jogging in the street?
That’s a bit like a scuba diving magazine telling its readers how much more scenic it is swimming in shark-infested waters.
The answer is obvious Jogging kills brain cells
There is a certain absurdity in driving someplace so you can jog or ride a bike on paved paths. Yes, you have the added entertainment of annoying couples with strollers and small children, and there’s the down-to-earth warmth of tromping in Canada goose poop. In the big picture, though, the paved surfaces you jogged or biked on were the same as the ones you drove on to get there. If you had jogged or biked from your home, you would have used no gasoline. Some of you even have stair-stepper devices built into your apartment buildings. I have to go a few miles to get to a place with stairs.
You folks in crowded city conditions made your decisions to live there. Everybody makes their own choices. I dodged a man in St. Louis who believed it was my responsibility to dodge a man riding a bicycle on a sidewalk. :eek: That was unusual. For me, it was.
Fair enough. But this doesn’t, in my mind, provide a good reason for choosing a busy city street, in the dark, as your path. I’m sure concrete, or bike paths, or parks, or grass all have their drawbacks as running surfaces. But, if the “best” place for my hobby is the middle of a street, I’m thinking its time for a new hobby.
Running isn’t a hobby, it’s a way for me to maintain my weight, stay healthy, and get my exercise. And it’s a way for me to offset my “real” hobby: drinking beer and eating hot wings.
I have to get out there and get some exercise or I gain weight like crazy, and running is my preferred method. Like the others in this thread, I wake up super-early to get my morning run in, and can’t squeeze anything else into my schedule. So I can either run on the sidewalks or the street. If I run on the sidewalks my knees and back hurt for the rest of the day. On the street, I feel great, energized, etc.
I live in a quiet neighborhood, so I rarely even see a car at the times in which I run, but even if I did see them I wouldn’t alter my behavior. How much does it really affect your commute to pass a runner? You have to very slightly turn your steering wheel to the left, then very slightly back to the right. This tricky maneuver probably takes somewhere between 1-2 seconds, and it gives the runner an appropriate amount of space to support him or her in a healthier lifestyle. So what’s the big deal?
I agree, runners need to take responsibility and wear reflective clothing, but the drivers need to let us do our thing.
Whenever I see this type of thread, I assume it is not aimed at those runners who frequent side streets, wearing reflective clothing, at low-traffic times. But there is a special breed of runner who chooses to run down the busiest streets in a particular area, at relatively high traffic times, despite the availability of numerous side streets a block or less in either direction.
In this runner’s opinion, this type of person has no legitimate excuse.
Absolutely – as a driver, I need to share the road and be careful of all obstructions. You’re right that going around a runner is very minor. But my objection is not based on any inconvenience to me. I just don’t want to kill anybody. I think I am a very careful and courteous driver, but when somebody is running in the street, without reflective clothing, and with his back to me, the deck is stacked against me. There are special places for pedestrian traffic. The center stripe is not one of those places.
Good point–I’d assumed that streets and sidewalks were the same in the OP’s mind but that’s probably not the case.
I do have to cross streets and when the sidewalks are bad, I do have to run in the streets. As I posted earlier, I live in a fairly old section of town (homes are all at least a century old) and the sidewalks are not always good. So yes, where I know the sidewalk is cracked, I sure do move out to the street.
Fortunately I was able to find one (seriously, just one) hot weather top that had some reflective stuff on the back but wasn’t one of those safety vests. Those vests would make me sweat more, and that’s not a good thing.
I agree that running in the middle of a busy, city street in the dark is a bad idea and the risks offset the health benefits.
However, I don’t know that we would all agree on what exactly is meant by ‘dark’ and ‘busy.’
I used to run before 0500 some mornings, and I mostly ran in the street. A lot of people would say that was foolhardy and dangerous. But that was the best time of the day for me to run consistently, and so I took that risk. If I were in charge of the world, there’d be well-maintained dirt running paths everywhere I might want to run.
In my experience, the most dangerous place of all to run was on a concrete sidewalk anywhere there was a driveway. Driveways seemed to be “Ooh, mister in-a-big-hurry-driver, please splatter me all over the pavement” zones.