Friday, June 5, 2009

Parking Lot Loops

If you can walk around it, someone is going to try to run around it.

In Britain, the Great Court at Trinity College, Cambridge, was completed sometime in the early 1600s. Not much later, scholars started running around the Great Court. When the College clock was added later in the century, Trinity College's athletes had a goal: to complete the circuit of the Great Court before the College clock can finish striking twelve. 1928 Olympic gold-medalist David Cecil, Lord Burghley, became the first runner to beat the clock around the quad in 1927. Burghley's performance in the Great Court Run was the inspiration for a scene in the movie Chariots of Fire.

On this side of the Atlantic, Hamilton, Ontario bookie Billy Carroll and his cronies had a lively discussion about who had made the fastest circuit of Hamilton Harbour, a loop of about nineteen miles. Voices were raised, bets were made, and on Christmas Day of 1894 the Hamilton Around the Bay Race was established, three years before that upstart marathon in Boston, Massachusetts. The Hamilton Around the Bay Road Race remains the oldest long distance race in North America.

Yes, if you can walk around it, someone is going to try to run around it. Then someone else will measure it and try to time it. And in America, yet another person will find a way to sell tickets, auction off the television rights, and get the winner's picture printed on a box of "Wheaties."

There are several natural loops in the Tallahassee area, as short as a dash around the State Capitol Complex or as long as a circumambulation of Lake Jackson. In between, I've already written about the trails that circle Lake Henrietta, Lake Elberta, and the pond at Martha Wellman Park. But I also have a strange fascination for loops around parking lots.

Parking lots are not exactly havens of arboreal splendor. "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot," the song says. But if you're running a road race, you've already committed to running on pavement. In a parking lot, the race directors should easily be able to control automobile traffic and protect the runners (it's easier to close a parking lot than to close a highway). And if you're driving to the race, there should be plenty of parking when you get there.

So here are three such loops that I've given some thought to.

Terminal Drive Loop


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While driving around Terminal Drive at Tallahassee Regional Airport, waiting to pick up a debarking family member, I started to wonder just how long a loop it made. Was it a mile? Could this be the future course of the Tallahassee Airport Mile?

As Terminal Drive pictureit turns out, the loop is about 0.8 miles long. I'll measure it with surveying equipment someday when I don't mind exciting the fine men and women who work for the Transportation Security Authority. Still, you could lengthen that to a mile quite easily by repeating the straightaway along the terminal. Or you could do almost four laps and have a 5,000 meter course. The loop is actually fairly attractive, with a tree-lined north straightaway and a modest change in elevation on the curves between the north straightaway (which is lower) and the south straightaway (which is higher). One annoying detail is that this is an airport, and you probably couldn't shut it down for a race. However, there doesn't seem to be any passenger traffic in or out of Tallahassee after midnight. Thus, a Midnight Mile! Or series of one-mile races. Or an elite 5,000 meter race. Terminal Drive is well-lit, and spectators could see most of the race from the terminal. But you'd have to convince everyone involved (including the Transportation Security Authority) of the worthwhile cultural and economic benefits of such an event.

Governor's Square Mall Loop

22 laps around Governor's Square is a marathon!


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Or Governor's Square pictureat least very, very close to a marathon. The loop around the Governor's Square Mall parking lot is right about 2100 yards, which is not quite 1-1/4 miles or a bit short of two kilometers. Not that you'd necessarily want to run a marathon on this loop. For one thing, the mall was built on a hillside, and there is a pretty good elevation change between the low end of the loop to the north and high end of the loop near Apalachee Parkway. After nine or ten times around the mall, I imagine that hill would get a bit monotonous.

Still, there are worse roads to run on. For a shorter run, the slopes wouldn't be particularly challenging but would still cause runners to change the muscle groups they were using as they moved around the loop. Almost the entire loop is lined by trees, including live oaks, white oaks, and magnolias.

Governor's Square pictureThere are interesting possibilities for holding a race on the loop. A 4K would be a little more than two laps, and is enough of an oddball distance that nearly everyone would be guaranteed a personal best. Spectators might be disappointed to find that there is a large building in the middle of the loop (i.e., Governor's Square Mall) blocking their view. Most of the loop is wide enough that you could cone off a lane for the runners, altho' you'd probably still want to schedule the race to take place before the mall's regular hours (you certainly wouldn't want to hold a race during the Christmas shopping season). Governor's Square might even be happy to host an event that brought several hundred people to the mall.

Tallahassee Mall Loop

If no one stages a race around Governor's Square Mall, then someone is liable to put on a race around Tallahassee Mall.

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There Tallahassee Mall loopactually was at least one road race starting from Tallahassee Mall back in the 1980s, attested to by the yellowing pages of old Racing South magazines. More recently, the mall was expanded, and the developers attempted to add a perimeter road to the parking lot. They were fairly successful to the east and to the north of Tallahassee Mall; the perimeter road is wide, landscaped, and goes by woods and ponds. To the south--especially parallel to North Monroe Street (US 27)--you're in the old parking lot, and the perimeter road is flanked by asphalt on both sides. To the west, things are even worse. There is no perimeter road to the west. In order to complete a loop around the mall, you either have to snake through the parking lot itself or head out onto Allen Road.

PondPortions of the loop have all the charm of an alleyway (or a parking lot), but some of the newer parts are landscaped. Almost none of the loop is flat, most of it being gently rolling, with a genuine hill on Allen Road. It's a bit longer than the Governor's Square loop, measuring about 2,350 yards (1-1/3 miles, or 2.15 km). Two loops plus 700 meters would be a 5K, or two loops less 300 meters would be a 4K. Once again, spectators would have the mall blocking their view, and mall merchants would have dozens if not hundreds of potential customers in their parking lot.

This isn't a comprehensive list of Tallahassee's parking lot loops, and I'm sure that there are a few long loops around apartment complexes or Wal-Mart stores that I've missed. A few people may be adamant that a parking lot is the worst place in the world to race, but if the alternative is yet another 5K around Maclay Gardens State Park or the Florida State University campus, then the parking lot loops at least look like a change of scenery.

I'll agree, though, that a marathon of 22 laps around Governor's Square Mall isn't a great idea.

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Posted by Herb Wills at 4:29 PM
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