Monday, April 17, 2017

Running in Bloomington, IL: Constitution Trail

Between the recovery after the fiasco at last week's 100K Nationals and the tapering for the Boston Marathon this morning, plus quite a few miles of driving from customer meetings in Wisconsin to the the South of Illinois, this has been a very low mileage week but I was able to squeeze a good early morning run while staying in Bloomington, IL. 11 miles on the Constitution Trail.

Looking at the map of the trail system, this reminded me of the run I had in Columbus 3 years ago on their long suburban trail system. However, see for yourself, Bloomington set the bar much higher, see how many trail appear on these maps (available as pdf, or mobile version):


I think this is a case of too much abundance because it doesn't seem like all these trails are actually marked and I ended up myself losing track of the trail on my East-West run...

That being said, it started very well though as I was super gad to find a super wide asphalt bike path near the hotel I was staying at the first night, on the East side of the city.

Quickly, the trail joined a rail track, always a fixture in the Midwest (we forget how important is the rail system when living in California...). In this case, there is even a place which used to be very busy, The Junction between trail North-South and East-West lines.


Here is the place I lost track of the trail and went on the street.


Of course, that's only a one-run experience, as you see on these maps, there is much more to explore! Congrats to Bloomington for developing this trail system to get people to exercise!

I went for a 5-mile run on Saturday at marathon pace. The legs seem to have recovered fine, just hoping asthma isn't going to kick in this time, time to go to Hopkinton for my Boston #5, it's going to be a warm day per local standards (they had snow here a weekend ago!). See you on Boylston Street in a few hours!

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