Distance: 10.67 mi.
Time: 1:21:22.
Pace: 7:38.
I'm in between homes for the next two weeks, and as a result I'm staying with family in southeast Charlotte. I'm eternally grateful for the hospitality and the huge home, but this side of town is nothing short of awful for running. I will never take for granted being able to live and run in Dilworth and Myers Park every day.
I set out through Matthews by the Siskey Y, cheating death as there was no sidewalk for a long stretch of road. I do not understand this at all. So many of the connecting roads out here do not have sidewalks. How is this safe? What happens when a resident wants to walk down the street? I suppose the answer to this is: they don't. This is America, after all; people don't think you can walk around unless you live in a sub-division. Anyone who passed by me probably immediately thought I was either (a) an idiot or (b) running from the law. Maybe both. On the bright side, this led to an exciting moment crossing the I-485 bridge, when I simply waited until there were no cars and sprinted across it as if my life depended on it.
I made my way, alive if not well, down to Highway 51. Here, of course, there were sidewalks. It would seem to me that if you had to pick and choose where to put a sidewalk, then the busy four-lane highway would not seem to need one compared to a short, two-lane connecting road in the middle of a massive residential area. Nevertheless, I ran, on the sidewalk, from Fullwood Lane all the way to the Arboretum Shopping Center - at the intersection of 51 and Providence Road.
The cool thing about this stretch of the run is that I had some massive hills, which served the dual purpose of hill training while also easing my aching left leg. Pushing on the ups seemed to make the numb feeling go away in an area that has been a mild concern to me. I crested the hill and turned left on Kuykendall, where of course I once again would have to run with no sidewalks.
Check that - every now and then, there would be a sidewalk, and then it would disappear into a sub-division. Again, if you can only put sidewalks in certain areas, then I would think the quiet neighborhood streets would be less of a priority than the curvy connecting road. (Ideally, there would be sidewalks on all the roads, but you get the idea.) This is simply horrible land-use planning, and it helps explain why suburban housing costs are at such a great risk of plummeting without warning: there is no sustainability to a community that leads nowhere, means nothing, does not connect. This entire side of town is filled with small sub-divisions that fit that description. The houses are beautiful and the neighborhoods are often very quiet and peaceful, but ultimately there is no sense of place. This is the type of planning that has dominated America since right after World War II, and I think Charlotte has done a fantastic job of attempting to turn that around (see: Plaza-Midwood, NoDa, Phillips Place, Birkdale Village, South End, et al.).
You might be thinking, "But Jason, I don't like to run or ride my bike, so none of this matters to me." Fair enough, but you're still a slave to your car. Some of these people probably spend five minutes simply driving out of their neighborhoods, only to go to a place that looks exactly like the one they've just left. This obviously results in a much higher cost of living, seemingly without much reward.
On the bright side, there's always the McMullen Greenway, and many people don't even need to drive to it!
Geography lesson over. Sorry.
