By Frank da Cruz - Upper Riverside Drive. Run North up the sidewalk along Riverside Park to Grant's Tomb and just keep going. Run up the viaduct to 135th Street. A spectacular, panoramic view — the river, the George Washington Bridge, New Jersey, West Harlem — and when you reach the 130s, the smells coming up from Fairway are an extra treat. An especially good time for this run is when big black thunderstorm clouds are approaching from the north; the bridge is tricked into thinking the sun has set so turns on its lights, which gleam like strings of pearls against the turbulent backdrop and reflect on the water. Lightning flashes and booming thunder add excitement. So what if you get soaked (but once I did this in a hailstorm, which I don't recommend). Anyway, at the 135th Street end of the viaduct, you can turn around and come back, or if you want to do another 1.4 miles, go up to 139th Street and enter Riverbank State Park (i.e. the top of the North River sewage treatment plant). If you have never been to Riverbank State Park, you will be surprised; it is the only State park in Manhattan, complete with pool, ball fields, skating rink, basketball and handball courts, a concert stage, a carousel, picnic areas, even park rangers. If you run around the circumfrence, that's worth about a mile, then come back out the way you went in, or: if you go down the stairs on the northeast corner of the complex, which bring you to a whole new section of Riverside Park, where you can run (mostly) along the river all the way to the Little Red Lighthouse underneath the George Washington Bridge at 180th Street, a bit more than 3 miles north of Columbia. By the way, I discovered that bottom of the stairs doesn't connect directly with the park any more — now you have to detour through a series of gates, but at least there is still access. Or you can run past Riverbank State Park and keep going north on Riverside Drive. There is another viaduct, equally spectacular, between 152nd and 155th Streets (river and New Jersey on the west, Audubon Terrace and Trinity Cemetary on the east), then a looooong hill up to 163rd from which you can coast down to 165th, where you can: turn right up the short steep hill to Fort Washington Avenue (which puts you in Columbia's uptown campus), and then run north on Fort Washington to 179th Street, where you can get on the George Washington Bridg; or you can keep going north on Riverside Drive, but it gets tricky when it merges with the West Side Highway and you have to dash across various ramps and entrances, and then the highway itself. July update: I found a way to get from Riverside Drive to the new path along the Highway. As you approach the George Washington Bridge on the west side of Riverside Drive, after crossing a couple highway exits, you come to the place where the Drive and the highway merge. Rather than leap into highway traffic, you can follow the asphalt path that curves around to the left. It is blocked off with a big log, perhaps for good reason, but you can jump over the log and follow the path down and around and through a dense wood. The asphalt soon disappears but the path continues around and brings you back to the street level under the bridge, where you can see it blocked off with a cement barricade. From here you can see the new path, about which more just below. For safety, you should not take this path alone, because it is completely hidden from the road and everywhere else. Eventually you can find the once old decrepit overgrown but now gloriously renovated sidewalk along the west edge of the highway where you can run all the way up past the Cloisters to Dyckman Street, just shy of the tolls. For decades, this path was narrow, overgrown, and crumbling but now it is wide and clean with a perfect-for-running asphalt surface. I have done this a few times, and saw all sorts of wildlife in the adjoining woods — raccoons, possums, skunks, etc. The sidewalk ends at Dyckman Street, where you can: turn around and go back (when you reach the George Washington Bridge, new path curves around to the right and goes down through a tunnel and over a railroad bridge to the Little Red Lighthouse, so you have the option of returning along the river rather than the way you came); or cross under the highway via a new access path (in years past, the only way to cross the highway at this point was by suicidal dash through traffic), go down the hill to Dyckman Street, and then enter Inwood Hill Park (on the north side of Dyckman Street) and run along its ghostly overgrown paths (I haven't been there in a while; maybe it is cleaned up now); or once you find your way onto Dyckman Street itself, you can also enter the grounds of the Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park (just south of Dyckman Street) with their rustic and picturesque network of walkways, also suitable for running except when the knights are jousting. The route up Riverside Drive from 112th to 162nd is a terrific five-mile run with spectacular views and, in the summer, the delicious aromas of family cookouts from 135th Street northwards.

Runners who live in the Columbia University area of Manhattan, New York City (Morningside Heights and West Harlem) are fortunate to have Riverside Park, Central Park, and Morningside Park nearby. The parks and the Hudson riverfront are in better condition now than at any time in the last one hundred years, especially since 2000 with the inauguration of the Greenway. The site Upper Manhattan Running describes some obvious and not-so-obvious runs that start in the Columbia area, but it is also useful for anybody who lives on the west side anywhere between midtown and Washington Heights or Inwood.

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