By Frank da Cruz - Here is the perfect 5-mile run from Columbia. Start at 112th Street (if you start at 116th, then it is a bit more than 5 miles). Run down the Riverside Drive sidewalk and enter the park at 97th Street. Go around the little loop to 96th street and then back up to 100th Street, where the Mall starts. Turn left to go under the highway. Now you are right on the river, on a path for runners, pedestrians, skaters, and cyclists, Cherry Walk, constructed in 2000, part of the Greenway, goes north from this point to 129th Street, along the river, next to the highway (thus it is very safe because thousands of people can see you). Cherry Walk itself is exactly 1.5 miles long, counting the wiggles, mostly flat except for a modest hill near Grant's Tomb. It is beautifully landscaped, lots of blossoms in the Spring, and you will see ducks, geese, and cormorants up close in the Spring and Fall. Once I even saw a great blue heron and another time a family of loons. Because of the prevailing West wind, you hardly ever get exhaust fumes from the highway. When you get to the end of Cherry Walk, keep going to the Fairway parking lot fence, then turn around, come back the same way to 100th Street, go back up into the park, and run north to the end of the Mall at 110th Street. That is exactly 5 miles (except now, September 2008, the Fairway Parking lot is gone, more about this below). The Cherry Walk surface is perfectly smooth asphalt with excellent drainage. There are never any puddles. My only quibble is the way the bicycle and running lanes are laid out; the bike lane is relatively flat, whereas the runners lane is slightly banked for drainage, which can be hard on the knees and ankles. Originally it was the other way and they changed it. The lanes don't work anyway. The narrow west lane is clearly marked "Pedestrians only" (including runners). The wider east lane is clearly marked for bicyclists and skaters in both directions. But "everybody knows" you are supposed to keep right, so northbound runners in their own lane are met by a constant onslaught of oncoming bikers, many of whom play chicken with you because they believe they are in the correct lane and we runners are wrong. On the other hand, if we run north on the right, the few southbound bikers who actually read and obey the signs yell at you for breaking the rules. This has become increasingly annoying to me, but I can't find out who in city government to talk to about it. As you exit Cherry Walk at 129th Street (St. Clair Place) you see the brand-new (Fall 2008) Greenway extension where the 125th Street fishing pier and the Fairway parking lot used to be. It was opened to the public in late October 2008, so now you have an unobstructed path northwards. It might not be obvious, but you have to go to the right; the path is on the far side of the fence, on the other side from where the guardhouse is.

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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