I love Jacksonville

I absolutely love living here in Jacksonville, FL. Granted, it's a little rough when I realize that I'm going to have to start getting up even earlier to have a chance at running in less than 80 degree weather, but still... this is one great city when it comes to running.

On Saturday morning, I woke up and decided that I didn't want to run in the neighborhood. That's pretty understanding, I think, as I've been running just around the neighborhood for so long, it's just gotten ridiculously boring. I needed a change of pace. So I picked up the MacBook and signed on to MapMyRun, looking for a good spot to run.

What I found was that Jacksonville Beach from 16th St. South to the Neptune Beach border and back is almost exactly five miles (which is, conveniently enough, the distance I was going for). So I got my gear ready, and since it was already 9:30, I made sure to bring a fuel belt full of water and G2 for my hydrating purposes. Yeah, I'm getting smarter. Just don't bet on that continuing. History would be against you.

In any case, I headed out to the beach and went down to 16th South, where there's a good amount of parking. Which was... all.. full. Of course, my brain was slightly working when I realized that I could park anywhere I wanted to on the course, and just run the whole bloody thing, starting and stopping at that point. While this would generally be obvious, I'm sure, to most of you, this was a breakthrough for me. Especially for not even having had coffee. I was proud.

So, I headed up to the massive amounts of parking around the Jacksonville Beach City Hall and found a spot with no problem. I proceeded to sunscreen up (*very* important) and get moving. It started pretty slow, but moved into a pretty good pace. I was doing a 3/1 ratio, mostly because of the heat, but it felt pretty strong. The course I had chosen told me to head up 1st St. , and head back down 2nd St. But that just seemed... boring.

So, instead, when I got up to Seagate Dr. (the first street in Neptune Beach), I took a right instead of a left, and headed onto our beautiful beach.

For the record, let me stress that in no way am I advocating that people start coming to Jacksonville as a tourist destination. We have fewer tourists than probably any place in Florida, and I'm just peachy with that. We have far fewer idiots than the areas around the mouse, or those sun-baked folks in South Florida. But if you want to visit Jacksonville as a runner's destination, I'd love for you to show up, and I'll even show you places to visit.

Our beaches are perfect for running. They are very wide, even at high tide. They are hard-packed sand, which means that although there's much less stress on your ankles and knees, it's still not that much additional effort to propel yourself down the sand. And finally, it's relatively flat, so you don't get the same problems you would see running on the side of a steeply-crowned street. Plus, you get the standard breeze off the ocean, and even the occasional eye candy, no matter what your preferred candy may be. It's a winner.

But more than that, there's also some great runs in other areas of town. We have a race coming up in a couple months called the JDR Bridges 5K (formerly, the Vestcor Bridges 5K), which starts and ends downtown and runs over two of the scenic bridges crossing the St. Johns River. This is the equivalent of hill training in Florida, since it's the best we got, but it's also the first race where I broke 30:00 in a 5K. We have runs that go through beautiful and historical areas of town, such as the Gate River Run, heading through San Marco, or the Ortega River Run, which is a five miler on the other side of the river (which I didn't run, but Lana said it was great). We've got generally quick courses, but we have the oppressive humidity to make it still a challenge. And we've got enough variety that I should be able to keep it from getting boring for a long, long while.

And I've only started to explore.

In case you're curious, this was my five miler on the beach:



Note that, while the map looks like I was running in the water... not so much. I was very much up on the sand. I wish I'd brought a camera. Next time, I promise.