As promised, the South Hill Rec Way course is now open for those participating in the FLRC Challenge! This brings us to six courses to choose from for your weekend runs. That will probably be it for a few weeks while we wait for the snow to melt in the woods on the four remaining trail courses.
South Hill Rec Way
The 6.8-mile South Hill Rec Way course requires that you run all three arms of the South Hill Rec Way, starting and finishing on the path above the playground.
If you’re scanning the sign to start and finish, it’s easiest to park on Juniper, although there’s also parking at Burns and Coddington, and you can run the arms in any order you want if you enter your time in Webscorer afterward.
Precisely. As discussed here, the philosophy is “cover the ground.” As long as you run all three segments, the order in which you do them doesn’t matter.
Perhaps we’ll discover that one particular approach turns out to be fastest, but it’s not clear to me what that would be on the South Hill Rec Way. With the Cornell Botanic Gardens, I’m betting that it’s faster to go counter-clockwise such that you run down the steep hill rather than up. But maybe not!
Great! I have done a ton of running on the S. Hill Rec Way and have some thoughts about more advantageous ways to run the course. It is slightly up hill going from Hudson Street to Burns, so it seems like it would be faster to run that slight uphill first while you are still fresher. Similar to how it might make sense to start near the Children’s Garden at the Black Diamond trail instead of the other end by the turnaround point… My current thinking with the hill on the S. Hill Rec Way course is that maybe it’s best to end with the hill? I’m curious to try it out a few ways since it’s super close to my house!
I ran it today. Started on the lower branch at Hudson, ran to Burns, back to the upper branch at Hudson, and finally back down to the lower branch at Hudson. My GPS clocked 6.73 miles, but thinking through it, I can’t see how by doing it that way, I could have generated any kind of shortcut. Nice course!
Thanks! We’ll see how the GPS distances work out over time and perhaps drop to 6.7 miles. When I was mapping it on the Web, it was tricky to figure out several of the exact turnaround points, and mine came in at 6.76, so I rounded up.
