New Yorker Designs Ultrarunning Routes That Make Every Workout a History Lesson

Runner's World ^ | February 1, 2019 | Jordan Smith

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

New York City resident Todd Aydelotte has come up with an inventive way to make long runs in the city interesting: Turn them into a history lesson.

It started about two years ago, when he started running longer distances. Inspired by ultrarunners like Tommy Rivers Puzey and Timothy Olson, who seem to run wild, free, and connected to the land, Aydelotte wanted to bring that to his own runs. But running in canyons and near streams is not easily feasible in the concrete jungle.

Aydelotte needed to find a different way to motivate himself to go farther and distract himself from the pain that comes with running 50 or 60 miles.

When 8 to 12 laps around Central Park got too tedious, he had a revelation. He has always been a huge history buff, so he thought, “Why not combine running and history?”

Now, he does just that and tracks all his runs—and their historical significance—on Instagram.

To prepare for his runs, Aydelotte trains his mind. He takes capturing the history very seriously, and spends hours in libraries and online arming himself with extraordinary amounts of research. He then documents the runs on his Instagram page with annotated notes of each destination’s significance.

“The way I train is to study, to read, and soak myself into the history,” Aydelotte told Runner’s World. “It’s a way to take running and push it into an area of meditation and intellectualism that inspires me.”

[Larry Lucido]

You could always run the Peterman Reality Tour route. Get a free Three Musketeers, a pizza bagel and a muffin stump, push a Frogger machine across the street while dodging traffic, evade the Van Buren Boys at Lorenzo’s and end up at the coffee shop or the Soup Nazi’s place.

[glock rocks]

My Roku remote is velcroed to the handlebars of my spinner bike in the den. Does that qualify for an article?

[PghBaldy]

Exactly what I thought I would find in the article: "Currently, he is preparing to do a 40-mile, five-borough ultra, which he calls "Slavery in New York,” to honor Black History Month. "

[a fool in paradise]

politicize everything has been a mantra since at least the 70s.

And Bill Clinton’s team did this in the 1990s. The “20th century” stamps by the US post office were awful spinning history as was the original White House website (with bios slamming his predecessors and raving about his accomplishments).