Trail Running--in Chicago

(Image credit here)

In a post last week I promised I'd comment about my running while on a business trip to Chicago. It was all I hoped for, and much more.

First off, convenience. I was staying at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare, which sits less than a mile east of the airport. With no rental car, I despaired of finding a decent place to run. Typically at airport hotels, the best you can hope for is street running involving parking lots, franchise avenues, and traffic.

I am a frequent traveler and pretty good by now at sniffing out places to run.  I had done my research ahead of time, Googling such things as Trail Running, Mountain Biking, Nature Trails, with the Chicago location. Also did a MapQuest lookup of the area, looking for green space that indicates some sort of park land. I found there was a series of "forest preserves," with trails, stretching along the Des Plaines River. Best news: I could reach the nearest access point on foot, along Lawrence Avenue, only about 1.5 miles from my hotel (this suburb is called Rosemont).

Second, the trail was pretty decent. The Des Plaines Trail was along the wooded river bottomland. The path and setting was pretty similar to running on the C+O Canal towpath along the Potomac River, of JFK 50 miler fame. It was a dirt and fine gravel path in the woods. The path was well-maintained and pretty well-marked. No water available here in Nov, although there were water pumps for summer use. There were several road crossings, all of which either had pedestrian crossing signals, overpasses, tunnels under the roadway, or routing under bridges right beside the river.

Most of the time I could not see any civilization. But I sure could hear it--auto traffic at a distance, and air traffic. Being under an approach path to O'Hare, the passenger planes coming in had flaps down and landing gear down and were screaming CLOSE overhead. Make no mistake, it was an urban trail. But it was plenty woodsy enough to be quite pleasurable.

Third, cool critters. I saw about half a dozen whitetail deer. One doe was quite close--she scared the crap out of me--I'm talking a mere 20' away, just off the trail. She seemed used to people and fairly unconcerned. Later I saw a magnificent 10 point buck, huge antlers, huge body, only 50' away. That's the closest I have ever been to one that big.

Bottom line: I ran about an hour and half out, then returned; I figure about 18 miles. These were some of the best "urban" miles I've ever logged. Not perfect, but very good for no car, right beside O'Hare Airport.

Running in Chicago...and the TSA

This week, perhaps as you read this, I will be in the skies above this nation flying to and from a business destination.  My business is in Chicago, where I will be staying at an airport hotel, but will not have a rental car.  Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I was able to find out that there is a trail, only a mile from my hotel, along the Des Plaines River near O'Hare Airport, that apparently stretches some miles.

Having scheduled my flights to have plenty of time on either end, I will be able to fit in a nice long run.  Will report after the fact on how it went.

Now, switching over to the aviation side of the equation, turns out that Just an Earth-Bound Misfit just ranted long and hard about airport security and the TSA:

It was pretty clear then, and it is clearer now, that the TSA's job is purely theatrical.

Meanwhile, the pilots and the flight attendants are not at all happy about having to undergo trial by X-ray several times a duty day, and I cannot blame them for that. The TSA says those scanners are safe, but really, does anybody trust for a picosecond anything that the TSA says? It's already come out that the assurance of the TSA that the scanners don't store the images is a lie.

The part about screening the pilots is especially inane. In the cockpit of airliners is a crash ax which, if my recollection is correct, has on its head one really pointy end and one very sharp end. So the TSA makes sure that the pilots don't have a little bitty knife, they feel all happy of their screening the pilots, and then the pilots get to sit in a itty bitty room with the modern equivalent of a war axe. And that doesn't even get into the point that a determined pilot could just crash the airplane and kill all aboard if that was his goal.

Love that last point about the ax!  Don't misunderstand--I am all for security that really and truly makes us safer.  But don't waste our time with security theater.

Along these lines, I can't help but draw a parallel with the broader impacts of 9/11.  Via Spencer Ackerman's Trapped Within a Frame:

Here I was, set to write a long post about the new Woodward book excerpts, when Gulliver distills my intended point in a tweet:

"Does not compute: if we could "absorb" another 9/11, why are we wasting $70B/yr on war that won't prevent it anyway?"

He's referring to an Obama quote about how the U.S. proved resilient after 9/11.

--SNIP--

It’s also a point that ultimately cuts against the massive expansion of the Afghanistan war that Obama has instituted. One way of getting close to squaring it is to say that we’re going to go big for a limited period of time in order to mitigate what we can in Afghanistan — the ol’ “so it doesn’t go back to being a safe haven” argument. But that still doesn’t address the basic resource-interest mismatch. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion from Woodward’s excerpts that the factor inhibiting Obama from addressing it is an inability to break out of the fear-driven politics that surround terrorism, which inhibit counterterrorism vigilance under the guise of bolstering it.

Then there’s this:

Woodward quotes Petraeus as saying, “You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a little bit like Iraq, actually. . . . Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

Feeling safer and better about your (grand) kids' future?