Winter Vacation 2015: Running in Ft Lauderdale

From January 31 through February 8,  Alek and I, along with Tammy, Chris, Nate, and Matt went on the JOCO Cruise Crazy, an 8 night Caribbean cruise with some amazing entertainers including Jonathan Coulton, Paul & Storm, Pat Rothfuss, John Scalzi, Matthew Inman, The Both, and many others.  If you're curious about this cruise, I don't think I can summarize better than John Scalzi, so please head over to Whatever and take a look at his post.

I have a few things to say about trying to get workouts in on vacation, so I'll share them over the course of a few posts.

We flew into Ft Lauderdale on January 30 just to avoid any stress with airport to ship transfers.  We stayed at The Hilton Ft Lauderdale Marina.  Alek and I decided to get up and get a run in before meeting the group for brunch, or for me and Alek, elevensies, since we’d already eaten breakfast prior to the run.

Finding a running route in an unfamiliar city can be tricky.  We wanted to run in a pretty area, and avoid being next to traffic as much as possible.  As we were heading out, Nate was on his way back in from his morning run (he seemed to have skipped first breakfast).  Naturally we asked him for a good running route.  After Nate described his route to us and walked away, a helpful hotel employee came by and gave us a Hilton Branded pocket map with a few different running routes.  

We went outside to use the map.  This thing had clearly not been proofread by anyone  before printing.  It contradicted itself everywhere.  We set off on what was maybe the 4 mile blue route, but could easily have been the 6 mile blue route or the 6 mile red route.  After two miles of not arriving at the cross street we were planning to turn left on to, we crossed the street and turned back.  On the other side of the street there was a better activity path and it was closer to the beach.  The views were pretty.  The run itself was fairly easy, with a the only hill being right outside the hotel as we had to cross a bridge to get over some water.

Nice beach front view - check out the kite surfer.

Hotel running maps are awesome things to have, but would be much better without all of the confusion!