Places I ran: Alameda’s abandoned Naval Air Station

This is one of many reasons why I love running.

You run the same route every day where you live. Or maybe you have two or three routes near your home. You’re intimately familiar with them. You know every elevation stretch and there are certain markers along your way — houses, crossings, and even vegetation — that speak to you. They tell you how much you have left before you turn back, or where you are in your loop.

But then sometimes you travel so you have to explore a very unfamiliar place. It can be early in the morning or in the evening when it’s already dark.

I hate treadmill running so I always go outside, even if it means stopping all the time to check navigation or running through many traffic lights.

It’s not always an enjoyable experience, this running in an unfamiliar place. Yesterday I traveled to Northern California. The office of the company is in Alameda, a small island between Oakland and San Francisco. In the evening I went running. Monday is my rest or recovery day so I only wanted to do a few miles, but they turned out very inconvenient miles — I stopped a lot and had to change directions, mistakenly thinking I could find a loop from the hotel and back. I knew the local college had a track and during one of my previous visits I actually ran on it — the field was then buzzing with kids’ soccer — but it was shut and dark last night.