Echo Park Celebrates National Running Day

If you follow Twitter trends, you know that it’s National Running Day.  And the weather couldn’t be better to take a lap around the 'hood.

Later, I’ll be hitting my favorite stretch of unpaved pathway, the loop around the Silver Lake Reservoir, which I’ve measured (several times) to be 2.2 miles. 

I’ll be wearing my old beat-up Nikes.  But Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run will be on my mind.  I had a long discussion this weekend about it with two cyclists who’d returned to running recently.

They had worried about sore hips and knees.  But they’d been running for several months without pain wearing the highly touted by pricey“barefoot shoe." I'd consider that too.

The cyclists also told me Born to Run argues that man was not made to stretch.

I'm still nursing a strained hamstring I got after slacking off on my hip-openers. So I’m going to look skeptically at this still very interesting idea.

National Running Day is celebrated the first Wednesday of June every year. An estimated 43 million runners will be running, coaching and doing public service for their sport.

Our recent article about the LA Marathon included lots of tips from local runners about where to run and how to stretch.  Click to read that.

And if you’re just getting started, check out these “Ten Tips from New Runners” from our sister publication The Huffington Post:

See you at the Reservoir.