My Strangest Run Ever

I travel for work quite a bit. Actually I am writing this at about 30K feet on my way to Baltimore for a few days. There’s simply no way for me to run as much as I like unless I carry my gear with me and run on the road. At one time I hated this practice; more shoes to carry, iPod to charge, Garmin to lose, and stinky gear to pack home, lent more headaches to an already unpleasant event – airline travel.

However as time has gone by I have learned to embrace the opportunity to run in new places. Orlando in January and San Diego in June make for nice temperature breaks, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Denver, and Vegas’ downtowns are all best seen in a pair of running shoes. Running through DC with the omnipresent feeling of being chased is great for speedwork.  I have even found a small group of co-workers, who I travel with a few times a year, that love to run as much as I do. It was these fine folks I shod up with in Orlando a few weeks ago, that lead me to the strangest run of my life.

It started with us all deciding, over a bottle of whiskey at midnight, that we would all take off for a mind clearing run at 5:AM (very bad idea #1). One of them suggested a place for us to jog through, she had nicknamed spooky town. I had no idea what spooky town was, nor did I care, they just mentioned a casual run that would be slow and short, and given the time of night I agreed to go I thought that sounded perfect. Still not knowing the details of spooky town, or that I would soon be in violation of trespassing, all four of us broke into a trot at around 5:00 AM.

We hadn’t made it a mile when I watched our pack leader abruptly break off the side walk and scale a six foot stone wall like she was a Navy seal. After hearing her land on the other side and yell, “I think this will do” the remainder of us (all men) struggled over the wall and joined our female body guard. I’ll remind you that it was 5:04 a.m. and still very dark out, and none of us had any idea where we were. Our female leader explained that she thought this was an abandoned amusement park, she passed it two days prior, and she thought it may make for a neat place to go “jogsploring.” That was the extent of the information we received. We exchanged glances of manly encouragement and took a running start at the wall.

After scaling it less gracefully than the others, I fell flat on my ass, and forging my way through some trees I was abruptly on a sidewalk. I looked up to see which way the group started running and found all three of them staring at a 60 foot concrete statue of Buda, with two non-functioning waterfalls on both sides. Oddly enough not the strangest thing we found that morning.

We trotted around for 20 minutes or so looking at some pretty amazing structures, albeit most coated in graffiti. By the way the Latin Kings Rule.  We found ruminants of what we thought was some kind of Asian themed amusement park. I jogged up a scale model of the Great Wall, climbed a mountain topped by an entire Chinese village, there was an abandoned theatre, a stone forest and I swear I even ran right through Tiananmen Square. It also appeared at one time the place had been amazingly landscaped.We concluded our jog when we found the homeless dude hiding on the second floor of a restaurant with no walls.

It was a pretty strange run to say the least, and when we returned to our cooperate housing we grew increasingly intrigued about where we had just been. With my mad Google skills, and the overlay map from my Garmin, we discovered we had just spent the wee hours of the morning jogging through what remained of Splendid China. Once a booming 100 acre amusement park it was completely abandoned in 2003. When opened it featured more than 60 recreations of Chinese landmarks and was meticulously landscaped. It took two years to build but the drop in tourism after 9-11-01 eventually wiped out this little slice of China. I found some pictures online. Some of them from when the park was opened and some from after the park closed. I posted them below but they really don’t do it justice. You really have to see it at 5:AM while on a hung-over run to appreciate it’s dilapidated beauty.