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Muddy Shoe Reviews
Inspiration: C&O Canal Trail at Point of Rocks
By Paul Hackley
March/April 2011
For the Washington Running Report
A commute between work in Reston, VA and home in Frederick, MD is terrible, no matter how you measure it. Add weekend getaway traffic or a holiday exodus, and Friday afternoon could stretch into two hours on the road, cramped into the driver’s seat. Sometimes I could listen through three full National Public Radio news cycles on the half hour. Fortunately, the drive was often interrupted for an afternoon run along the C&O Canal Towpath at Point of Rocks.
From Point of Rocks, I eventually ran the entire path between the markers for miles 46 and 53. Mostly I remember running in the heat, greasy and slick as a fried chicken drumstick. Past the lock house and interpretative signposts, past the campgrounds and their Boy Scout troops with bugs flying into my mouth, sweat rolling off my back.
None of the commute mattered after running a little bit down the C&O. The tension of the office and the hassle of the drive would roll away, my mind clearing, emptying, thinking about nothing, nothing but the hard dirt path underfoot and how to put my feet upon it.
I cherish the memory of a cool fall day on the towpath when a mature barred owl silently appeared over my head, dropping low from his home in a giant river bottom sycamore. He drifted low, close to the towpath ahead of me, and then vaulted far overhead until I lost sight of him in the colorful leaves. That was in the early stages of my running, when I was just getting started. Long before I ever thought about mile splits or PRs, before I had run in my first timed race even. I did not have a Garmin GPS to check my pace–this was when I checked my Timex to see that I still had enough time to pick up my girls from YMCA aftercare before the mandated closure of 6:30 p.m.
In March 2006, I married Nadine and we made the Reston-Frederick commute together. We avoided traffic on the Leesburg Bypass by cutting through the suburban communities along Battlefield Parkway and remarked, ‘If we lived here we would be home now.’ Was it predicting the future or setting a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Nadine was always just as eager as I to stop at the C&O Canal, but not to run. She would take a brisk walk. Before we pulled into the gravel access for Point of Rocks we had to navigate the crowded roadways. In particular, the painful merge from two lanes to one where the Leesburg Bypass joins Business Route 15. Today, we live close enough to hear the merge and I savor the noise from the horns of dueling commuters trying to be first. That is because the old me would have been out there, jockeying for position, while the new me has time for a longer run, or to sit on the deck eating peanuts and enjoying my family.
We no longer have the C&O Canal halfway through our commute, but still we visit Point of Rocks and the towpath to celebrate life. My mother’s entire life. We spread her ashes at Lock 28 (shush, don’t tell the Park Service!). And, we visit to run. Now, it is a special day when I take my two year old, Josie, in the jogger and off we go over the familiar old ground. She sings and says hi to others on the path and my mind empties until she calls me back. Then the trains roll by and we stop and watch and sip water and gaze together at the big world, until it is time to run on the C&O Canal towpath some more.
Paul Hackley is a geologist and technical writer who works for the U.S. Geological Survey.