A few weeks ago, I had to go to Manhattan for a few hours. I was going to fly into LaGuardia and it was going to be at the rush hour of the morning. So, I decided to pack light and just run!
Running from LaGuardia to Manhattan
Over the last year or so, I have been running more during layovers and even trying to get to/from the airport by foot – if possible. Of course, due to luggage, it is not always possible but as both an aviation geek and a runner, it is nice to enjoy the views of the airport during layovers while running all around the outside of it!
For this particular trip, I knew I had to take the bus from LaGuardia to the subway so the only real traffic was going to be the bus ride. But, Google Maps was giving me an estimate of 1 hour and 7 minutes from LaGuardia to where I needed to be in Manhattan (near Grand Central). So, I knew that it would be a close race of running vs public transportation.
Gear I Used
I needed a change of clothes, a battery pack for my phone, water, and of course wallet. I did my run with the Salomon Adv Skin 12 which has 12 liters of packing capacity and two water flasks (I would only need one, in reality, I didn’t need any for that length of a run but decided to grab one anyway).
For my watch, I was actually using two since I was doing a long-comparison of them – my main watch was the Garmin Epix Pro and the other watch was the COROS Pace Pro. Both of them support mapping so were able to give me the turn-by-turn directions from my route creation.
My LGA-Manhattan Route
The journey from LGA to Manhattan on the run took 7.31 miles. Honestly, it should have been a bit shorter but I missed the pedestrian access point for the bridge and had to run back to catch that. Coming out of the airport, I headed out towards Ditmars Blvd and took a right and that jogged up to 23rd Ave. From there, I headed to Astoria Blvd N and then took a left on 49th St. I ran on that for a while before heading over to 48th St. I turned right on the bike/pedastrian path that runs parallel with Northern Blvd. There were not as many cyclists/runners out as I thought there may be at this time of the day. I continued on the path towards Queens Plaza N before realizing I ran past the bridge path for the Queensboro bridge. Back to catch the entrance and then over the bridge I ran!
I always love running the bridges into Manhattan. Instead of other modes of transportation, this lets the city ever so slowly come more fully into view and it really gives some great views.
All in all, the route I ran was 7.31 miles in 1 hour, 8 minutes for an average pace of 9 minutes and 23 seconds per mile. If you want to do the route yourself, here is a link to my LGA-Manhattan course run. You can download this route to your GPS watch (for most watches, download it to your computer as a GPX file and then I transfer it to my phone and open it with the app I am using. For this run, I used both Garmin Connect and COROS. With watches that have mapping, it will upload and you can load the course to let it give you directions along the way).
This is a great thing to try if you are traveling to NYC with others since they can take your bags and you can just go with the bare minimum.
