It’s easy to imagine that Athens might be a good place for running, what with its historical associations with Marathon, etc. But that’s all that they are in my admittedly limited experience: mere associations. Modern Athens is not particularly friendly to runners, at least in terms of infrastructure. Sidewalks are of wildly varying widths, uneven, and surrounded by highly unpredictable and therefore dangerous traffic. It’s a big city with some fun/challenging topography, but ultimately it’s a bit too deadly for Christina and me.
But we have not been forced to give up our passion for running. There are, fortunately, two very solid options for safe running on something other than a treadmill. The first is the one we use most often: the National Gardens that abut the Parliament building. The gardens are extensive, lovely, and honeycombed with well-maintained meandering trails. If you run the trails the more or less trace the park’s iron fences, each lap is very nearly one mile in length, and this route offers some fairly serious elevation gain (I think around 450 feet over the course of the loop). There is a shorter, flatter loop that comes in around 0.85 miles, and this is the one I use if I not up to the hills, or I want to work on speed.
The National Gardens also offer a tremendous amount of excellent people watching (and occasional fist shaking) and even some animal watching. The park is full of cats and also features a small zoo with a small collection of maybe half a dozen different kinds of animals. But one of the really striking denizens of the park is a fairly massive flock of green parrots that would normally be found in the foothills of the Himalayas or in sub-Saharan tropical forests. Supposedly, these parrots either escaped a large shipment that were headed to Greek pet stores, or they are the result of pets that were lost or released by individual owners (this feels less likely than the Big Bang version of a shipment getting loose).
Just a few minutes closer to our apartment is the Kalimarmaro, also known as the Panathenaic Stadium. This is the enormous ancient marble stadium that was refurbished prior to the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. It is still used as the end point of the Athens Classic Marathon, and it played a role in the 2004 Olympic Games as well as playing a continual role in the handover of the Olympic flame from Greece each time the games take place. It is an imposing and evocative structure, but you do have to pay an entry fee to get into the stadium itself with its track and stands, etc.
However, the stadium is built into a natural valley between two hills. What this means is that the top of the stadium is ringed by an asphalt path that in practical terms offers a sort of emergency exit from the structure. Now, however, the asphalt path is a near-perfect 500-meter U-shaped track. This kind of repetitive running route is something that I can do pretty well, but I discovered the first time I tried it out that you can catch some serious wind in the face up there at the top of the stadium. If all I wanted was to mix up my running routes, I would certainly come back to the Kalimarmaro, but the truth is that it is an inspiring place to run with its history and with the enormous set of Olympic rings looming over the center of the stands.