Oh god, I love the stair-streets. I just found out about them and then spent a night running up and down a set that goes by a friend's apartment, high off the sheer weirdness of Pittsburgh.

cool!

Interesting that Cincinnati got referenced on this article. Back when I lived in a tiny 450 square foot apartment / row house, it was at the top of a flight of stairs that went from a dead end on our street to Taft Drive (a major thruway) 100 feet below us. Pretty much any map, including Google, insists (to this day, 10 years later) that our old dead end street intersects Taft. We'd probably see 4 or 5 people per day turning around in the alley / parking lot behind our building.

I used to tell transplants to Cincy that really the only way to learn how to get around in Cincy was to just drive around for a few weeks getting comprehensively lost. Also, there are probably six ways of getting from any point, to any point in the city, depending on how hilly/scenic/fast/empty you want your route to be. But they'll probably take about 10 minutes longer than your estimate, regardless of how near/far you are.

I also used to describe Cincinnati to incredulous out-of-towners as a "mini San Francisco". Don't assume that just because most of Ohio is pancake flat, all of it is. Cincy is incredibly hilly, and a bear to ride a bike in. The 2 years we helped promote the Elite Cycling Nationals road race in Cincinnati, everyone said that those were some of the most difficult courses Nats had ever been run on. It wasn't just the multiple 15% climbs... the 95° heat and 100% humidity didn't help. I recall we had 34 finishers out of 150 starters in the pro men's race the year I ran the medical tent, and we had to send back to the hospital for something like 2 dozen more bags of saline to run IV fluids because we ran out of bags onsite.

Both Cincy and PGH are cut by multiple rivers that run through narrow steep channels (almost canyons), and were primarily built by German immigrants on the old radial / military plan. So they tend to look a fair bit like European cities, aka wet string on a map.

as far as the race... for winter cross-training, a bunch of runners and cyclists I hung out with used to run "stadiums" (stair repeats) in the old University of Cincinnati Physics building which was a 15 story "skyscraper" on campus, and we'd do something like 4 to 10 reps, depending on how crazy we were.

So if you already live (and one assumes, train) in one of these cities, that race probably doesn't sound all that terrible.

Or not. I think the most reps I ever did of the Physics building was eight, plus I also don't run much anymore, so there is that.

Yay Pittsburgh! I'm sending this link to my dad.

*hugs Pittsburgh*

Despite or perhaps because my dad was dying of cancer at the time, I have nothing but warm feelings for Pittsburgh. Every time I read a post like this, it's like I'm back there with him.

Thank you.