About Town runs

Pam Iyer knows exactly where she is going to be at 6 a.m. every Tuesday morning during the summer months. She’ll be a little sweaty because she has already run about five miles, but there will be a smile on her face as she greets the runners who show up faithfully at this early hour to take part in an “About Town” run.

There’s a loyal group of eight to ten runners committed to this unique outing during the three summer months. Some have jobs, others have small children at home, but they all make the effort to get up, get dressed and drive to a different starting point somewhere in Fort Collins each week.

Iyer, 64, who has been running for 25 years, has been organizing these runs for the last five summers. She’d been running the same route with a friend every Tuesday morning so for long that she got thoroughly bored with the course and decided to do something about it. Her answer was to find new starting points and research new courses around town. Her friend liked the idea. Before Iyer knew it, other members of her running group joined in and the About Town event was launched.

As interest grew, the runs began to take on a life of their own. Iyer developed themes for the runs. She began paying close attention to creating courses that illustrated the theme of the week and that were between 4½ and 5 miles long, short enough that participants could be home at a reasonable time to start their days.

Over time she has created more than 50 courses and so far there have been no repeats. Participants have learned about areas in Fort Collins that were new to them. And they have been able to get in a run in the cool of the early morning when the traffic is light to non-existent, depending on the course.

Iyer runs each course at least five times in order to make sure that she knows it well and never takes the group around a wrong turn. At the end of each run she heads for her car and produces an array of homemade baked goods. “I like to cook,” she says. Also she sees the reward at the end of the run as a way of encouraging participants.

On a sparkling Tuesday morning in late July, the course started at the Womens Clinic on Garfield and Lemay Streets, the starting point in Fort Collins for the Olympic Torch run in January 2002: destination Salt Lake City. Iyer had created a torch for each runner to carry for a time and she shared the history of the torch as it traveled from Greece to Utah. She had to search Coloradoan files to discover the torch’s route through town. It traversed 46 of the states in the U.S. on its long journey.

She did a Pony Express run which touched base at post offices across town. Participants brought mail and deposited it at the final stop, the post office on Boardwalk.

A scavenger hunt in City Park featured poetic clues tied to balloons, a Rosie Ruiz run recalled the woman who cheated in the Boston Marathon and was declared the winner until the following day in 1980. There was a memorial run that started at the home of a much-loved running club member who lost her life a few years ago. On June 25 there was a “halfway to Christmas” run. Everyone wore red and green and said “merry halfway to Christmas” to passersby on the trail. There was a tour of local breweries during the beer run.

During a summer when the theme was music, Iyer figured out how to play songs during runs. When marijuana shops were the new thing in town, she played Come on baby, light my fire. Leaving on a Jet Plane played while runners pranced across the old landing strip outside of town. There has been a church run, a mystery run and a run touching base at streets named for U.S. presidents. Still to come this summer is a CSU tour of outdoor art on the campus.

Iyer worries a little that she’s running out of locations. But it looks unlikely that she will ever run out of ideas. Interest in the runs has grown with time and Iyer is having as much fun as she did on the day she decided to discover Fort Collins on her feet and share the journey with her running friends.