Another Childhood Memory, Shattered

 This is Corbin Park, Spokane:

The houses around the park are pretty amazing and it's a fairly unknown gem to people unfamiliar with the city.

Located two miles north of downtown, Corbin Park is one of only five local historic districts in Spokane. The site was the city’s first fairgrounds with a central racetrack. In 1889 a plat of the Corbin Park Addition included the former racetrack as a park in the center of the residential district. Homes within the district include a variety of styles such as Queen Anne, Tudor Revival, American Foursquare, Arts & Crafts, and Bungalows. The vast majority date from 1900 to 1925, but there are both earlier and later examples ringing the park. In 1909, a formal park design was prepared by the Olmsted Brothers, Landscape Architects of Brookline, Massachusetts. Today, most of the park has been adapted for current use as a baseball diamond and playground areas.

 When I was a little kid, our family and one or two other families we were friends with went to this park for a Summer picnic.  If I recall correctly, we were located on the south end and toward the western side of that long straightaway. 

I don't recall the details of how this subject came up, but I suppose that I (being curios and very garrulous) had commented that the park seemed an unusual shape.  One of the dads informed me that the park had been a horse-racing track and was exactly one mile in circumference.  Wow!  I, being a kid of maybe 7 or 8, had a lot of experience with running, but never a set distance, it was always just random play, which involved running.  The idea of running a whole mile, non-stop, fascinated me.  I didn't have to worry about getting lost, since the park was a simple oval.  I informed a parent that I intended to jog around the park and vaguely remember getting some push-back;  "You're too young to run that far" to which I replied, "I can always walk if I get tired".

I ran the whole loop, non-stop.  Over the course of the picnic, I would run it a bunch more times, sometimes recruiting others to join me.  I think I ended up running the loop 9 times and bragged for years about running 9 miles.  Well, as you can see above, the course is more like 0.8 miles.

On one hand, this is but another instance of an adult mis-informing me.  But, had I been properly informed that the loop was some fraction of a mile, I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't have tried to run the whole way around without stopping.