By JOSHUA ROBINSON for the Wall Street Journal
In the dead of night, cloaked in purple darkness, Central Park bears only a faint resemblance to its daytime self. The din of the city fades to a soft hum. The friendly shade of tree-lined paths turns to lurking shadow. The only light comes winking from the street lamps and the postcard skyline to the south.
Joshua Robinson talks about the denizens of joggers who run after dark in New York's Central Park.
Most of the park's daily visitors—the tourists, the dog walkers, the before- and after-work joggers—have long called it a day. Even the early-morning crowd still has a few hours of sleep ahead. But sporadically through the stillness, bouncing silhouettes cross the lamplight, crunching the ground beneath them.
They are Central Park's midnight runners, those people who lace up their sneakers when others go to bed. In the heart of the city that never sleeps, they are on the late shift.
For the small fraternity of the park's after-hours runners, the habit often begins with a hectic schedule pushing their regular jog deep into the night. Then, once they get over the initial apprehension of running in the dark with only the shadows and jumbo-sized raccoons for company, they grow to love it. They bask in the space on the empty paths, the sense of calm that washes over the park, the eerie scenery.
A solitary runner makes his way through Central Park after dark.
"First of all, it's beautiful," said Jonas Ganzemuller, a 26-year-old saxophone student at the Manhattan School of Music. "Then there's the meditative aspect. I do a lot of concentrating on my breathing. And I'm a nature guy, so I try to take advantage of what little is left on the island."
Not many other people do. On a recent weeknight, nearly an hour elapsed between the time a man trotted backwards with his dog past Engineer's Gate and the next jogger. Reasonable security concerns and famous victims like the Central Park Jogger, a woman who was brutally raped and assaulted after dark in 1989, are still powerful deterrents.
Still, most of the regular midnight runners said they have never felt at risk. The patrol cars zipping along the outer roads are a reassuring presence. Overall, the police considers Central Park a relatively safe area, though primarily in the daytime. According to NYPD statistics, there have been a total of three assaults in the park to date this year—down from five for the same period in 2009—and 20 robberies.
Keith Bedford for The Wall Street Journal
John Cote, who runs at all hours of the night, jogs through Central Park by the light of street lamps.
John Cote, who ran at all hours of the night while working as an investment-banking analyst in his first three years at J.P. Morgan, was actually surprised by how secure he felt. Even if he recognizes that heading to Central Park at 1 a.m. might have been "kind of stupid."
"I can't think of one time where I felt in danger," he said. "Which is kind of unnerving because I feel like I should have. When you're out there running hard, you just get so focused you stop thinking about your own safety. It was more in my mind when I was running easy."
With far fewer women in the park late at night, safety is a foremost concern for Kate Rosenblatt. She would prefer to run during the daytime, but her schedule as a surgery resident at Mount Sinai leaves her little choice.
Though she has stopped carrying pepper spray, she takes precautions like avoiding groups of people and peeling off to the sidewalks of 59th Street or Fifth Avenue if she starts especially late. Ms. Rosenblatt also runs with headphones, but she keeps the talk radio she listens to playing low and turns it off when she passes anyone. The radio, she said, is the only way to keep her night runs interesting. The solitude and silence are not her cup of tea.
"I'm really not paying attention to the nighttime in Central Park," said Ms. Rosenblatt, 30. "It's not interesting to me."
For David Goughnour, 29, it is entirely the opposite. A hotel doorman with regular work hours, he has the option to run during the daytime. He chooses not to. He fell in love with midnight in Central Park. Listening to the silence, relishing the emptiness and, as he put it, "playing peek-a-boo with the light." To him, it is just like running through the set for A Midsummer Night's Dream or around his hometown of Nashua, N.H. When he starts running, he escapes Manhattan.
"I can have Central Park to myself," Mr. Goughnour said, seemingly amazed that more people didn't want the same. "It's a little more like New Hampshire and a little less like New York."
The main difference is that New Hampshire doesn't close in the middle of the night.
Like many other nocturnal runners, Mr. Goughnour wasn't clear on Central Park's late-night policy. No one is allowed inside between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m, except for authorized workers. As Mr. Goughnour found out several months ago, there are plenty of police officers on duty to enforce that law.
He was going through his four miles when flashing lights stopped him in his tracks. Moments later, a police officer wrote him what's known as a C Summons, the same kind of ticket issued for open containers and littering. There is no automatic fine, but the summons requires a court appearance. A judge sentenced him to six months' probation.
More often than not, runners reported being told in no uncertain terms to simply exit the park. Excuses like, "But this is my way home," never quite cut it. Even being a world-class marathoner in training is not enough to save a runner from expulsion after 1 a.m.
Khalid Khannouchi, a four-time winner of the Chicago Marathon who has twice broken the world record, knows so for a fact. One night three years ago, he was caught completely off-guard when police pulled him over and instructed him to leave.
"I didn't know it ever closed," he said in a telephone interview.
As a practicing Muslim, Mr. Khannouchi takes to running late at night every year during Ramadan. Not being able to eat from sunrise to sundown every day for a month wreaks havoc on his schedule, meaning that he has to set out on his second run of the day around 1 a.m. And in 2007 he chose to conduct his night sessions in Central Park to prepare for the United States Olympic marathon trials.
Night after night, he drove the 40 minutes from his home in Ossining to Manhattan and ventured into the darkness. His wife or a training partner would sometimes join him. But for the most part, he ran alone for up to 20 miles.
"Besides the scary raccoons—it's amazing how big they are—it was a lot of fun," he said from Colorado Springs, where he has encountered bears and coyotes on recent night runs. "It's crazy, but it's a lot safer in the park than it is here."
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