Central Park · Cat Hill

A short history

Central Park has been the spiritual home of urban running in America since Fred Lebow founded the New York Road Runners in 1958 and built the New York City Marathon course around the park's 10 km loop. The route this GPX traces — East Drive heading north from the 64th Street entrance past Cat Hill toward the Met — is the first 1 km of that loop.

Cat Hill itself is named for the bronze panther crouching on a boulder beside the road at the top of the climb. The hill is a ~25 m rise over 400 m of road — short on paper, but quad-burning at race pace. Every NYC Marathon finisher has trained on it. Every casual jogger has cursed it.

The route ends at 79th Street near the Metropolitan Museum of Art steps — about as iconic an NYC running landmark as exists.

About this GPX

This is the route the SummitRoom 60-second demo uses, so the data quality matters more than the distance suggests.

• 87 waypoints traced from the OpenStreetMap geometry of East Drive
• Elevation from OpenTopoData USGS NED 10-metre data (the same USGS source NYC Parks uses for their official maps)
• Trimmed to exactly 1,000 m via Haversine distance calculation — useful for warmup loops and pace tests
• Elevation range: 15-24 m, with the Cat Hill climb concentrated between waypoints 8 and 18

The route only goes one way (north) — we didn't add the return leg because the demo uses this as a one-way run, not a loop.

Treadmill simulation notes

This is the easiest route in the library by a wide margin. The auto-incline simulation will push between 0% and ~3%, with the bulk of the climb happening between 200 m and 600 m of distance.

If you want to use this for a benchmark run:

• It's exactly 1.0 km, so your pace conversions are clean.
• It's roughly +9 m net climb, similar to many real-world city blocks — useful for sense-checking how your treadmill's incline simulation feels.
• A reasonable target: 5:00-5:30 / km at a comfortable jog with the auto-incline engaged. You'll feel Cat Hill briefly.

If you're new to SummitRoom, this is the route you've already run — it's the 1 km demo you can try without signing up. The page exists so that if Google sends a runner to "Central Park East Drive GPX with elevation", they can download the same file we use ourselves.