ARCHIVED RACE: Greenline Half Marathon 2012 @ Shelby Farms Park, Memphis, TN, USA on 14 October 2012

Set for its second annual running in mid-October 2012 — after a 2011 race that saw just over 560 runners cross the finish line — the Shelby Farms Greenline Half Marathon will take runners along a combination of park roads, bike paths and converted railroad trails through Memphis’s Shelby Farms Park, on an out-and-back course that’s largely fast and flat, with mostly gently rolling hills thrown in.

The race serves as both a fundraiser and a way to raise awareness of the mission of the Shelby Farms Greenline, a seven-mile-long stretch of converted railroad beds that had been abandoned and overgrown for decades, but today serve as a running, walking and biking trail that stretches from the park all the way into midtown Memphis. Runners will trek along two miles of the Greenline in the second half of the race, as they’re making their way back into the park toward the finish.

Much of the rest of the course, especially in the early miles in the first half, takes runners along the park roads and trails within Shelby Farms Park, which is one of the nation’s largest urban parks and measures some five times the size of New York City’s Central Park. Once a penal farm where prisoners did agricultural labor to provide food for inmates, the park today is used mainly for recreation, and counts some 20 ponds as well as horse stables and a series of paved and dirt trails that wind through its 4,500 acres. There’s even a herd of American bison living in the park.

Runners start the race at 8:00 AM — the race also is open to walkers, provided they can finish the course within four hours — near the park’s visitor center, just off North Pine Lake Drive. From there, the course’s first few miles wind through the trails and tree-lined roads around a pair of lakes known as Penal Farm Lake Two and Penal Farm Lake Three, making a counter-clockwise loop aroudn the lakes on the way south toward Walnut Grove Road.

The course, which so far has followed an overall (and very gradual) downhill descent, flattens out by the time runners reach the mile 4 marker along Walnut Grove Road, where they turn right and head west. The next few miles take runners out of the park and into the neighborhoods just west of Shelby Farms, and there’s a bridge crossing over the Wolf River that divides the park from the more residential areas.

After a series of turns along East Yates Road, Colgrove Street, Malboro Road, Mason Road and Mesquite Road, the course brings runners north all the way up to the Greenline Rail Trail, where they’ll get their first encounter with what the race is all about supporting.