Northshore Half Marathon, 10M & 5k

What was once a sprawling sugar plantation along the sandy shoreline of Louisiana’s Lake Ponchartrain — and where visitors can still see the ruins of the crumbling sugar mill built there all the way back in 1829 — today serves as the launching pad for the Northshore Half Marathon on the Louisiana Northshore. Last year’s race saw hundreds of runners cross the finish line in Fontainebleau State Park, where the race also starts. Now a 2,800-acre state park filled with miles of hiking and nature trails, campgrounds and lakefront cabins for overnight stays, Fontainebleau got its name back in the early 1800s from its original owner, Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville, who started the sugar plantation here and named it for the forest that lies just outside Paris in his native France. Runners and walkers — the race is open to both, as the course will remain open for 4 hours — start the race in the parking lot area near the park’s beach. From there, the course first heads east along the park’s main road for the first mile and a half until meeting up with the Ronald Reagan Highway, where runners make a left turn to head west that parallels the Tammany Trace Trail, the biking, walking and running trail that runs into nearby Mandeville. The tree-covered roads and trails inside the park, whose moss-covered old oak trees are typical of the Deep South, give way to more open roads and neighborhoods once runners make their way into town and turn onto Montgomery Street.