Northeast Ohio has been under a deep freeze since January. Cleveland, specifically, didn’t see temperatures over freezing for 18 days in January and early February — the longest such streak since the winter of 2000 and 2001. Those temperatures caused 95% of the surface of Lake Erie to freeze.While experts warn that walking on the ice is dangerous under any circumstances, the extensive ice coverage has drawn some adventurous Northeast Ohioans to explore the surface of the lake on foot.At Clevelan...

Gordon Park on Cleveland's East Side — part of Cleveland Metroparks' Lakefront Reservation — offers a long list of amenities spread across its 122 lakefront acres. There are boat ramps, walking trails, tennis courts and a picnic lawn.But ever since Interstate 90 was built in the 1950s, East Siders have had a hard time accessing the park, and Lake Erie in general.Cleveland Metroparks has been working on solutions to the problem for several years. And they’ve recently gotten some help from student...

When she was growing up, Marilyn Olsen of North Olmsted says girls didn’t play sports. She herself was a party girl, preferring dancing to any organized exercise.“When I got out of high school, it was the bars or the ballrooms,” Olsen said. “Never, never anything athletic, but the dancing was good.”That changed when she was 45. A coworker recommended that Olsen join her for a race, and from there she fell in love with the sport of running. She ended up placing third in her first 5K.“I tried it a...

Eric Miller says Mansfield has some of the best roads in the state. But it wasn’t always like this.“Our streets were in deplorable condition,” Miller said. “They were falling apart, most of the streets were in terrible shape, and we just needed to do something about it.”Back in the 1980s, Miller — a lawyer — started a group called the Committee for Better Streets, dedicated to fixing the streets for everyone.The idea, he says, was this: “How can you, as a modern-day citizen, do something that he...