The only reason they would make a path that way is to make it wheelchair accessible. Also, if it were only for recreational use, they wouldn't have put the hand rails.
Imagine if they made the path straight up the hill and having to manually wheel a wheelchair up the slope. It would get pretty tiring, I would think.
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Cat 2 Track, Cat 3 Road.
"If you’re new enough [to racing] that you would ask such question, then i would hazard a guess that if you just made up a workout that sounded hard to do, and did it, you’d probably get faster." --
the tiniest sprinter