Health & Fitness
Exploring Major Trails Through Running
This is an outlook on the Twin Cities' major trails, their use by runners and how far one can run on one trail.
A trail is a trail, right? They're all the same? Why go exploring all or even any of the ones I already know?
Throughout Minneapolis, most people do know of all the big name trails here, even if the don't use them for what they are to a point used for. Just a few of these trails include the Minnehaha Parkway, the Grand Rounds, and the Greenway Byway trail. Many of the runners I have myself talked to say they use at least one of these great trails some time through the year to train on. From at least the prospective of the runners I have made friends with, they didn't know how far out from the cities you could go on just one trail. Some don't even know where some trails end or turn in to another trail.
As a distance runner here in the Twin Cities myself, I have spent quite a number of long runs exploring how far I can go on one trail. As a repeat marathoner, I know that my body at a reasonable pace can go 26.2 miles with out being to strung out physically. After this being said you may now understand that I don't mean exploring how far my body can go, but how far any given trail I'm exploring goes.
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What I have found is that from time exploring these trails, I myself had to be in some amount of amazement. I didn't know how far on such trails as the Greenway. Bear in mind that this single trail does change names the further out one goes from the cities. I don't remember them all off hand. Along just the Greenway, one can go from the Mississippi River all the way out to and past the Chaska U of MN Arboretum.
In an exploratory run to north Minneapolis, I found that a runner, by using a combination of the Minnehaha Parkway, the Grand Rounds parkway and the Cedar Lake Trail, you can get to North Minneapolis without side streets, just trails.
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I guess that when I think of the possibilities for running, it seems somewhat endless. If you wanted to, and if you work in a place that didn't mind you running to work, you could use it as a mode of transportation to and from work. I have heard of a few runners using running to literally run their errands, such as groceries, going to the mail box.
I do look forward to seeing where running takes us as a large community of people where it will be 10, 20 and 30 years from now as part of human culture.
