Trailing into work

Living in the UK we are spoilt for places to run on trails, whether its around our beautiful coastline, the amazing national parks of the Lake or peak district, the pennines or snowdonia or any of many long distance paths like the north and south downs ways, the cotswolds way or the thames path.

In fact with some many epic trails on offer its easy to forget that most of us also have so many the miles of excellent footpaths, tracks and bridleways right on our doorsteps.

Even in some of our bigger cities where you might not expect to find anything even resembling a trail, its quite common to find a hidden trails and tracks if you look hard enough.

The old networks of canals and railways left by our industrial heritage are quite often now left as trails.

I work in the heart of Newcastle and quite often either run the 12 miles into the office or go for a run from the city centre before work.

While I used to run mainly on roads, I recently set myself the challenge of finding off road alternatives. I was amazed by the variety of trails I found. There was some degree of running on roads linking different tracks together, but I quite liked the mix of terrain going from roads to parks to woods and riverside tracks.

Whether you use them as training runs for more a more epic ultra or runs in their right i’d definitely recommend exploring more of the many the tracks, trails and footpaths criss crossing the country and leading right to the hearts of the big cities.