Running Routes for Travelers
As someone who has to frequently travel for work, I've never understood my colleagues who sit around the hotel bar complaining about how they never see more than the hotel and the airport. I run everywhere I go, and I've discovered more wonderful spots than I ever could have hoped for.This non-profit blog chronicles my own favorite running trails as I travel the world. I've been running for 40 years, and for the last 30 years I've been living and working in Europe, with jobs that have required lots of travel. As someone with a craving for moving around in the fresh air, you can imagine that I've had the good fortune to run along some of the most awesome, beautiful, and -- sometimes -- ugly places you can imagine. (Hey, not every place is a tourist hotspot.) I now place my hard-earned miles/kilometers at your disposal, totally non-commercial, and hope these running route descriptions can help inspire you on your own journey, when your path happens to cross one of mine.
The images are mainly self-made, with my own cell-phone camera (or pictures have been borrowed from my wife and kids). For a few routes where I didn't have a working smartphone, I used images from license-free photo sites like www.flickr.com, www.bigfoto.com or www.pixelio.de or even screenshots from Google Maps).
The Routes
The routes reflect my own running preferences: rather quiet nature than loud streets, rather old towns than suburbs. Whenever possible, I head out through fields, woods, jumping over streams, and often making my own trail where the existing ones petered out. Of course, those spots won't be added here, because I doubt if even I could find them again. The route lengths vary from a few kilometers to up to 20. They are as varied and eclectic as the areas where they took place, and as my mood carried me. The locations are concentrated in this order:- Germany (pretty much everywhere)
- Western Europe (lots of places, but not most)
- US (mainly Florida, New York, California)
- Rest of world (Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, South Africa, Seychelles, Shenzhen, Singapore, Israel)
Maps
As you can see, I have included links to maps for each run. Thanks to the folks at www.mapmyrun.com, anyone can quickly and easily map their running routes, which I've done. There are, of course, also apps available to automatically map a run in real-time when using a GPS-phone. The map should open in a new tab or window. You can toggle between distances in miles or kilometers. To save the GPS waypoints, just click on the "Export This Route"-link (to the right of the map), as seen in this screenshot:
Comments
Please add your comments to any route if you want to add your own experiences to extend/correct anything that I've placed here. The more useful information, the better!
Requests
If you have any special requests for a route in a town that you'll be traveling to, let me know. There's a good chance that I've run there, and I'll make a posting!