Quick guide to finding trails in the city

Treasure hunting for urban trail running pirates

Do they have trails in suburbia?

When I found out my family and I were moving to Chicago the first thing that flashed into my mind wasn’t about crossing borders, finding new schools, or fitting in with our American neighbours to the south; it was all about trail running.

1.Where could I find trails?

2.How far would I need to drive to find nature?

3.Was I going to lose a sense of myself without the rugged trails I’ve been running for the past 8 years living on the Niagara Escarpment in southwest / central Ontario?

Well after my first month I have my answers.

‘Inner Loop’ on Nike Island, Skokie Lagoons

1.Yes I can find trails.

2.No driving required, I can step out my front door and in a mile be lost in the woods.

3.Absolutely not, if anything I’m cementing my understanding of who I am.

I give a lot of deep dive articles into my mindset but this article is a breakdown of how I explore and find trails to run when it seems impossible.

I’ll share 3 tips and then send you all off to find nature no matter where you live.

You can use these tips to

• Get better at finding trails

• Start trail running if you’ve never considered it

• Find that important escape that I talked about in a recent article on adjusting top city life coming from the country. Read it HERE

Tip #1: Open your eyes and ears

The city is a bombardment of sights and sounds. Billboards, shops, restaurants, businesses, and entertainment all compete for your eyes. Cars, planes, trains, people, and all their stuff assault your ears. It’s too easy to shut off and keep to yourself.

But all around you are little places to escape.

Open your eyes and see little patches of forest at the edges of parks, business campuses, or shopping centers.

Look for animal tracks, not the ones on leashes, and see where they go.

Open your ears to flowing water, birds chirping, rustling of critters, and wind blowing through trees. Notice where you can start to hear the sounds of the city start to fade away.

Pair of Coyotes welcomed me on my first ‘trail’ run in Chicago

Your attention determines your perception and the moment you start to notice the spaces in the city that aren’t the ‘urban parts’ you’ll begin to find the nature you sorely lack.

Tip #2: Use Technology

Ok, tip 1 is difficult, I get it. Good thing we have shortcuts!

I use two digital tools to help me find trails: AllTrails and Google Maps

First Google Maps: It’s as simple as looking for the green and blue parts of the city. Where are the green spaces and where does water flow. Memorize these and seek them out on foot. Go explore.

Second AllTrails: Best app on the PLANET in my opinion. You just go to the map and search. Sometimes you get a gem of a trail, single track, winding through a forest, barely travelled by human feet. Other times its a gravel path wide enough for a car or two, and sometimes it’s an ashpalt ‘trail.’

Exploring a ‘secret path’ with my kids on the North Chicago River

In those situations, you can default to tip #1 and find what I call the ‘secret’ paths that don’t show up on the apps, but people have made themselves over time to get to the golden spots.

Tip #3: Get creative

This is all about blending the first two. Sometimes you really do need to escape, pack up your car and get out of dodge. I’m heading out to Wisconsin next weekend with a running friend I met last year at the Prairie on Fire backyard ultra. It’s a 90 minute drive from my house but it will be the most ‘nature’ I can find and certainly the most rugged trails anywhere close to me.

In the city think about hopping fences, heading under bridges, walking into dense woods, finding the ‘edge of town,’ or anything else.

One of the beautiful parts about finding trails or nature is just the adventure part. Exploration is a lost art for adults, so is imagination. Nature naturally beckons these virtues inside us so it’s vital to harness that energy if you want to seek it out in the urban environment.

NOW GO!

Ultimately, it’s the DESIRE to find nature that pulls you like a magnet towards it. These tips are a great start, but after a while you just tune into the places where people aren’t in the city, whether ‘artificial’ or ‘natural’ and seek those out.

Listen friends, you weren’t meant to live with tens of thousands of neighbors, let alone millions of fellow citizens. The ancient philosopher Aristotle posited that a state should be no bigger than 100,000 people. Modern technology makes that a small city today.

Once you set your heart towards finding nature as close as possible to you, the world will open up and provide you all the space you need.

Happy training team!