My Happy Place
Why trail running is my number 1 outdoor activity.
If all goes to plan, I will be hitting “Publish” on this article the morning of Sunday, July 28, just before I head out the door to compete, for the fourteenth time officially, in the annual Escarpment Trail Run here in the Catskills Mountains, the oldest trail race on the east coast and certainly one of the most illustrious. Founded in 1977 by local running pioneer Dick Vincent, the 30k/18.5 mile race, one with greater intensity and time demands than a road marathon but falling short of an official ”ultramarathon”, has been held every single year since, except 2020 and 2021, “the Covid years.”1
I could – and indeed, my initial draft did – write here about how gnarly and technical the race is, and how the race website’s info page has a URL “thiswillhurt” that comes with various caveats and warnings intended to deter people from entering, which is just as well given that it’s restricted to 200 runners anyway. But as per the previous three in a series of posts here on Substack about my adventures in running (here, here, and here), my intent is not to suggest I have any skills that you do not, but rather to share my enthusiasm in the hope that you may follow suit – in other words, that if you have never done so already, you may choose to switch out the hard roads now and then for the ditches and pitches of the trails.
You see, for all that I enjoy road running, I love trail running more. Trails are the place I feel most alive, most natural, most at one with the earth. Trails – especially the mountain trails, and even more especially in the Catskills Mountains - are my happy place.
Running the trails also brings me peace. Or to quote Dick Vincent from when we recorded a short documentary piece on trail running for one of my early One Step Beyond podcasts (out on the Escarpment Trail itself):
“It’s like yoga in motion: the thought, the breath, the body all becomes one again.”
There is another reason to consider trail running superior to the road equivalent. At least a decade ago, I ran a summer race in Vermont while camping in nearby Burlington with the family. It was about 5 miles or so through woods, without too much elevation, and to my surprise and delight I won my age group. On trail races this normally means nothing more than bragging rights to anyone who cares (i.e., you and you alone), but on this occasion I was awarded a book entitled The Ultimate Guide To Trail Running. While mainly full of expert information, tactics and all-round advice, with tips and motivational quotes from those who have gone before us, the authors couldn’t help just a little bit of one-upmanship, with a reminder at the end of one page that “the road to injury is paved.” Turning said page indicated that that sentence had already concluded. The road to injury is paved, it turns out, not with good intentions, nor bad ones, nor anything else. The road to injury is just paved.
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To elaborate, road running involves running on hard surfaces, and usually at a consistent pace/cadence. Racing on roads involves doing so at speed. Run/race enough miles/hours/races (and especially all three) on those hard road surfaces and it is almost guaranteed that even the most free flowing of runners will eventually acquire a repetitive stress injury. Sometimes it’s just a sore calf, a strained quad, or tight hamstrings, but occasionally it’s a tear or a sprain, and sometimes, something worse. I once fractured my metatarsal halfway though an October marathon (i.e. at the end of a busy running season) and though that required several months out from competition, it was considerably preferable to the plantar fasciiitis that I have seen not only injure some of the best local runners for a full season, but take them out of the sport entirely.
Trails, on the other hand, typically falls into two camps. Either they provide softer surfaces that are more forgiving on your legs to begin with (carriage trails on the Shawangunks here in the Hudson Valley, dirt tracks in California, grass and earth on British fells). Or, the surfaces might be tougher, per the infamously “technical” Catskills with their infamous “two rocks for every dirt,” but the mere process of navigating the course – climbing, descending, and navigating various obstacles like oddly-angled boulders, loose rocks, tree roots and the occasional cliff/crag - ensures that your feet rarely repeat the same motion twice. This kind of trail running is more like dancing, and approached with that concept in mind, it’s one of the most enjoyable workouts you can have if you’re too old, unhip, and, frankly, disinterested to still hit the nightclub floors.
So yes, falling is a genuine concern in the harder forms of trail running and I have done so enough times to attest to that. But I’ve also taken a bloody fall at mile 24 of a road marathon at which I would otherwise have qualified for Boston. And while I’ve witnessed one truly nasty injury on the Escarpment, the vast majority of people on the trails run within their limits; plus, to some extent, depending on the course, the conditions, your love of the game and your ability to get knocked down but get up again, falling is all part of the fun. Besides, a hard-fought race, or a fun trail run, with distance and elevation of your choosing, can leave you with a runner’s high that your average road maintenance run emphatically can not. There is, in my mind, no competition.
Indeed, there is very little competition in trail racing anyway. That’s not to say that people don’t go out there to win it or to run a personal best/record or just meet a particular goal: they do. But they do so to satisfy themselves, because trail running is the very definition of the Olympian ideal of sport as a noble, amateur activity. I had to run the Escarpment six times (a total of 100 miles) just to get a souvenir shirt, and another five times to pass 200 miles and a second shirt; the winner still doesn’t get anything more than bragging rights, and I think it’s a shame that Dick has started introducing souvenir caps for all finishers. (Environmentally, we need to move away from swag, not towards it.) Ultra-marathon winners often get nothing more than a growler of local IPA for their hard-fought efforts, which at least is more useful than a medal, given that IPA is the official fuel of trail running. At our local New Paltz Monday night summer series, where across five weeks following the July 4th holiday, we run up and down gentle carriage trails and through occasional woods, at distances between about 3 and 5 miles, we nowadays receive a text message with our race stats the moment we cross the line thanks to the hi-tech chip in our bib, but it doesn’t amount to anything other than personal in(tro)spection while munching on a free slice of watermelon or two.
No, we do this because we love it; the gain is entirely non-material. Correspondingly, the entry fee to trail racing won’t break the bank. The New Paltz series is $25 for five weeks, equivalent to a single weekend road 5k round these parts. Even the Escarpment Trail Run, with its significant organizational and administrative costs, is a modest $70. (By comparison, the NYC Marathon, is $315, international entry to the London Marathon not much less at £225. As for triathlons, forget it: I had to quickly quit that sport due to its exorbitant entry fees.) A self-organized event – people are always putting together little challenges for themselves or groups, and much more so on the trails than the roads – can easily be done for free.
A reminder: I did not grow up like this. My interest in trails only began when we got a weekend place in the Catskills in 2002. I had started entering a few local road races and found a camaraderie that was, frankly, lacking in the cattle call of the New York City weekend races. So I entered a couple of short-distance summer evening trail races too, and found even more of it. By that point, I was struggling with my road running back in NYC, getting too ambitious in my belief that I could qualify for the Boston Marathon only to painfully bonk on my 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th marathons, and it occurred to me that I might be better taking a pause on this Boston obsession until I moved up an age group, and perhaps enjoy what the Catskills Mountains and other local forests had to offer instead.
In the meantime, I read local radio DJ and runner Jimmy Buff’s articles about the Escarpment Run in a Catskills magazine, and I was fascinated by the possibility of running on trails that I knew were considered hard enough just to hike. On the last Sunday of July, either 2004 or 2005, my family ventured to the Escarpment Run’s finish line at North South Lake, just too late to witness inveterate winner Ben Nephew bring it home in about three hours flat. But I was not too late to catch the tall, gangly guy in third place who emerged from the woods to cross the finish line covered in mud, sweat, just a little bit of blood and emitting tears of joy, proclaiming it “the best day of my life” as he did so.
I decided I wanted some of what he had, and subsequently ingratiated myself into the local trail running community: Jimmy Buff kindly befriended me and took me out on the Escarpment so I could learn to fall over frequently, then properly, and eventually, only rarely; he also took me on a run with Dick Vincent, and they and other people I ran with remarked to my surprise that I had some of what it took to be a trail runner. Somehow I convinced Dick that I met the qualification standards for the Escarpment and in 2006 I made my debut.
I’ve had the best days of my life on the trails ever since.
To be emphatically clear: you don’t need to go to somewhere like the Catskills, or take on some famously hard mountainous challenge, to experience trail running. The likelihood is that you’ve already done so – for which I return to my earlier posts about how we are all runners, or at least that we were all runners. You remember (again) back when we were kids and running footloose and unshod through the fields? On the basis that trails are essentially anything “off-road,” we were trail running. Indeed, many of the hundreds of Park Runs that take place all over the UK every Saturday morning at 9am – with no entry fee - barely touch tarmac. The one in Beverley, where I was born and which I have joined more than any other Park Run, takes place on the Westwood, and though the surface is generally grassy, and has only modest little bumps that the locals nonetheless consider “hills” (to be fair, when you are running, anything that is not flat feels like a hill), it could still be considered a trail.
And even if you think that trails must constitute something more than just a lack of tarmac or cement, that doesn’t mean they’re hard to find. When I lived near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, there were a couple of “cross-country” runs that eschewed the circular road for the woods that were otherwise rarely explored; it was a whole new world in a place I thought I knew well. I’ve found woods within Streatham Common and Dulwich Park in London, I have found them off the Bike Path that runs alongside Lake Champlain in Vermont; I have found them in Santa Monica; I have found them almost everywhere I have looked for them, including in the heart of Kuala Lumpar.
Defining the sport of trail running much further than I already have done is nonetheless a notoriously slippery path, much like some of the trails themselves, and one my Trail Running book bravely gets stuck into as early as page 4, seeking to get the basics out of the way before categorizing different recognized forms – e.g., mountain running, sky running, and fell running. The latter, not so incidentally, is a British variety that typically involves short-ish distances out in the open, with the frequent options to find your own quickest way up or down a slope. If you want to know more, the episode of One Step Beyond on which I hosted author/musician Boff Whalley, along with the subject of his recent book Faster! Louder!, the ex-mohawked punk champion fell runner Gary Devine, proved the most popular of the entire two seasons.2
But back to our definitions. While confirming that anything unpaved can qualify, The Ultimate Guide to Trail Running suggests that for the purposes of its own contents, a trail is any course that has three of the following four characteristics:
it is unpaved,
has natural obstacles (going on to list a number of them),
has a significant gain or loss of elevation, and
includes scenic vistas.
It’s a solid definition, though the last characteristic often goes unstated and sometimes unnoticed among trail runners, for the simple reason that if you lift your gaze from the trail itself long enough to admire the view in the middle of running hard, the chances are you’ll be admiring it from ground level instead. But that’s not to say, especially when just out and about having your weekend fun, you can’t stop to smell the roses, or the lavender, the mountain laurel, the pine and more besides. On my fun runs, I take a special thrill in ascending a local mountain and pausing there; even better if there’s an old fire tower to climb for a better view. Indeed, having a destination – and preferably one with a view – to reach and return from is one of the things that can make a long-ish weekend trail run so much more satisfying than the equivalent on roads.
Even on mountain races, there are typically sections where you are either going slow enough to take in your surroundings (i.e. up Blackhead Mountain on the Escarpment, which climbs 1100ft in 0.9 mile); or steady enough, perhaps on a ridge; or, as on the annual Cat’s Tail Trail Marathon, at the top of Wittenburg Mountain, where hikers can be found hanging out on the ledge enjoying the expansive view across New York State and beyond, and I always give them a shout-out as I check the view for myself and feel grateful for all that life has to offer.
There are other rewards to trail running beyond the views, the lower entry cost, the comparative lack of repetitive motion, and the literal and metaphorical high. A certain intensity of commitment is required for sure, and a good trail runner has to become adept at climbing and descending alike, developing a careful instinctive balance between fearlessness and commonsense, but the pace is considerably slower all around. Your body takes a pounding but it’s a different kind of pounding, and, I would argue, an ultimately less stressful pounding. There is also the sheer unpredictability of a course, even from one week to the next: a recent rain may have turned it slick and slippery, or a heatwave rendered the earth just as slick with something akin to sand; a tree may have come down in a storm, or you might not know the course at all and find yourself constantly surprised by its ups and downs, twists and turns, in a way that road running rarely offers. Throw in the vagaries of real-time weather – I’ve run the Escarpment in a thunderstorm, in high heat, higher humidity, but also a couple of times in something that qualifies as “ideal” – and race times vary so wildly year from year that they are barely worth tracking.
Meantime, your GPS may help you avoid getting completely lost, but chances are, you’ll find yourself getting off-trail occasionally anyway and learning to navigate your way back to safety. You’ll learn to bring the right amount of water and food with you, because you can’t just stop in at the nearest corner shop should you run out of supplies. In the process, you’ll find your mind and body alike getting stronger. And though you may choose to listen to music or podcasts, you will soon hear yourself tuning them out as you focus imperceptibly and subconsciously on every next step. Going with friends, you will likely leave the troubles of the world behind you as you chat about anything and everything. And if you do have troubles in the world but no one to run and share them with, then it’s what our local Yoda, Dick Vincent, says, again on that little documentary piece we did, which I thoroughly recommend you listen to because it covers so much ground in so little time (I have set the YouTube audio to start at the relevant point):
“If you are running a trail where you can think a bit, you can clear your mind of all that noise that creates some of the anger and resentment and get some clarity about what really is going on in your life.”
As for equipment, there’s little to worry about. Dedicated trail shoes are not necessary for fun runs, but they are if you want to compete or just progress. I remain a massive fan of the British fell running company Inov-8, especially since the owners bought back the company after an ill-fated attempt at rapid over-expansion. I continue to practice minimal footwear even on the mountains, meaning zero drop from heel to toe and as low to the ground as possible, and Inov-8 obliges with its Trailfly 270s, which comes with various hi-tech grips and top-of-the-line material and costs more than anything else I ever put on my feet. But they last forever, and anyway, I know people who compete even in the 55-mile Manitou’s Revenge, considered the hardest 50-mile/100k race in the Eastern United States, in the huaraches as favored by the Tarahumara Indians made famous by Christopher McDougall’s epic book Born To Run. (Yes, I did a podcast about that as well.)
Moving above and beyond footwear, you’ll want some kind of waist pack or backpack for longer runs, but that’s good equipment to have in your cupboard/closet anyway. And while some people like to use poles for longer events with steep ascents and descents, that doesn’t apply to every day trail runs and races. In short, don’t sweat it.
That said, with most trail running taking place in the summer months, I’m used to sweating it. The second week of our New Paltz summer series took place in the middle of a global boiling mid-July heatwave, and even at the 7pm start time, the combined temperature in Fahrenheit (80+ degrees) and relative humidity (at least 60%) was pushing right up at the combined total of 150, above which the body can not cool itself down. It happened to be the week I wanted to go for it, and though the race was barely 5k – I have to reinforce, trail running comes in all shapes and sizes - it took an incredible amount out of me; I was still getting my breath back 24 hours later.
But that’s just me and my stupid competitive nature. One of the things that makes me happiest at the shorter trail races is seeing all types take to the course – and especially, on this summer series, the older and less able enthusiasts who head out collectively on an early start, self-timing on the understanding that it’s not about speed: it’s about getting out, taking part, and experiencing that special buzz that you can only get from running in nature, on the trails. If you haven’t already, I hope some day you will join me, and them, wherever you may be choosing to take those first steps off-road. I will bet you a growler of local IPA that you will be back for more.
I ran the Escarpment both years anyway, the first self-supported, which was damned hard work, the second as part of a group on an easy qualifying run for its return in 2022, given that Dick needed to re-establish his core field. Ironically, when the race did return in ‘22, I ran it with Covid, the only time I have contracted the virus. For this I apologize to fellow runners and volunteers: I absolutely did not know or suspect as much at the time, though it explained why I felt so shit throughout the race despite having trained near perfectly. Last year I used the race as an incentive to recover from my fractured knee, posting my slowest time to date… and given that I missed the race in 2019 to climb Kilimanjaro, that means it’s now six years since I ran it, officially, hard and fast.
Boff Whalley, a keen fell runner himself whose excellent book Run Wild is essentially a lengthy diatribe against road marathons in favour of fell running, was formerly a member of Chumbawamba, and Faster! Louder! is as much a biography of the Leeds (anarcho)-punk scene as it is of his mate Gary. Chumbawamba, for anyone struggling to connect the dots, were of course authors of the song “Tubthumping,” the unofficial anthem of all trail, fell and mountain runners for its chorus “I get knocked down, but I get up again…”
I was in Hudson NY a month or so ago, and had saw the Catskills in the distance and thought, wow, I need to run them haha. Just had a nice run on the Appalachian Trail today - happy to not be doing so many road miles these days.
I hope that all went well for you today, Tony. So many people have told me, "Yeah, I used to run, but then my knees went bad," or words to that effect, and I always think to myself, "Yeah, that's because you did nothing but run on concrete sidewalks each time that you went out!"