Trails

For cross country practice my team runs on the Cedar Valley Nature trail a lot. The trail has decent scenery with many plants and trees, a small pond and a creek. It is nice to have a certain place to run practices on. We are able to run many of our long runs there.

It is very convenient to be able to have a certain trail or path you can do many of your runs on. By running on the same trail it helps you know how far you have run. You can have certain mile markers or landmarks on the trail that help you know how far you are running.  On the trail I run on there are mile markers that are spray painted on the trail for each one half of a mile.

Running on the same trail can also help you to run at a certain pace. If you run with a watch when you’re running it’s nice to have one half mile markers because at each mark you can check and see if you are close to running your target time. You can also compare one of your runs to another run if you are on the same trail. You can compare one of your times to the time you are running and see if you are going faster, the same or slower than before by comparing how far you have ran on the trail to how long you have been running.

It is also nice to run on a trail when you have to run long distances.  When I have to run at my house and I want to run eight miles I have to run a four mile loops twice because there aren’t any paths in my neighborhood that I can run eight miles on. When I run on the trail I can run eight miles without having to do any extra loops or running the same thing twice.

On most trails there is also a drinking fountain which is really nice on hot days so you can stop to get a drink of water during your run. Running on a trail is very nice for knowing how far you are running and at what pace you are running. It is also very nice for when you have to run for long distances.