How to run in a new city
You’ve found yourself in a far away land, and you have your running shoes, but no local knowledge. Now what? A running tour, perhaps...
Travel is a beautiful thing. We laugh about getting the travel bug, we make the effort to take the scenic route if we’ve got the time, we talk romantically about wanderlust, we pour scorn upon the least well-travelled among us, we long to experience new cultures, meet new people, eat native foods, and visit far-flung wonders of the world.
Yeah, for this one we have to ignore the massive environmental impact of flying. Has aviation contributed to 4% of climate change? That’s the estimated cost of all those beautiful things I listed in the previous paragraph, but let’s keep that in mind for another day.
What if you’re a runner, though? I mean, really a runner. You want to get to a new country and run, right?
Just go for a run right out of the hotel? You’ll be running alone, and phone maps might lead you to a rougher neighborhood than you intended. Signing up for a local race at your destination is a top idea, but only if you’re there on a weekend. How about joining a local running group? Also great, but not every city has an LA Running Connoisseur fastidiously listing every run.
My favorite way of experiencing a city through running is with a tour guide. Yes, there are running tours all around the world, where you can run for 5km or 10km – or further – and the host will show you their city, and impart some crucial local knowledge, the minutiae of which could never be delivered by the internet. Plus, they won’t let you run through the more dangerous parts of the city. Unless you want to, of course.
When I visited Porto in 2019, I woke up, and ran a touch over 10k around Portugal’s incredibly hilly second city. It was a reasonably priced couple of hours, and Sergio was a magnificent guide, taking me across the magnificent bridges, and showing me locations of historical moments, as well as some amazing street art. It was everything I wanted from a private tour. Plus – most importantly – I got my run in.
Sergio’s Porto Running Tours is part of a global network of running tours. When I found this out, I was fascinated to find out how and why someone would build this network. I knew they would be similarly worldly people like that first paragraph described.
It turned out that two completely separate world travellers who both loved exploring new locales by foot, decided to build similar (but definitely different) running tour platforms at around the same time, so I spoke to Raoul Spronken of RunningTours.net (where I found Sergio in Porto), and Lena Andersson of Go! Running Tours about the beauty of guided runs in a new city.
Raoul is a self-professed traveler. He’s visited 90 countries now and always wants to run with a local. During his search for that person in Cape Town, he stumbled upon a running tour. He had no idea such a thing existed, but one thing led to another and because he “loves to meet new people” and show them his city, he started his own tours of his hometown of Maastricht, in the south of the Netherlands, back in 2011. Eventually, enough people asked him if tours like his existed in other cities, and RunningTours.net was born.
Lena started hosting running tours in Copenhagen, Denmark, after the disappointment of being discouraged from running alone in Mumbai by the hotel concierge. Back then, she was in the corporate world, traveling around the planet for 200 days of the year, and her promise to herself that if she was going to work that hard, she would at least see as much as possible of all these cities was rudely broken. Lena “ended up not not seeing anything of India, other than from a taxi.”
Such was the success of her hometown tours, that customers asked Lena if tours like hers existed elsewhere. It’s the same as with Raoul.
The differences between their platforms are operational, but superficial.
RunningTours.net is a directory of 80 vetted, quality-controlled, independent running tour operators, and their contact details. You find a tour in the city you’re heading to, and you book directly with the individual.
Go! Running has full listings of its almost 100 franchise tours with photographs, descriptions, review, and a built-in booking system.
They are the Nike and Adidas of the global running tours networks. Others exist, of course, but these are the gold standards if you want a running tour.
Raoul explains that – much like him – running tour operators take the tours on the side of their job.
“It's fun to do. You meet interesting people. You don't become rich off it! The money I make from the running tours, I invest in RunningTours.net.”
“I want to offer people a service that I would like to find abroad. I would be happy if I could go somewhere, and there's a running guide. That makes my trip more worthwhile.”
“There are some cities where [the tour operators] don't want to spend money or they are not technical enough to create a website, so I want to be a place for them as well.”
Raoul has dreams of building a more involved website, with a booking system where he could make a small commission. As it is, his website is a labor of love that costs him money. Charging a fee to be listed, he says, is more trouble than it’s worth. As it is, he lacks the time to build that website himself.
This is the platform that Lena’s Go! Running Tours already offers, and it all came from that same desire to provide hospitality to customers. She knew that more control over the quality of the tours was required if guests were to return to the platform in future. Adding consistent branding to franchised tours, with tour operators who were trained as to the standards of communication, and of making the tour itself incredible. That’s the reliability that gives customers more peace of mind.
I know about this first-hand as my friend Sean is a tour operator for Go! Running Tours. He has a running club in LA that runs around filming locations. It’s the perfect Hollywood excursion.
RunningTours.net lists tours in places like Azerbaijan, Uganda, and Tunisia, but back home in Maastricht, Raoul looks out for where his guests are arriving from. If they’re fellow Dutch, he’ll show them something different to where he’d take American visitors, for instance. Maastricht might not be a city that you’re overly familiar with, but it was the birthplace of the European Union, and it was also a city liberated by America at the end of World War 2. This is the kind of knowledge your local tour guides can impart on you while running at a pace of your choice.
Rome’s Bucket List tour of all the famous attractions is Go! Running’s most popular tour – mainly due to the number of tourists that descend on Italy every year – but what are the Lena’s favorite tours?
“Christiania is this hippie community. It's a very different side of Copenhagen, and I really like it when things are not too perfect. In Copenhagen, people are usually well behaved, it's clean, we follow the rules. People come here think it’s incredible, but sometimes a little bit too perfect for me.”
“There's one in Bangkok that's called Street Art to Street Food.” It’s exactly what you think. You run around looking for street art, and end up in a street food market.
“We also have a tour in Kenya in Nairobi where they run in the Ngong Hills of Nairobi. People run with an elite Kenyan Runner, who runs a 2:08 marathon, and then they send through these pictures with giraffes.”
Once you’ve made the effort to broaden your horizons, an optional excursion at your destination should be a true pleasure, and both RunningTours.net and Go! Running aim to provide exactly that.
Next time you’re on your travels, which platform will you use? I recommend using both. While they’ve been made by two incredibly well-traveled people trying to provide a supreme running experience to travelers, neither is a comprehensive library of the world’s running tours. You’ll find your perfect tour on one of them, though.
And if you can’t, reaching out to a tour operator for a slightly modified run is never a problem. After all, these are people who truly prize the variety of life. Just like you.
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Thanks for reading
- Raz x
Oooh forwarding to my retired running coach father in LA to spread the word! What a fun bday or friend activity for people to explore their own city in a slightly different way.
I‘d rather run by myself, but I think these offerings are really helpful for a lot of people. I love exploring cities on business trips. So much better than just seeing conference rooms. ✌🏻