There is a park in Minneapolis called Theodore Wirth Park. I often see people online who talk about running the trails that they have, however, until today I had never been there, at least not in any significant way. My wife and I had made an attempt to explore the park, but as I discovered, we were on the wrong side, and only managed to find a mile or so of mountain bike trails.

A friend of mine posted to a Facebook group, that I am a part of, that she was putting together a group run at the park Saturday morning, and so I thought it would be great opportunity to actually see what I was missing out on. I arrived at 7am, and a large group of folks headed out from the beach house to explore the trails on the southern half of the park.

As it turns out there is a ton of trails in this area. Many of them are only moderately marked, so we trusted our run leader to get us through. However, one of the advantageous of this park is that you are surrounded by roads and freeways. If you ever get lost, within a quarter mile or so, you should see a road in the distance. These roads bring you back to the parking lot, or you can take another spur to keep going. It’s a great place to run in circles, and trust you’re never that far from your car. All told, we ended up with a 4 mile loop on today’s route.

I could see heading down to this park on occasion and getting lost. It’s a great little natural area in the middle of Minneapolis. I’m grateful for some wonderful friends who showed all of us how great of a resource we have, right here in the middle of the city.