Field notes 7 MIN READ
Trail running draws better than road running
The same distance, the same effort, and one of them makes a far more interesting line. It comes down to how a trail is built and how a road is.
Put a 12 km road run and a 12 km trail run side by side as drawings and the trail run wins almost every time. This is not romance about nature. It is geometry.
Roads are built to go somewhere
A road is a compromise between the shortest route and the cheapest one to build. The result is long straights, wide radius curves, and a grid where the land is flat. Run on it and your line inherits that logic — efficient, legible, and not very much yours.
A trail is built around obstacles. It goes where the ground allows: around the wet bit, along the ridge, down the side of the gully rather than into it. Every one of those decisions is a direction change, and direction changes are what make a line look like a drawing rather than a diagram.
The signature of a forest
Run the same forest loop fifty times and you will notice the drawing has a personality. The tight switchbacks where the path drops off a bank. The long gentle arc around a lake. The place where three trails meet and your track makes a small knot because you stopped to decide.
That knot is the part people point at. It is also the part no route planner would ever have drawn.
Where trail running draws badly
Two cases, and they are worth knowing before you print.
A single out-and-back on a linear trail. Same problem as the road version: one line, drawn twice, and no enclosed area.
A very short loop repeated. Hill repeats and interval sessions produce a beautiful mess on the ground and an unreadable scribble on paper. The effort was real; the drawing is not the place to show it. A season of them layered together is a different matter — that becomes a heatmap, and the repetition is the whole subject.
On elevation
Trail runs usually have real climbing, which means the elevation profile has something to say. Worth knowing: the profile drawn from your watch is not the same as the number your app reports. Barometric altimeters drift, sometimes by a hundred metres over a long day, and a profile drawn from the raw file slopes the wrong way for reasons that have nothing to do with the ground.
We correct for that drift before drawing. The number beside it comes from your activity, not from our maths — the honest source for a printed figure is the one you already believe.
Questions people actually ask
- Why does a trail route draw better than a road route?
- Because a trail was made by use and a road was made by engineering. One follows the land; the other is a compromise between directness and cost.
- Does that mean road routes are not worth printing?
- No. A road route with real character — a coast road, a col, a long point-to-point — draws well. The weak case is a lap of an urban park.
- Is GPS worse on trails?
- Sometimes. Tree cover and steep valleys reduce accuracy, so a forest route is often noisier. At poster scale it rarely matters.
- Which size suits a trail route?
- 50×70. Trail routes carry more small-scale detail than road routes and lose it at 30×40.
YOURS, FROM A FILE, IN 90 SECONDS
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