Running in New Jersey

The Jersey Shore stretches well past Asbury Park, and runners who explore it find a string of distinct boardwalk personalities. Point Pleasant Beach offers a shorter, arcade-lined boardwalk that gets crowded on summer weekends, so early morning runs before 8am are far more pleasant. Ocean City, on the southern end, has one of the longest continuous boardwalks in the state at roughly 2.5 miles, with a quieter, family-oriented feel than the Asbury Park to Long Branch stretch.

Spring Lake, often called the Irish Riviera, has a wooden boardwalk bordered by a lake path that lets runners combine a freshwater loop with an ocean stretch in a single outing. Sea Girt and Belmar connect directly to Spring Lake's boardwalk, so runners based in any of these towns can string together 8 to 10 miles of uninterrupted oceanfront without ever leaving the boards. Winter running on these boardwalks is often better than summer, since the wind off the Atlantic is brisk but the paths are empty and free of beach traffic.

The Pinelands National Reserve covers over a million acres of southern New Jersey, and the Batona Trail is only the spine of a much larger network of sandy fire roads and single-track that connects towns like Chatsworth and Tabernacle. These trails are flat and forgiving on the joints, but the sand adds resistance that makes easy runs feel harder than the mileage suggests, so runners training for a road race elsewhere should treat Pine Barrens miles as a strength session rather than a pace workout.

The Highlands region in the northwest, covering towns like Ringwood, West Milford, and Boonton, has rockier and more technical terrain than most of the state, with sections of the Highlands Trail that require scrambling over exposed bedrock. Norvin Green State Forest near Ringwood is a favorite among local trail runners for its combination of ridge views and stream crossings. Because the Highlands sit at higher elevation than the rest of New Jersey, they hold snow and ice longer into spring, so trail shoes with more aggressive lugs are worth packing through March.