Running in Ohio

Dayton sits roughly equidistant between Columbus and Cincinnati and has built its own respectable trail network, anchored by the Great Miami River Recreation Trail, part of the larger Miami Valley Trails system that links Dayton to surrounding suburbs with more than 340 miles of paved paths, one of the largest paved trail networks in the country for a metro area of its size.

Athens, in Ohio's Appalachian foothills and home to Ohio University, offers a running character unlike anywhere else in the state, with genuinely hilly terrain carved by the Hocking River and access to nearby Hocking Hills State Park, whose sandstone gorges and waterfalls draw trail runners from across southeastern Ohio. The town's small size and college population give it an outsized running culture relative to its population.

Toledo, on Lake Erie's western edge, rounds out Ohio's secondary running cities with its own Maumee River waterfront trails and access to the flat, wind-exposed terrain typical of the state's northwest corner, terrain that trains runners well for the pancake-flat finish of the Glass City Marathon each spring.

The Buckeye Trail is a 1,444-mile loop that circles the entire state of Ohio, connecting sections of the Towpath Trail, national forest land, and rural back roads into a single continuous route, making it one of the longest state-contained trail loops in the country. Very few runners attempt the full loop, but sections of it near Hocking Hills, the Cuyahoga Valley, and the Wayne National Forest see regular use from local trail runners.

Because the Buckeye Trail is built largely from connecting existing shorter trails rather than a single purpose-built path, its surface and difficulty vary enormously from one section to the next, ranging from flat converted rail beds to genuinely rugged single-track through the Appalachian foothills in the state's southeast, giving runners a way to sample nearly every terrain type Ohio offers without leaving a single named trail system.

A small community of ultrarunners has taken to running the Buckeye Trail in supported or self-supported multi-day efforts, treating it as Ohio's answer to long-distance thru-trails in more mountainous states, and organized events now use various sections of it for ultra-distance races that would be impossible to fit within any single Ohio park.