Running in Vermont

Middlebury, home to Middlebury College, sits in Vermont's Champlain Valley and has built a running culture around the college's cross country and Nordic ski programs, whose athletes train year-round on the town's network of dirt roads and the nearby Trail Around Middlebury (TAM), a roughly 18-mile loop that circles the town entirely on protected land. The college's presence means Middlebury punches well above its population size in organized road races and trail events.

Montpelier, Vermont's capital and one of the smallest state capitals in the country, offers a running experience defined by its size, runners can reach genuine forest trails within minutes of the small downtown, with the Hubbard Park trail network climbing directly from the edge of the capitol building into wooded hillside. This proximity between government buildings and forest trails is unusual even by Vermont's rural standards.

Both towns benefit from Vermont's unusually dense network of unpaved town roads, maintained well enough for daily running but quiet enough that runners can log long, uninterrupted miles without significant traffic, a road running experience increasingly rare in more developed New England states.

Vermont has a long history with ultradistance trail running, and events built around the Green Mountains have run for decades, drawing a small but committed community of runners willing to train through the state's notoriously difficult mud season each spring. The Vermont 100, held on rural dirt roads and trails in the state's south central region, is one of the longest-running 100-mile trail races in the country.

The Mad Marathon in Waitsfield, held each July in the Mad River Valley, times its rolling course to fall squarely within Vermont's short, reliable summer window, avoiding both mud season and the ice and snow that can arrive as early as October at higher elevations. Runners training for it typically build their base through late spring once the dirt roads have firmed up enough to run safely.

Because Vermont's weather compresses the ideal training season into a few reliable months, many Vermont runners treat winter as a dedicated strength and cross-training period, whether on snowshoes, Nordic skis, or indoor tracks, rather than attempting to maintain outdoor road mileage through a season that can bury trails and back roads in snow for weeks at a time.