Adventure Running: Tunnel Vision

Running is the sport I truly love. And I make it more fun with Adventure Running. I think making it fun is important for any type of workout if you want to make it stick and have trouble maintaining a fitness habit.

As I wrote previously, I’ve gamified my running and turned it into a game of conquest, continuously adding new “conquered” territory to my map. This is something I’ve done my whole life with travel, and I simply extended it to running. In that previous article, I mentioned that a subset of my running is “running tourism” when I travel. I showed running maps of New York and Seoul as examples. A variation of that is adventure running.

Wherever you live, you can make your runs fun and interesting. Explore your city, explore outside your city- you can make your runs an adventure. Don’t just run from home, but drive to other locations, park the car, and go for a run. I never run the same route twice, and as a result, I’ve gotten to know my home region very well- Santa Cruz, CA.

Wright's Station Tunnel- Portal 1 — Wright’s Station Tunnel- Portal 1

The gallery above represents my latest quest. There’s a lot of history in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the tumultuous hills between Santa Cruz and San Jose. They are steep, and much of it is impassable on fit, blocked by creeks and dense brush, steep hills and cliffs, and tangled masses of poison oak. But there are trails and roads. Strava’s heat maps help me find the passable areas. It has also helped on a couple of these to ask locals I see when I’m running by. In fact, I ply locals’ knowledge all the time to find new routes and figure out how to make some routes work.

I’ve heard for years about the old Santa Cruz Railroad that connected us to San Jose. It was built in the 1800’s and closed in 1940. It ferried lumber as well as passengers. There were a total of 5 tunnels in the final configuration before being shut down. Four of those are up in the hills (the last one is in Santa Cruz and is still in use). The ones up in the hills are mostly remote and now overgrown with brush. I found online a few websites talking about the railroad, and one of them provided coordinates. With that, and Strava’s heatmaps, I was able to plot a path to seven of the eight portals. The eighth portal is on private property behind locked gates, so it is, alas, off limits without getting myself in trouble.

In a 2-month period, I visited all seven portals, which are in the gallery above. Several were easily accessible, and several were quite remote. I incorporated all of them into runs, one per run except for the last one, which was the shortest tunnel. Even so on the last one, the existence of a tunnel is due to steep terrain, and getting from one end to the other isn’t easy. All tunnels are now closed. Three have had their entrances dynamited to keep people out, and the last, and shortest one, is actually used for cold storage. It is capped off by a building at one end and a concrete wall at the other. Though set up by the US Government, it was also used by Disney to store old celluloids.

The map above shows my runs in the Santa Cruz area and in the mountains. The white line is the old rail line (tracks are all removed except for the southern portion, which is still in use as a tourist train). The tunnels are marked with wide, green lines, the fourth one of which is barely visible by a very thin line. That’s the one in use for storage. The 5th tunnel, down in Santa Cruz, is part of that tourist train. I’ve been through that one. Thank you to Santa Cruz Trains for providing a very detailed KML file, from which I was able to extract the Santa Cruz line in the map.

Get Out And Explore

The key here is to research your area and get out and explore it. Get in the car and drive and you can add destination runs to your itinerary. The great thing with Strava’s heat maps is you can see where passages are, and if there’s areas that are not as safe, they will not be so brightly lit up. The heat map’s brightness directly correlates with popularity. Of course when it comes to trails, I’ll take even the faintest wisp of trace in their heat maps. That is, after all, why it’s called Adventure Running! I’ll be back with more ideas to make your runs fun!