Trail Running in Fall, Through Hills and Leaves

Between November and March, the high trails disappear under snow and ice, and the hills near home become the place to keep running real climbs through real woods.

• Why it makes sense to bring your trail running a thousand feet or so lower in winter
• What the hills look like month by month, from October’s leaves to the first flowers of March
• What happens in your head when the trail is ten minutes from home
• Five safety rules for short days, one line each

In November, the trail you ran all summer is still there, but getting to it now takes different legs and different gear. The hut where you stopped for coffee closed weeks ago, and snow already covers the last stretch below the pass. By four in the afternoon, the sun has dropped behind the ridge. It’s tempting to push your trail shoes to the back of the closet and go back to pavement until April.

Why Trail Running Moves Downhill in Winter

High up, in winter, the ground stops being something you can run on. Ice lingers all day in the shaded sections, and snow that’s firm at dawn turns to slush by noon. Moving around up there takes crampons and a way of reading conditions that is a craft of its own. Anyone who tries it in summer shoes is doing something other than trail running, and doing it underequipped.

Hills are mountains at a smaller scale. They have the same climbs that put your hands on your knees and the same trails that slip into the woods and come out on a ridgeline, with descents where you still have to choose where each foot goes. What changes is the scale, and with it everything else: an hour and a half out instead of a whole day, a thousand or two feet of climbing instead of five thousand. And from almost every bend you can see the houses in town, so you can judge by eye how far you are from your front door.

If you’ve spent the summer running in the mountains, this is the most sensible move of the season. Your legs keep doing real climbing and real descending, and trail running stays part of your week instead of turning into a memory you’ll pick back up in spring.

The Hills From October to March

Between late October and November, the hills change color almost by the day. The chestnuts turn rust, and the oaks hold a warm brown that lasts into December. The maples flare yellow for a week, then let go all at once. The trail vanishes under a layer of dry leaves that crackle like crumpled paper with every step, and the air smells of damp undergrowth, of earth and mushrooms, a smell that never makes it to the city.

Then, in December, the woods strip bare and open up. With the leaves gone, your eye slips between the trunks and travels far: you can see the ridge across the way and, traced on the opposite slope, the trail you’ll be on half an hour from now. It’s also the season of silence. The traffic stays down in the valley, and over your own breathing all you hear is a woodpecker working a trunk and a robin or two rummaging through the leaves. On foggy mornings you sometimes climb up through the gray and break out of it all at once, sun in your face, the valley below gone under a white sea with only the other hilltops showing. Once you’ve seen it, you go looking for it every winter.

Light is the most valuable thing the hills have to give in these months. The sun stays low even at noon, cuts across the woods at a slant, and stretches the shadows of the trunks over the trail like the ruled lines on a notebook page. Around four in the afternoon it turns golden, lights up the bark and the plowed fields, and doesn’t last: twenty minutes, half an hour at most. Getting out to run inside that half hour is one of the best reasons to lace up in the middle of winter.

The way back is the part you never see in the mountains in winter, because by that hour you should have been off the mountain long ago. In the hills, you run down toward town as the sky goes dark, and the lights come on one after another: first the streetlights along the road, then the windows. In February the forest floor fills with primroses, in March the wild plums bloom white along the edges of the fields, and you realize the season has gone by without you missing a single week on the trails.

What a Trail Close to Home Does to Your Head

On a trail, the ground claims your attention. Every step asks you to watch where you land and pick a line between a root and a rock, which leaves little room for the week’s worries: tomorrow’s meeting and the unanswered email can wait at the bottom of the hill.

The mountains are an event you plan for, with an alarm at dawn and a whole day set aside. The hills just outside your door fit into any ordinary Saturday morning or a stretched-out lunch hour. That changes how often the reprieve comes around: once a month becomes once a week, and at that point it earns a fixed spot in your routine, like the Sunday long run.

There’s a quieter relief, too. Knowing the way home is always within sight switches off the last thought that keeps running in the background in the mountains, the one about getting back. With that gone as well, all that’s left is the trail ahead.