how to find dirt roads for running?

we drive around or use google earth to find them. I've asked on local Facebook running pages as well. Unfort for us they're usually through areas where loose, aggressive dogs and hillbillies with trucks live. Lots of dust in our faces and scary dogs weren't worth some 3 miles of soft surfaces. I bet PN though has some good ones.

Most bases don't have a ton of roads and are poor places to train. Some have a track that isn't heavily used. You usually have to be a dod employee or service member to get on these installations though. Do not show up thinking you can run some low traffic roads. A better option is historic sites and battlefields.

you can do worse than looking into where your local HS/colleges holds their XC meets or practices. some parks where i live have dirt paths.

This website helped me find a bunch of dirt roads in middle-of-nowhere Mississippi.

Also, I would just go for drives on days in a 15 mile radius of campus when I had the time to just go searching & I would find roads that way (found a random 10 mile gravel/clay road by doing this)

I moved to a new town a few months ago and had the same problem. I emailed the local university’s cross country coach, and he kindly gave me a list of all the nearby dirt roads where the team does their training. Game changer!

you go outside, look for the dirt road and start running on it

Are you in a town or city?

yes- leave the city

no- look outside your window

there ya go buddy

Move to Northern New Mexico. It’s all dirt roads here.

Worth checking, I'd say. Where I live, there's the main part of the base that you need to go through a checkpoint to get in. It's nice and they do allow non-miltary in (with some hoops) for certain areas/roads. But there is also an adjacent area (that is really nice as well as underused. . . which is a good thing) that you don't need to go through a checkpoint to use. Just need the $10 annual isportsman account to check when it's open and not being used for military training.

This is the way. Cal Topo is my preference.

Also confirms you are on public roads and not someones driveway or something.

You should be able to search for "[county name] road surface map" and find the official government map of all the roads in that county that shows the road surface. Most counties supply a pdf and a DWG of the map.

for example:

https://iowadot.gov/maps/msp/pdf/des-moines-co.pdf