Running in Montreal

Mount Royal

Ran there during the 76 Olympics.

Many trails and horse paths.

parc du mont-royal is where everyone runs because there is no where else, essentially. it's known as "the mountain" because it's completely up or down. no flat sections. if you went all the way up and then down starting from mcgill, it would be less than 8 miles. you could do a second lap of the top loop to round your run out to 10 miles. if you are uninterested in doing a run that is entirely a climb and then a decent, you could run along the river on the south side of the island. ie: along lasalle. depending on where you start, you could run out along the canal lachine and back along the river st. laurent, which is entirely grassy and flat.

or you might just want to pick up smoking and drinking, like everyone else does here! enjoy!

When I travel I like to tour a city on my run. So, I suggest that you run out to Olympic Stadium via Parc Lafontaine and Rachel St/the Plateau. If you're running from downtown, you can run easily to Parc Lafontaine, which is only 1-2 miles from McGill University, east along Sherbrooke. YOu can weave your way there through some interesting side streets, in order to bypass the traffic.

Parc Lafontaine in itself is lovely, and approximately 2.6k around, with lots of paths criss-crossing the interior, a nice pond, English-style gardens/landscaping on the one side, French-style landscaping on the other side. Many runners do loops of this park on easy runs and a good 10k takes place there in October. You then want to run to Rachel St., the street that forms the park's northern edge. If you follow this road east for a couple of miles, you'll reach Olympic Stadium. Granted, the route along this street is not beautiful, but although you'll have lights, most of the side streets along Rachel are quiet and so one doesn't always have to stop very much along the way. It's actually a bike route.

If you're interested (highly recommended), you can take a side street or two to your left as you run east on Rachel to tour the Plateau- a very interesting francophone neighbourhood. At any rate, when you reach Olympic Stadium, you can dart into the park there in which you can run about a 3k loop. I think the perimeter of the park is 3.6k or something like that. At the Olympic Stadium, you can run down the ramp that the runners would have entered during the Olympic marathon, which has given me a thrill every time I've done it. (But then I'm a huge runner geek).

The mountain is probably the best choice if you want nature, but it is all up or down, as mentioned previously. Also, you'll feel a bit like a gerbil running on a plastic wheel since every person in Montreal runs or walks up there, but the view from the top is a bonus.

If you are staying downtown run down to the Old Port and take the path that winds along the Canal. It's totally flat but you get a good historical perspective of Montreal.

Cheers