LCC RUNNERS: Regent's Park Trails [3km] ALL LEVELS

Welcome back to LCC's Trail Running Club!

For this instalment, we're taking on another one of the great parks of central London (for everyone's ease and convenience): the Regent's Park, situated just a few minutes' walk from Euston station or Great Portland Street and right on its own Bakerloo line station, also called Regent's Park.

We'll be looking at a roughly 30-40 minute run, covering around 3 kilometres (2 miles) on flat surfaces, suitable for beginners and experienced runners alike. The terrain will be about half paved, half compacted dirt trail.

The Regent's Park, much like our other regular route at Hyde Park, doesn't get much love from London locals. With the rest of central-central London it's more or less consigned to the hell of tourism, shopping and offices. It's not hard to see why: Regents' is home to the London zoo and even the US Ambassadors' residence. Tourism and commercialism are practically in its geographic DNA. But nothing can stop us LCC runners: we'll enjoy the space and reclaim it for the people, one step at a time.

Our route will take us from our meeting-point at Great Portland Street station, over to the park (~2-3 mins), up the Broad Walk trail for about 1km, westward past the Zoo to the "Monkey Gate", down past Winfield House (the US ambassador's residence), over Hanover Island (where toilets are available) and around the boating lake to finish back where we started.

Take care and see you on the trails!

Our standard bit of info about our running group and why it's good is provided below:

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Humans evolved to run and sprint; no wonder then that when we do it regularly (within moderation and with plenty of rest days), our brains as well as bodies thank us. Running has recently been shown to improve neuroplasticity, heal brain damage in affected individuals, and foster better mental health including elevated mood at rest and enhanced task-switching ability. Doing all this in nature, as opposed to busy London roads dodging commuters and street cleaners, also helps deliver the well-known benefits of time spent in nature to mood, anxiety levels, cognition and memory. All these things matter a great deal in an age where burnout and exhaustion are a constant presence either in our own lives or those of the people we care about [who you should totally invite along]. It matters especially for people trying to eke out a percentage of their time and mental capacity for transformative social and political organising: the better we feel, the more we'll be able to do.

In a nutshell, running is great for you and you should do it. Trail running is even better. Best of all is doing all this with a supportive group of comrades, especially one which includes knowledgeable folks who can provide some structure to what can be a puzzling sport to get started with if building up to something, like a 10k or half marathon, is your goal. Part of our running group's programming will be building a series of events aimed at building people up, slowly but surely, towards specific goals, using progressive programmes similar to the NHS's Couch to 5k system.

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Take care and see you on the trails!