Remember when you were a kid and you ran just because you could? Not to keep your blood pressure down or to be able to eat that chocolate thunder hot fudge sundae, but because you were outside and you had legs and those legs wanted to move.
Trail running feels like that to me. But not just any trail. Playful trails, single track, curvy trails; trails that go up and down through dips and gullies; trails that say, “You gotta see this.”
Those are the trails that give me the elusive runner’s high. You finish out of breath, noodle-legged, but you say, “God, that was fun.”
In the hill country of Texas, about an hour west of San Antonio, we stumbled upon a city park campground in the town of Kerrville with a small system of trails that were made with me in mind. A trail runner from Colorado or Vermont or any area with more than one contour line on their topographical map might consider the Kerrville trails child’s play. But where we live in southern Delaware, elevation is measured in inches, and single tracks are short, and soggy, and end at hunting blinds.
Six sections made up the trail system in Kerrville-Schreiner Park, and most were short—1.5 to 2 miles. Connector trails combined the sections to create a grand loop of 9ish miles. About 350 feet of elevation gain made for some short heart-pumping, but not toss-your-cookies, climbs.
Did I mention these trails were great fun for my green-level mountain biking skills, too?
Icing on the cake was the paved bicycle trail, accessible from the park, that followed the clear, blue waters of the Guadalupe River into downtown Kerrville (six miles one-way).
We’ve been RVing for nearly 15 years now and less than a handful of campgrounds make it into the coveted top tier of the Mitchell-Adams-Mitchell rating system – Anastasia, Grayton Beach, McDowell, Dead Horse Ranch. Our scoring system is purely subjective but some factors include exercise options, how close the sites are to each other, park vegetation, what type of clientele the park attracts (loud, obnoxious versus quiet, respectful), etc.
Unfortunately, Covid put the brakes on one of the most important categories in our rating system: quality of bars within biking distance from the park (extra points for cute microbreweries). Kerrville has great potential in this area. And while, at this point, it’s looking pretty good for Kerrville-Schreiner, our scoring is incomplete. We’ll have to return after Covid for the final rating.
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