Every Trail Project- Homestead Park/Heritage Trail

 I wanted to mention it up top this time that a big part of this project is to raise funds for Friends of Metro Parks. You can support this effort at this donation page. Make sure you select "Every Trail Project" in the donation detail section! Thank you!

Now, on to the trails! Today I hit some trails that bring back a lot of memories of training for Ironman in 2013. I spent countless miles running and cycling on this trail (shoutout to Dan and Jimmy who were with me for almost every single one of those miles). I actually have a pretty funny story about a little mishap I had on this trail back in 2013 that I'll tell at the end.

Homestead Park and Heritage Trail Park are two parks that are very close to each other, connected by the Heritage Trail. Homestead has a really great playground area for kids with lots of different things for them to play on. My daughter loves the little climbing wall they have there. The only trail within the park is a .75 mile paved loop around the park, but it does connect to the Heritage Trail. If you just need to get some steps in or want to run some shorter loops while the kids play, Homestead would be a good option. If you have kids learning to ride a bike, this would be a good place to go for that as well.

Heritage Trail Park is a small park with a cool little dog park, that serves mostly as a starting point for the section of the Heritage Trail that the Metro Parks maintains (more on this in a second). I have long been a fan of this park for one major reason...it has a porta-potty!

For this run, I chose to combine the two parks. You can see the route I mapped out here, although it's pretty straightforward. For this route you can start at Homestead and run the short loop, then connect to the Heritage Trail. I started at Heritage Trail Park and ran to Homestead, did the loop and then ran back towards Heritage Trail Park and on to the terminus of the trail. Either way, you'll actually take a short section of trail that is not maintained by the Metro Parks. The Heritage Trail a little over 6 miles total, but only 3.3 miles of it is maintained by the Metro Parks. That stretch of trail is from Heritage Trail Park to the terminus at Cemetery Pike Rd. 

The current terminus of the Heritage Trail that could be extended some day!

As I mentioned, the Metro Parks maintains about 3.3 miles of the trail. The number one best part about this is that there is a crushed gravel bridle trail that runs alongside the paved trail for almost the entire length of the Metro Parks section. My trail runner knees were definitely thankful for this!

Very, very happy about the crushed gravel!

This trail is a pretty good out and back option for a long run and  there are several access points. If you want to run the entire trail, you can start in Old Hilliard and run all the way to Cemetery Pike and back. You can also start from Homestead Park or Heritage Trail Park, depending on what distance you want to run. I will note that there is very little shade on this trail, so go when it's overcast like I did today, or carry that sunscreen!

Now it's story time! As I mentioned above, I spent countless miles on this trail while training for an Ironman in 2013. It was always nice to have those access points I mentioned, especially for restroom breaks, and most importantly, water refills. On long runs, Homestead park often served as a water refill spot. Many times we'd roll into Homestead on empty and the water that we refilled would get us to the end of our run. There was one very hot day that summer when we really, really needed that water refill. We got to the park to find signs stating that the water was shut off because of some work they were doing. Uh oh. I had zero water and I was really thirsty. From Homestead to the end of the trail in Old Hilliard is just over a mile, then we would have a few miles after that to get back to our starting point. I really didn't think I could make it, but I also didn't have much of a choice. We thought about stopping at the hose of one the houses along the trail, but we also looked pretty sketchy from our run at that point and didn't want to alarm anyone. So, I stumbled along until we made it to Old Hilliard. Then I saw it, like a beacon of hope in the distance. Otie's Tavern was right there with the open sign on. I pushed through the door, no shirt, covered in sweet, very smelly and begged the bartender for some water. I'm sure she thought I was crazy but she gave me some water anyway. I drank it so fast. People definitely looked at me funny and I was definitely embarrassing my friends. I actually drank it so fast that I made myself sick and couldn't finish my run anyway. I waited shamefully on the corner for my friends to finish the run and come back to pick me up. Always carry more water than you think you'll need so you don't end up like me!

As always, thanks for following along! Get outside, stay healthy and find joy!