Urban Running in Buenos Aires

B is in the midst of training for her second marathon, so she had to figure out how to get in some long runs while in Buenos Aires (she’ll be up to an 18 mile run this month). After searching the web a bit, she ran across Urban Running Tours which offers a guided running tour of Buenos Aires.

Urban Running Tours’ main objective is to show you the city in a dynamic way, having fun, by starting or ending your day exercising during your leisure or business trip to Buenos Aires.

Essentially, you get an extremely friendly and knowledgeable Buenos Aires runner that takes you on a 10K run (a little over 6 miles) from wherever you happen to be staying. In our case, we were greeted by Juan, the founder of URT, at 8:00am in front of our apartment. From there, we ran about a half mile through the city blocks outside of our apartment until we emerged onto a much more runner-friendly road with a groomed running trail.

Two days before our urban running tour, we had gone for a 3-mile run around our apartment confined mostly to the city sidewalks and it was not a real pleasant experience. In addition to the cold and rainy conditions, it does not appear that porteños expect people to be running down their city sidewalks. Couple that with the ubiquitous dog walkers that don’t think they should have to pick up after the dogs they walk, and you have a pretty inhospitable running environment.

Having Juan show us an accessible, runner-friendly area of the city has made a huge difference in our running enjoyment in the city. He took us on a beautiful run through the Palermo Lakes area (sort of like a smaller version of New York’s Central Park) and told Beth how to easily extend the route to get up to her max of 18 miles while we’re in Buenos Aires. He even offered to draw up specific routes with Google Maps in advance of her bigger runs if she wanted.

For $50 a person (or $90 for two people), you get the 10K guided run which includes:

• A history of the city along with notable landmarks and places of interest
• An insider view of where the best running routes are in the city
• A dry-fit running T-shirt
• Digital photos of your run
• 5% of the cost will be donated to the Buenos Aires Cardiovascular Foundation

I know that my non-running friends are thinking, “You paid $90 to get up at 8:00am to run 6 miles on a vacation? Are you nuts?!” But, just like our visits to New York and Chicago this summer, I think the run may end up being one of our favorite activities, and the guided tour at the beginning of our month-long vacation was well worth it. You can read B’s review of Urban Running Tours at TripAdvisor. They also do urban running tours in a number of other cities through Global Running Tours (including 10 major cities in the U.S.), so if you’re in one of these cities for a vacation, I strongly recommend that you check them out!

Here are the pics from our run: