Dublin is an unusually good running city, and the reason is geography rather than provision: it sits in a bowl with the sea on one side and mountains on the other, and both are reachable on foot or by tram from the centre. Very few capitals give you an ocean and a 700-metre summit within the same commute.
Phoenix Park
The obvious answer, and the right one. At 1,750 acres it is one of the largest enclosed city parks in Europe — roughly twice the size of New York's Central Park and considerably bigger than Richmond Park in London. It has a resident herd of fallow deer, largely traffic-free roads, and enough space that you can run a long run inside it without repeating yourself.
Chesterfield Avenue, the long straight through the middle, is the reference: about 4km end to end, gently undulating, and the start line of the Frank Duffy 10 Mile. The perimeter is roughly 16km. The whole park is the site of the Dublin Race Series and the middle third of the Dublin Marathon, so if you are racing here you will see it anyway.
Worth knowing
The park is not flat. It rises steadily from the Parkgate Street entrance at the city end towards the Castleknock gate, which means an out-and-back from town is uphill on the way out and a free ride home — pleasant, and worth accounting for if you are pacing an effort.
The coast: Sandymount to Howth
The other great Dublin run. From Sandymount Strand you can run north along the bay, and with the DART line following the coast the whole way you can make it any length you like and take the train home.
- Sandymount Strand — flat, open and enormous at low tide, when the water retreats far enough to run on hard sand for a mile out.
- The Great South Wall out to Poolbeg Lighthouse — a granite wall running a mile into Dublin Bay, exposed on both sides and one of the most distinctive short runs anywhere in Ireland.
- Clontarf and the Bull Wall — flat promenade and a wooden bridge to Bull Island, a UNESCO biosphere with a five-kilometre beach on it.
- Howth Head — the payoff. A cliff path circuit of roughly 10km with real climbing, views back across the bay to Wicklow, and a DART station at the bottom.
The Howth cliff path is the single best run in Dublin and the one to do if you only do one. It is genuinely rough underfoot in places and exposed to the sea wind, so it is a trail run rather than a promenade jog.
The mountains, from the tram
The thing that makes Dublin distinctive. The Luas Green Line runs to Ballinteer and Marlay Park, and Marlay Park is the northern terminus of the Wicklow Way — meaning you can leave the city centre by tram and be on a waymarked mountain trail inside forty minutes with no car involved.
From Marlay the Way climbs to Kilmashogue, Tibradden and Fairy Castle, with the Dublin mountains opening out behind. Ticknock and the Featherbeds are the other standard access points. This is where Dublin's trail and ultra scene lives, and where the Wicklow Way Race and the Art O'Neill Challenge both pass through.
parkrun in Dublin
There are 26 parkruns in County Dublin, the highest concentration of any Irish county by a wide margin and comparable to a large English county. Whatever part of the city you are in on a Saturday morning, there is one nearby.
Racing in the city
Dublin's own calendar is dense. The Dublin Marathon on the October bank holiday Monday is the largest event in Irish running, at around 20,000 runners and by ballot. The Dublin Race Series — Fingal 10K, Frank Duffy 10 Mile, Dublin Half — builds towards it across the summer, all in or around Phoenix Park.
In January, the Raheny 5 in the northern suburbs draws around 3,500 runners to a five-mile road race starting at three in the afternoon, which is one of the more civilised ideas in the sport. The Great Ireland Run 10K takes over Phoenix Park in April.