About
Running Around Portland is a long out-of-print 1979 guidebook by John Perry and Buzz Willits, with photography by Ancil Nance, published by Running Around Portland Press. It describes 44 running routes around Portland, Vancouver, and the surrounding hills — grouped into five sections, each with a hand-drawn course map, a difficulty and conditions rating, a beginning point, and a turn-by-turn narrative in the authors' own voice.
This site is a fan-made, non-commercial transcription of that book. Each route gets its own page with the original map, any accompanying photo, and the route's text copied out verbatim (typos and all) from the scanned original. The home page lists all of them grouped by section, with distance and difficulty at a glance and a map showing roughly where each one starts.
Also transcribed from the book's back matter:
- Running organizations and publications active in 1979
- A calendar of annual organized runs around Portland and Vancouver
- A calorie table and aerobic point tables for walking and running
A couple of things are still incomplete: two routes (Ester Short Park Run and Lacamas Lake Loop) came out too blurred in the original scans to transcribe, and a few months are missing from the annual-runs calendar for the same reason. Both are noted where they're missing, pending better scans of the original book.
Copyright
Text and maps © 1979 the original authors and Running Around Portland Press. All rights remain with them; nothing here is claimed as original work, and nothing on this site is for sale. It exists because the book is long out of print and hard to find, and because these are still good routes.
The source and transcription scripts are on GitHub.