Route Spotlight

There’s a reason Fort Clinch is the first thing I mention when someone asks where to run on Amelia Island. The Fort Clinch trail system offers 6+ miles of genuine singletrack — rolling, rooted, variable underfoot — inside a 1,400-acre state park on the northern tip of the island. For an ultrarunner based on a flat barrier island, that’s significant. I’ve run this loop more times than I can count. I direct a trail race here — the Florida Roots Trail Series — so I’ve also walked every section with a course-marking kit, stood at every tricky junction, and watched dozens of runners navigate the terrain for the first time. That experience gives me a particular view of what the trail is actually like, not just what the map shows. ...

Most visitors to Amelia Island head straight for Fort Clinch when they want trails, and I get it — the singletrack inside the state park is legitimately great. But there’s a trail system right in the middle of Fernandina Beach that I probably run more than anything else, and it rarely has more than a handful of people on it: Egans Creek Greenway. I’ve been running Egans Creek for years. On a normal week it shows up in my schedule at least twice — sometimes as a standalone workout, sometimes as the middle section of a longer route that starts downtown, dips through the greenway, and loops back via the neighborhoods along Citrona Drive. It’s become such a default that I forget not everyone knows it’s there. ...