If you head west on 70 from Nashville a few miles past White Bluff you'll see a small wooden sign for the Montgomery Bell Mountain Bike Park. This park has excellent trails and plenty of miles to explore. I still get lost on some of the trails. Last week I went to give my knee a test on some more difficult trails than I had been running on and I ended up running for close to two hours through a thunder storm before I started cutting through the brush to get back to the main trail.
This park has a fair number of bikers on the weekends and weekday evenings when the weather is really nice. Otherwise I guess it's a little too far of a drive from Nashville and people in Dickson county aren't too interested in bike riding so it's usually pretty empty. I typically run around 10 a.m. so that probably adds to the fact that I rarely see other people when I run. I've seen a couple runners there but, normally I don't even see a bike rider. When you look at a map of the park it's amazing how small it looks especially if you've been running the yellow trail for over an hour. The trails wind back and forth through the park cramming twenty miles of trail into a small area. The park is pretty heavily wooded and quite beautiful. It doesn't have any long climbs but there are a lot of small climbs that add up and start to take a toll on your legs. There is one section of the yellow trail where you cris-cross a small creek about five times and have to run up and down the steep bank on each side. There are a lot of spots on the trail where I'm always hoping I'll see a biker come by because I can't imagine how anyone could ride a bike down that part of the trail.
The green trail has a few spots like that where the trail is really steep with loose rocks and it looks like a death trap for a biker. I'm sure they have as much fun as I do though. Every so often you hit a spot, on the green and yellow trails mostly, where you do a lot more hopping and skipping down hills than running. This park is definitely a fun place to run, but it can be pretty tough at times and there are a lot of those camouflaged roots and rocks lurking in the shadows waiting to stub your toe or twist your ankle if your not very vigilant/lucky. I've twisted my ankle there pretty badly a few times, but never too seriously. For some reason I only twist my right ankle and never the left.
This is an overall excellent park and the terrain is difficult enough that it will take you a while to exhaust the twenty miles of trail. Don't let the fact that it is a "bike park" scare you away it is a great place to run and you don't have to worry about getting run over at every turn.
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