"Each step forward has a sacred meaning of its own" Sri Chinmoy
Higashiyama Trail Run - Feb 2026 - Kyoto
After a quiescent midwinter in terms of training, I felt ready to restart my trail-running on our first morning in Kyoto. As per usual, there was an enticing window of opportunity between early morning meditation and breakfast, so I got myself out of the hotel (next door to Kyoto's City Hall) and ran towards the hills. The edge of town was marked by a forested ridge, probably under a mile away as the crow flies, but I had my eye on a the waymarked Kyoto Trail which had an entry point exactly a mile from the hotel and led to a temple overlooking the city.
It was around zero degrees, pretty bracing, but very still and with the city not yet fully awake I had no problems jogging the empty pavements over Sanjo bridge and into the Higashiyama neighbourhood. Soon I was passing shrines and temples nestled between the stores and houses of this modern-and-ancient city, glimpsing enchanting, red Tori gates when I looked down side streets and alleys. Soon I found my trailhead and ran beneath two more of these symbolic archways on a path of solid, stone slabs that wound towards the hillside. The sky was clear and the sun just about to rise, though as I was running eastward towards the hills I was putting that moment off with each step.
Before I reached the limit of the built-up area and the start of the wooded hills, I stopped off to explore a shinto shrine at Awata, silent and deserted. I'm used to feeling the sacredness of landcapes, but the impression I was already getting of Kyoto was of a cityscape that perfectly blended old and new, sacred and mundane. Just take a look at any map of Kyoto and you'll see it's a city of shrines and temples, many of them with gardens and parks forming green oases. After a pause for contemplation at Awata I ran onwards and upwards, now on a twisting dirt trail among the trees. The climb was too steep to run in places, so I adopted the fell-runner's walk with hands on knees and made good progress. I met one other runner, stretching in front of another shinto shrine, then bumped into Balarka and Abhijatri who were coming down from the ridge on an early morning hike. Jet lag had got them up and out well before dawn.
At the top of the climb was the buddhist temple at Shogunzaka, all closed up to visitors at this time of day, but a viewing platform gave me a panorama out across Kyoto which was now just starting to wake up and get busy. Still it had a peaceful vibration though, a kind of harmony in motion. There were numerous ways down, so to avoid retracing my steps I followed signs for Chion-in, another great temple on the edge of town. Before I got there I passed some groves of bamboo and had more amazing views out across the city. Just before the massive temple complex there was a tiny, almost hidden temple in the trees, called Taiseikankitenson on the map....I had the garden to myself for another short, contemplative moment before I descended past immense wooden temple-halls and belltowers to pick up the route back to city hall.
That was my first run in Kyoto and my first impression of a beautiful city - the feeling of sacred landscape seemed to pervade everthing from the hilltop temples to the city streets. Maybe that atmosphere is everywhere if you're in the right state of consciousness, and on your own doorstep perhaps it's harder to tune into it amid the distractions and mundanities of everyday life? And perhaps here's something about being a traveller in a foreign land that just makes it easier to attune to the presence of sacred spaces.
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