Running · Chicago, Illinois, USA · recorded with NomadTracks

Grant Park, the Bean & the Museum Campus: a 10.5 km Chicago run

A second Chicago morning run, and almost a different city: where the first looped north to Navy Pier and the Magnificent Mile, this 10.5-kilometer route runs south through the parks — Grant Park, the Museum Campus and Millennium Park, the cultural heart of the lakefront.

Just under 80 minutes, flat as a tabletop, the loop ties together the postcards: Buckingham Fountain, the Field Museum, Cloud Gate, a harbour full of sailboats and the Chicago River — then back to where it started.

Distance10.5 km
Elevation gain17 m
ActivityRunning
Duration1 h 18 min

About this data: this track and its photos were personally shared with us as samples by a NomadTracks user. NomadTracks never uploads, collects or shares your tracks or photos — your recordings stay on your devices and in your own cloud.

Route map of Grant Park, the Bean & the Museum Campus: a 10.5 km Chicago run drawn from the recorded GPS points on an OpenStreetMap basemap
The actual recorded GPS track — start marked green, finish orange. Numbered pins mark where the photos below were taken.

Download GPX Coordinates, elevation and relative times — recording dates are normalized out, photos not included.

Elevation profile of the track
Elevation profile over the full distance. Switch the map above to interactive mode, then slide across the chart — a marker follows the route.

A run through Chicago's front yard

Grant Park is Chicago's 'front yard' — a broad green strip built on landfill between the Loop and Lake Michigan, and kept 'forever open, clear and free' thanks to a string of lawsuits the merchant Aaron Montgomery Ward fought more than a century ago to stop anyone building on it. This run spends most of its time inside it. From the West Loop the route drops to the lakefront and turns south past Monroe Harbour — a mooring field thick with sailboat masts — toward the Museum Campus.

The sights, one by one

The recorded photos drop onto the map exactly where they were taken, and the run reads like a Chicago checklist. Buckingham Fountain, mid-park, is one of the largest fountains in the world: opened in 1927 and modelled on the Latona Basin at Versailles at roughly twice the scale, its four bronze sea horses stand for the four states that border Lake Michigan. The Museum Campus — created in 1998 by swinging Lake Shore Drive inland — gathers three institutions on a spit of parkland in the lake: the Field Museum of Natural History, a Beaux-Arts hall from 1921 that keeps 'Sue', one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus skeletons ever found; the Shedd Aquarium; and the Adler Planetarium out on its peninsula. Back north, in Millennium Park — itself built over old railway yards and opened in 2004 — sits Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, the 110-tonne polished-steel sculpture everyone calls 'the Bean', mirroring the whole skyline in its seamless surface. The loop closes along the Chicago River, the waterway the city famously reversed in 1900 so its sewage would flow away from the lake it drinks from, now crossed by a run of red bascule (drawbridge) spans.

The route

It's a flat, fast, almost entirely car-free loop: about 10.5 kilometres with barely 17 metres of climb, most of it on the Lakefront Trail and wide park paths. The way out is a straight shot south along the water to the Museum Campus; the way back weaves through Grant Park and Millennium Park into the Loop and finishes on the river. In summer the parks are busy with runners, cyclists and visitors, with shade and a drinking fountain every few hundred metres — an easy place to string ten kilometres together without ever checking a map.

Why record a city run

Like its northern sibling along Navy Pier and the Magnificent Mile, this is a flat road loop — no elevation drama, no navigation stakes. But the recorded line is the souvenir: the exact route, the real pace, and a GPX anyone could follow to run Chicago's parks and museums on foot. Every chart and the map came straight out of the app.

About the place: Chicago, Illinois, USA

Grant Park is Chicago's lakefront 'front yard', a mile-wide stretch of green between the Loop and Lake Michigan. It holds Buckingham Fountain, Millennium Park with its mirror-polished Cloud Gate ('the Bean'), and — on a spit of made land in the lake — the Museum Campus, which gathers the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium. The whole district is flat, car-light and threaded by the Lakefront Trail, which makes it one of the great urban running grounds in the United States.

Curved downtown towers rising over a Grant Park lawn, seen from the lakefront trail
1 · Curved downtown towers rising over a Grant Park lawn, seen from the lakefront trail
A Canada goose on the Monroe Harbour seawall, sailboats moored off Grant Park
2 · A Canada goose on the Monroe Harbour seawall, sailboats moored off Grant Park
The Field Museum of Natural History on Chicago's Museum Campus
3 · The Field Museum of Natural History on Chicago's Museum Campus
Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park
4 · Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park
Cloud Gate — “the Bean” — reflecting the skyline in Millennium Park
5 · Cloud Gate — “the Bean” — reflecting the skyline in Millennium Park
The Chicago River and a red bascule bridge, downtown towers on both banks
6 · The Chicago River and a red bascule bridge, downtown towers on both banks

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