Soul to Sole

• Just lace-up your trail shoes and you have the freedom to get out there and explore

Trail Running - the term itself may be fairly new, but the essence of the sport goes back millennia. Running over rough, natural terrain is running in its purest, most elemental, accessible and joyous form. And there's never been a better time to re-connect with your soles.

Running over varied terrain is obviously rooted way back in the necessities of sabre-tooth tiger evasion and express cave-to-cave transport, but the earliest evidence of organised running as a sport comes at around 3800 BC, back in ancient Egypt. All that pyramid-building was obviously quite the VO2 max-booster. You can then follow a winding trail of muddy footprints through early cross country running over open country, to the 19th century's embracing of "hare and hounds" races, all the way to 1995, when the British Athletic Federation approved a formal definition for Trail Running. Essentially, they say it's any race over footpaths and bridle paths which are marked on Ordinance Survey maps as public rights of way, but other tracks and pathways from which motorised traffic is excluded can all be considered trails.

However you define it, the sole-ful combo of the running buzz, the challenge of tackling nature in its raw un-manicured state, and the chance to explore our pockets of wilderness has become an increasingly irresistible package. These days Trail has serious momentum. Organised events like the Salomon Trail Running Series, which launched in 2008, has seen massive growth. With a mix of 10km Forest trails, marathons, training camps as well as the 10 mile Turbo X, the numbers over the last 3 years have trebled.

The product - specialist shoes and gear - has kept pace too, evolving to satisfy the specific needs of the trail running fraternity. In the last few years the off-road discipline has firmly outrun its niche appeal, as we've all started to realise just how accessible it is. Away from the definitions and the races, at it's simplest, trail running is just running off road, be it a country trail, a canal route or a dirt track. It's back-to-basics. Just lace-up your trail shoes and you have the freedom to get out there and explore. ‘Trail Running' as we know it now is simply the new, improved incarnation of what's always been the best way to get some soul into your soles.