Falling Waters Trail 5K / 10K / Half Marathon Run / Walk

Several hundred runners and walkers cross the finish line each year in all three races combined at the annual autumn running of Concord’s Falling Waters Trail Run/Walk, formerly known as the Wild Life Half Marathon.

The race takes runners and walkers along the Falling Waters Trail, a paved 10.5-mile trail that today is a popular recreational trail and linear park for the local residents that live between this small town in southern Michigan and the nearby town of Summit Township, where the trail ends today.

Built on a former railroad line that once stretched from Michigan all the way into Canada, the trail had been abandoned in the mid 1970s and lay unused all the way into the mid-1990s, when local efforts to turn the railroad into a linear park system finally got underway.

Today, of course, the vision is well on its way to being accomplished, with 12-ft-wide paved surfaces throughout the Falling Waters Trail — so named for the Potowotomi Native American tribes who originally inhabited this area, and named the Jackson County area “the land of falling waters.”

The race is organized by the Friends of Falling Waters Trail, a local nonprofit that helps maintain and protect it, and the race proceeds go to benefit both trail maintenance and park improvements all along the more than 10 miles of trails.