at Beijing Olympic Forest Park. I highly recommend it. I had actually intended for this to be orienteering, and it sortof was. I had a printed version of the
PWT 2010 map. I tried to get a taxi directly to the north part of the park where the course starts, but instead I arrived south of the main gate. rather than debating the details with the non-english-speaking driver, I figured I could just run, though it was getting dark rapidly. As it turns out, like most parks here, there are only a few places to enter the park, so I may not have been able to get in near where I wanted anyway.
I noticed right away that this is basically the city's running hotspot. I had seen barely a handful of runners in the city up to this point, but there were literally thousands of runners/walkers exercising in the park (makes sense now why I didn't see them elsewhere), and there were tens or hundreds of them within sight at all times. The park has some very-well-marked and lighted 3k, 5k, and 10k loops with km-markers, and the roads that the loops use have a ~2m wide lane of thin rubberized surface almost the whole way. Not as soft as a normal track since it was on top of the asphalt, but still nice.
By the time I got over to the o-map area, it was too dark to read the map outside of the lighted paths. The fun-police had also sprinkled text+pictogram signs randomly along the path to remind people to behave, most notably to "stay off the grasses". I decided I would just continue on the 10k loop, which I happened to be following up to this point anyway.
BTW, only the google maps satellite view is properly aligned with the gps track. Street map data from non-chinese sources is required to include some offset error for the people's protection..