This entire journey started relatively small. My brother shared an Instagram post with me about Rick Gates, a guy that had run every street in San Francisco. To me it sounded like a cool way to learn about a new place and I adopted the challenge for myself to learn about my new city of Alameda on foot. Everything started as me just running 5 miles or so on Sundays to start mapping some streets. This was early in 2019 and a lot of my free time was spent playing team sports: basketball, football, and baseball.
Fast-forwarding to the pandemic of 2020, suddenly all my team sports no longer existed. The only option for exercise was throwing on a face mask and hitting the streets. The once a week pursuit quickly became a 4 to 5 days a week pursuit. Towards the end of 2020 I finished running Alameda (or so I had thought). I had been keeping track of everything on a hand colored piece of tracing paper.
I also made this video with some custom programming and my wife posted it on social media:
Comments on that video made me aware of the website: citystrides.com
CityStrides gamifies the street completion experience. It keeps track of the street counts of every city, tells you how many you have completed, and displays a leaderboard. This helped me find a few short side streets that I completely missed on my map. It also brought me an obsessive need to complete more streets.
Soon after finding the website, I expanded my goal from running just the 716 streets in Alameda to all 2,078 streets in Oakland. As I continued to make progress in Oakland, team sports were showing no signs of returning and I just kept running more and more streets.
As I shared my journey with people and I came close to completing Oakland, people would keep asking me, “What’s next?” The only thing I could think to do was just keep running. I expanded my goal from just Alameda and Oakland to all 16,000+ streets in Alameda county.
Skipping ahead to 2024, I’ve now completed over 90% of the streets in the county. The variety of streets and terrain has allowed me to keep up my training volume without getting bored. This leads me to another dream goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.
When I was 9 years old living in Massachusetts, my dad took me to Fenway Park on Patriots Day to see the Red Sox play the Brewers. Unfortunately for the Sox, they got beat 18-0 that day, and we decided to leave early. This allowed us enough time to head over to the marathon course in time to see some of the leaders flying by back when the race used to start later in the morning. This memory has always stuck with me, and it’s always been a dream of mine to one day qualify for the race and be one of runners getting cheered on by the crowd.
As I inch closer to that goal, the quest to complete streets has kept me invigorated. As it stands I’m currently #25 in the world on CityStrides having completed over 15,000 streets.
Outside of the gamified aspect of the running, I have also tried to find a bigger purpose in the running. As I travel down every street in the county, I tried to think of ways to help support this community that unwittingly has kept me interested in exercising and chasing athletic dreams. I couldn’t think of a better organization than the Alameda County Community Food Bank that does their part to make sure that there is no food insecurity. It’s a noble mission and one that I’m hopeful I can inspire people to support.
CT is Running 