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Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Every Single Street - The Beginning - Egg Harbor Township, NJ





Today I made the decision to embark on a new running goal: to #RunAllTheStreets of my hometown, Egg Harbor Township, NJ. I don't have a specific target completion date, but at the same time I don't want this to become a never ending project either. I hope to comfortably complete it before the end of 2020. I'll be using City Strides and Strava to track my progress and plan my routes. I’m currently at 1.94% complete, a small fraction, but it's a start! Now only a little over 98% to go!

I first joined City Strides a little over a month ago without any real intention of actually using it to complete the #EverySingleStreet challenge. After joining, it took a week or so for my City Strides account to sync with my Strava account. And once it did, none of my past Strava runs had synced over to my City Strides account. Only my new Strava activities were syncing over. The manager of City Strides was responsive and has assured me that my past activities would sync, but it would take some time. A month or so later without any of the past activities syncing, I decided why wait to get started on running every single street for my past runs to sync over. Why not just start at zero? So that’s what I did today.

When I first heard about Rickey Gates’ project to run every single street in San Francisco, I thought it sounded kinda cool and kinda quirky, but I didn’t really have any desire to make an attempt at doing it myself in my hometown. I prefer running trails over roads to begin with and some roads are just crap roads to run due to a total lack of shoulders and high speed traffic. So why would I even want to run every single street? That’s what I thought until I joined City Strides just on a whim to see what percentage of my hometown’s streets I had already run. When it began to seem like my past activities wouldn’t sync over any time soon, I for the most part moved on and didn’t give it much further thought. I would occasionally check to see if my past activities had synced, but it still just showed newly recorded runs. Eventually I decided to be proactive about it and just start anew, running a few new streets I knew I had never run before. 



It wasn’t until today while running a host of new streets to up that percentage that I decided I would commit to running every single street. I was running and thinking (my favorite past time) about how I have been lacking motivation to run lately. The reasons for the lack of motivation are mostly due to the changing weather, shorter daylight hours, and the fact that I’m not currently registered for any races. I thought that maybe starting in on this new running goal/project would spark a bit of a fire to get me excited about going out for runs again when I’m not specifically training for anything. And for today, it did! Hopefully I can stay excited and engaged about this project throughout the winter when I tend to cut back pretty heavily on my running mileage. And if all goes as planned, I’ll be able to say I’ve run 100% (or nearly) of the streets of Egg Harbor Township, NJ by the end of 2020!

If you’d like to follow along on my journey, follow the links below to my social media accounts and sign up for email notifications for this blog as I will be updating the status of this project across multiple platforms. Also, if you are embarking on your own #EverySingleStreet challenge I’d love to hear about it and feature you on my social media!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/beastcoasttrail
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runscottrun/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beastcoasttrailrunning/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/snellscott
Reddit:  https://www.reddit.com/r/Strava/comments/cyfx0q/running_every_street/

Scott Snell
October 29, 2019


Other "Every Single Street" blog posts:
The beginning

Week 1
Week 17 - 24% Complete



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