Running along every single street in my neighborhood, it surely can’t take that long, right? I mean Wekerle is only a 1 km by 1 km square... Well, turns out you can fit a lot of streets in that amount of space. Over 42 km of them in fact, adding up almost perfectly to a marathon distance.
Wekerle
My neighborhood is called Wekerle, a quaint little area in the southern part of Budapest. It was built over a hundred years ago to provide affordable housing to workers flocking to the city at the time, while creating a very livable little area with lots of parks, garden space, etc. Today it is a neighborhood popular with families wishing to escape the busy city center, while remaining reasonably close with decent public transport connections. We moved here when I was a year old and excluding the 3 years in Dublin later, I grew up here. In 2015 I left for the UK to go to uni, then off to Spain for a year, then back to the UK, but hey, it’s 2020, coronavirus happened and I’m back in Wekerle again.
What The Hell Is #EverySingleStreet?
Well, I love completely pointless, but fun projects and this seemed like a damn good one. It’s not exactly like I have a time shortage these days… The idea came from Rickey Gates, who took this to the extreme, running every single street in San Francisco. Clearly, I’m not that fit, nor do I want to commit that much time to something, but I thought it would be fun to spend some time exploring my own neighborhood, so I set out to run the whole length of every single street.
Planning
How do you most efficiently run all the streets in the neighborhood – clearly, I’d have to run some streets multiple times, but the goal is to minimize the repeat sections. If I wanted to plan everything out well, I’m sure there would be a mathematical model that would help me calculate the fastest, most efficient route, but I’m not really a fan of that. I just printed a screenshot of Google Maps, popped it on a clipboard, grabbed a pen and started running. My estimate was that it would be roughly 30 km to run everything.
Running Every Single Street
I woke up nice and early one morning, popped on my running vest with some water, grabbed my clipboard and started running. About 5 km in, I could already see that my estimate would be way off. Not saying that I couldn’t have run the whole thing in one go, but I did have a few prior commitments in my not-so-busy schedule, so I decided to split the run in two.
It was great fun to slowly jog around all these little streets where I spent my childhood. I’ve probably been down every one of these streets at some point, but I definitely found things that I’ve forgotten about or saw streets in a new light. Honestly, it isn’t the most exciting place on earth, but it is a fun little maze to work your way around and it is very quiet and pretty. People were probably baffled by this weird guy running around early in the morning with a clipboard – I wonder what they thought I was doing.
I did two slow half marathons over the course of two mornings, clipboard in hand, marking off streets as I ran them. Was there any point to this exercise? Not really. But it was fun, and I needed a week with high mileage and low speed, so this was a great way to add to that, while staying local and keeping the run a little more exciting. It also made me appreciate this funky little neighborhood, with its shaded little streets, little traffic, cute puppies and pretty buildings.
Do you think you’ve seen every single street in your neighborhood? Now with the lockdowns in place, with daily walks and runs (hopefully still allowed), maybe it’s time to go off your usual route, find new places near you and appreciate the little things.