The Every Single Street Houston project started as a way to see my neighborhood. I was running just to see where I lived, because that kind of thing is important to me. At the time I was running with Nike+ and having trouble keeping track of where all I’d run. I researched how to better track this and eventually found Strava in March of 2019 and the personal heatmap feature. I became a paid subscriber for this feature alone.

Early on there weren’t a lot of rules to my efforts to see my neighborhood and the surrounding areas and I’d pass up many cul-de-sacs and streets that didn’t seem to be efficient to run and cut through parks and parking lots. That was good and it was fun. I accomplished what I wanted. I knew where I lived and was immersed in the community.

Then in late 2019, I stumbled on a website called CityStrides. A data nerd at heart, CityStrides spoke my language. Not only did I see a map of all the places I’d ran, it gave me a breakdown of the number of streets I’d completed from start to end, the progress toward streets I’d started, but not quite completed and what stood out the most was it showed my progress towards completing the city of Houston. At the time this was about 3%.

We moved neighborhoods soon after and my desire to see my new community came to the forefront. My wife and I, pushing a stroller each, explored much of our new community as a family over the coming months. As the percentages increased and my enjoyment of running the streets did as well, I decided to commit to trying to run Every Single Street in Houston. It was an incredible decision and I truly enjoy the running I get to do now.

Any time I go out of town now, I miss the streets of Houston and have began the practice of running and completing streets in whatever town or city I find myself in. I consider the streets I complete outside of Houston, souvenirs of my time there.