As a frequent traveler (you’ll read much more about that below), I have always enjoyed using a run as a way to explore a new city. At the start of 2021, my roommate shared with me the Rickey Gates “Every Single Street” video and told me that should be my running goal for 2022. I’m not sure if that was meant to be a joke because that was clearly impossible, but it did inspire me to look into others that had completed or were pursuing similar challenges. I soon found citystrides.com, an entire application built just for this purpose, which showed that Houston’s city limits has about 13,000 streets. I didn’t even notice for the first few months that the site also offers a leaderboard!! More to come on that later. I thought about a more realistic goal… running up and down every street within Houston’s ring road: the 38 mile, 96 square mile 610 Loop Freeway, which about 500,000 people call home.

I tried my first shot at the easy grid system just north of my home in the Heights. All of the beautiful, historic homes, and still-up-just-after-new-years Christmas decorations made for a fun start, but I knew that many of the destinations would be far less appealing. Even after the very first run, I realized trying to finish running all of these streets in a single year would be a terrible idea. It should be fun and not something that I stress about or prevents me from traveling. Following my third run of the year, I had finished 40 miles and gone down every street in the Heights.

I reached out to Instagram to see how my network felt about pursuing this goal, and everyone seemed generally in favor but mentioned valid concerns like lack of sidewalk, aggressive drivers, lots of gas, etc. At this point, thinking of how much fun I would have exploring my hometown in a new lens, learning by browsing Google Maps, and sneakily pushing my mileage per week even higher, I KNEW this challenge was perfect for me.

Like many towns across America, the east side of Houston is predominantly poorer than the west side. I made a map below to help you visualize that. With a few notable exceptions, once you are east of the 45/288 Freeways, the neighborhoods look much different. I’m not here to talk about issues related to segregation, but I think it’s important for Houstonians to recognize that our city is not just made up of people in the same political and socio-economic sphere.

Another common theme around Houston is railroad tracks. Typically, I would break daily route boundaries down based on a freeway, a bayou crossing, or a railroad crossing. For those of you that haven’t spent much time in Houston, our trains aren’t the 10 car Amtraks that have minorly inconvenienced you before. No, these KCS/BASF trains can easily be 200 cars long and take 5-10 minutes out of your day. And sometimes they just stop. If they bother you while driving, think about how annoying it is when you have to stop a long run for one!

All that to say, I broke the project up into 8 main sections for the purpose of this journal:

- Northwest: The area between 45, 10, and 610 west/north. Neighborhoods include the Greater Heights, Shady Acres, Timbergrove, and Woodland Heights.

- North: The area between 45, 59, 10, and 610 north. Neighborhoods include Northside, Near Northside, Fifth Ward, and Ryon.

- Northeast: The area between 59, 10, and 610 north/east. Neighborhoods include Frenchtown, Kashmere Gardens, the Fifth Ward, and Denver Harbor.

- Southeast: The area between 45, 59 10, and 610 east/south. Neighborhoods include Pleasantville, Port Houston, Fifth Ward, Pecan Park, Harrisburg, Lawndale, Magnolia Park, Second Ward, and EaDo. This is by far the largest land area section.

- South: The area between 45, 288, and 610 south. Neighborhoods include South Side, Gulfgate, MacGregor, and Third Ward.

- Southwest: The area between 288, 59, and 610 south/west. Neighborhoods include Braeswood Place, Bellaire, West University, Rice Village, Southampton, The Texas Medical Center, the Museum District, and the Astrodome/NRG area.

- West: The area between 59, 45, 10, and 610 west. Neighborhoods include Afton Oaks, Greenway/Upper Kirby, River Oaks, Montrose, Midtown, Fourth Ward, Sixth Ward, Sawyer Yards, Rice Military, and Memorial Park.

- Downtown: The area between 45, 10, and 59. No neighborhoods here! As you would expect, this is the smallest section but has the highest concentration of roads. The plan from early on was not to go down any of the downtown streets until everything else was done.

The very first weekend of the year, I wanted to see what it was like running in one of the less affluent neighborhoods so I could gauge how high I felt the risk level would be if I continued this. My general impression of Houston has been that every neighborhood is safe during the day, but that meant that 40-50% of the streets would only be run during the day. Additionally, I thought it would be a good idea to visit the furthest corners from my home on weekends, when traffic wouldn’t be as bad.

I got my first taste of running the South Side on the very first weekend of the adventure. I quickly realized that the toughest challenge of the rougher neighborhoods would not be encountering questionable people, but would be outrunning angry and protective dogs. Most of the outside dogs in these neighborhoods are tiny “yappy dogs”, but occasionally a larger dog is outside of a yard and opts for “fight” rather than “flight”.

In the Shady Acres neighborhood, I had to go by so many cul-de-sacs that I ended up stopping the run earlier than planned. My strategy of going to a neighborhood with the hopes of covering a certain area was perhaps a bit flawed in that I didn’t know how far I would be going on any given day, and often a route that “looks under 10 miles” could end up being much more. During the winter, I skipped out of Houston a handful of times: multiple trips to New Orleans, backpacking Catalina Island, a work trip to San Francisco, a week in Guatemala where I got to hike to the summit of Acatenango, and my first work trip to Israel. The running grind stayed strong up there, of course, but I did occasionally check out the Houston street map to decide where I would visit on the way back.

Any time I was home and had a free afternoon, I would head to the northwest part of town and complete as many streets as I could. It was a beautiful mix of urban and suburban, with townhomes giving way to mansions when I least expected. I didn’t realize how grateful I would be for port-a-potties and the constant state of construction that Houston is under before starting this journey. Nature would call at the most unexpected times, and I’m glad I still haven’t had to pee in anyone’s yard. I was surprised to see a handful of homes in the Heights with Mardi Gras decorations! Never thought so many people would have the same level of interest as my family. Going by the White Oak Music Hall at night, I saw a large crowd lining up for a concert (perhaps to be expected)

March was a big running month! I completed a trail marathon, my first 50k, and finally the 76 km Grand Canyon Rim-2-Rim-2-Rim. It was a 13 hour journey from freezing to blistering temperatures that I will never forget. I still managed to run a few streets in March (it counts as training!), but the priority was elevation training and properly tapering for these races. I will be clear from the beginning: the goal of 3,000 miles in 2022 was not meant to be only running. Certainly hiking counted, and if I was going to go on a 2 mile walk on an off day, that counted too. But walking around a grocery store definitely didn’t count! I decided that my minimum cutoff would be 1 kilometer, unless I was completing an unfinished street, which could be as little as 0.03 miles...

Wrapping up the last of the Northwest side, I felt the dominant culture shifting to be more hispanic. The first major section of the loop wrapped up with a stop at the Houston Farmers Market, a surprise show from a Beatles tribute band, and a stop at El Bolillo after the run. In April, I did my first “clean-up” run, where I ran down the streets that were missed during earlier runs. I realized immediately how much easier it would be if I had someone else driving, who could drop me off and pick me up so that I wouldn’t repeat every single street when coming back to my car. It also could be a bit unsafe to be doing this while a lot of cars were on the road - next time, I would try to recruit a friend to help and do it on a Sunday. It was also funny how many Strava activities it generated for the day! I kept most of them private to avoid spamming my friends.

I finished the Northwest Section of the loop in early April. This section was small, but it wasn’t the smallest, so even if I was only 10% of the way done, I was still proud of how much progress I’d made so quickly. I was given an opportunity to go back to Tel Aviv for work in May, and had the bright idea to ask for a return trip more than 2 weeks after the business trip ended. Though it was a long break from running the streets, visiting Georgia, Turkey, and Prague were all worth it. Getting screwed over and taking 36 hours to get home wasn’t worth it, though.

For the rest of April and into early May, I quickly cranked out the Northside and covered some more ground near the ship channel on weekends. May 1 was my first surprise downpour. I try my best to check the weather beforehand, but sometimes Houston has other plans. I hit 1000 total miles for the year on May 3rd - slightly behind breaking 3000 over the year, but it wasn’t yet impossible. When I got back to Houston at the end of May, the temperatures were getting rough, and as expected, I was planning to spend the summer (mid June until late August) away from home. I still managed to complete a few more streets in the 2 weeks I was home, including finishing the North section, and covering all of Pleasantville in the East. A couple of those after-work runs were spent covering the streets just outside of my house, since some afternoons I really just didn’t want to drive 20 minutes to spend an hour running through a poor, unexciting, scorching hot neighborhood.

My total mileage for 2022 was definitely on an upward trend from 2021 from the start! My paces were much lower than in the year before, since the majority of the miles I had run involved a lot of turning and reviewing the map (not to mention that I wasn’t wearing headphones to pump me up). It’s also worth mentioning that I didn’t run down new streets every single day. If I had plans and only had an hour to run, or just wanted to go on a run with headphones to remind me why I love the sport, I would instead hit one of my favorite Houston routes (Memorial Park, Buffalo Bayou, etc).

The summer was a whirlwind of an adventure. Over 10 weeks, I drove from Houston all the way to Banff/Jasper, and back. I even took a detour to fly to Chicago and party for 4 straight days at the Electric Forest music festival. So many beautiful hikes and fun moments shared with family and friends around the country! The goal of keeping the mileage above 8 a day mostly held firm, and I knew that I would be able to push myself later in the year to make sure 3000 miles happened. Once I was back in Texas, I was ready to go back to the new streets. After all, the worst of the heat and humidity was over!

I got back and immediately started working on the Northeast side of town on weeknights. The days were still long, so I could get to a destination around or before 5, run two hours, and still make it home before or as the sun went down. On weekends, I continued working on the northern part of the Southeast side. It was great to be able to run at 10am without suffering through unbearable humidity. I went back to Tel Aviv for another work week, where I managed to break 2000 miles (on September 3rd, so it would be possible to get to 3000, but I had work to do). It was funny to be completely prepared for Tel Aviv’s humidity since my coworkers were worried about how I would handle it.

After I got back from Tel Aviv, I grinded pretty hard on the Northeast side, noticing the shift from suburbs to heavy industry and massive railroad jumbles. I got to have a real “boy scout” moment one day there - an older woman went to grab her garbage can from a ditch, and I could tell it would be tough for her, so I helped her carry it back to her front door and spoke with her a bit. The Denver Harbor neighborhood also gave me my first “perfect grid” route that required nearly zero brainpower to navigate and complete.

At the beginning of the fall, I thought about a new goal that I could pursue when finishing the 610 loop - finish up in Discovery Green on my 30th birthday in November 2023. How fun would that be? At the rate I was going, it didn’t seem impossible. But of course, travel would always be the top priority! By the end of September, there were finally a few runs where the humidity was gone. Some beautiful runs through the Fifth Ward, filled with art and lots of people out and about, reminded me of what this is all about. I got a renewed excitement for chasing down more streets and started tearing it up during October.

I attended a wedding at the beginning of October for one of my oldest friends where I was a groomsman and, as expected, treated my body very poorly. I told myself that I would cleanse myself by only cooking veggies for 2 weeks. Little did I know that I would feel really great after these weeks and make a move to entirely stop eating meat (minus a bit of fish here and there). There were a few periods when I would run a half marathon for 3 or 4 days in a row and still not feel tired! Seeing halloween decorations almost every day ended up being another unexpected motivator. One weekend, I visited the Orange Show and Smither Park. As a lifelong Houstonian, I didn’t expect to see too many sites I had never seen or heard of before, but it happened then! The mosaics of Smither Park are very impressive and I encourage you to check them out. Places like Magnolia Park still had their fair share of angry dogs, but it really did feel like I was in Mexico with all Spanish signage and even carts driving around selling mexican sweets. Unfortunately, there was the occasional looooong train crossing delay.

October ended up my biggest running month ever, my first one topping 300 miles (but why make monthly running goals - they aren’t all the same length). I finished the Northeast section of town in early October, making me think I was probably more than a third of the way done! I knew the Southeast side would be daunting, but persistent half marathons after work and during the weekend had it getting cleaned up much more quickly than expected. As we got into November and the temperatures cooled off, I was spending 4-5 days a week covering new ground and the Southeast side was nearly done. I wanted to save EaDo for later on, since I knew the murals and bars would be a lot of fun to visit. At this point, I began to concurrently tackle the West, Southwest, and South sides of town, since after daylight savings time I wanted to be deliberate in the places I chose to run after it got dark. If felt like running for a while but didn’t want to sit in traffic for long, I would just run in places nearer to my house. I had my second street “cleanup” day in November. For 3 hours, one of my friends shuttled me around while I covered new ground. Occasionally he got lost, or we had miscommunications, but I did finish 11 miles of streets that I would have otherwise had to run twice. I got a pleasant surprise around Thanksgiving when my friend Jacob was back in town and offered to join an exploration of Braeswood Place. An even more pleasant surprise was seeing Jonathan Street in Bellaire!

Around Thanksgiving, I met Brandin LeBlanc, the other crazy person that was trying to run down EVERY street in Houston… not just in the 610 loop. He wasn’t feeling as much of a time crunch as I was, but after exchanging a few messages, we finally met up. We enjoyed a fun 12 mile run in the South Side, and had many stories to share about our running journey and the trials and tribulations that we had gone through. It sounded as if he’d had some even more concerning dog encounters than I’d had… which made me grateful that I decided to start carrying pepper spray on my runs, even though I still haven’t come close to deploying it.

I proudly pushed forward as November gave way to December, switching between EaDo, South Side, Bellaire, Montrose to keep me mentally “on my toes”. I spent the first half of December in Colombia, completing a trek to their Lost City and spending a week in Medellín after. Keeping the running grind up in Medellín was rough, since there weren’t any flat trails to run on. I got back and hit the ground running, adding 17 miles on my first day back, then beginning my countdown to 3,000 miles in 2023.

On the 26th of December, I finally made it to 3,000 miles for the year! I managed to finish with 3043 total, but I knew this year would probably be the most I ever total, and prioritizing long-term health was going to be at the forefront moving into 2023. My hips and hamstring had been hurting since coming back from Medellín, and as much as I love running fast, I had to shorten my stride to ensure that I wasn’t overdoing it. On December 31st, I covered every street in and around Rice University. Though just 8 miles long, I felt a lot of nostalgia and accomplishment going through the university that I called my home for 4 years, and looked forward to when I would ultimately go through the University of Houston and see every street of a school I haven’t spent much time at.

By the end of 2022, I had made my way to the 95th percentile of the CityStrides leaderboard with 2000 completed streets… in just one year! I also had the opportunity to be interviewed by my friend Will who works with the Public Media affiliate “Houston Matters”. No, we didn’t conduct the interview while running. I spent some time running in River Oaks, with some of the most immaculate Christmas lights in town. Now that Christmas was over, I hoped the neighborhood would be less crowded, and I did get lucky for the most part. West U did not have as many lights still up, but I did get to feel very close with the idyllic little neighborhood. Running West U took forever, though. I thought it wouldn’t take too long to work my way east to Rice Blvd, but with many east/west streets between Bissonnet and Holcombe, many of my routes only seemed to show a small amount of progress. One particularly enjoyable run was with Brandin (the other street explorer) in February on Super Bowl Sunday. We got to see a bit of everything - hospitals, a bayou, murals, nice homes, poor homes, a park, and even had a bald eagle sighting… which is funny because the Philadelphia Eagles did not win the super bowl.

I also pushed forward many streets in Montrose. Montrose was always filled with memories - the vast majority of those restaurants. This quarter, I stumbled upon a fun David Adickes sculpture that I didn’t even know existed. The winter was my first dive into the Greenway Plaza / Upper Kirby area. There were plenty of noteworthy incidents or sights during that stretch: watching a fender bender happen on Richmond, finding a $20 bill, seeing a well-decorated Mardi Gras house and two dancing bears made out of hedges, the pickleball courts at Greenway Plaza, and even the Lakewood Church.

In my final days in town for the quarter, I made it out to the University of Houston area twice. The first one got cut short because of a storm, but the second one felt great. With all the hype that UH basketball had for the year, it was great to get to run through the campus and see the basketball stadium before they presumably would get a 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. The hamstring and hip pain remained a concerning theme for the whole of Q1. I took many measures that helped me (cycling, more stretching, buying a massage gun, talking to a physical therapist), but I never felt as strong as I had back in October. Fortunately, I was still able to run a half marathon at least once a week, and I never broke my streak of 40 miles a week. I caught a fever one weekend and was pretty sure the next week would be doomed, but I fought hard and just barely was able to keep the streak alive. Disclaimer: a few of those miles were walked.

I took a couple excursions at the start of the year - Austin, Dallas, New Orleans twice, but after getting confirmation that I would be heading out to Tel Aviv for work again, opted to make a wild adventure out of the business trip, and booked a flight to Athens and from Bucharest, for a total of 53 days in between. As I said before - as much as I hoped to finish the streets of 610 challenge before the end of 2023, maximizing travel at my young age is still the #1 priority.

Many more adventures were the theme of the spring and summer of 2023. I offered to rent out my own room to a close friend, so I was committed to spending very little time at home in the next few months. After getting back from Europe in mid-April, I got back on the saddle, excited to once again be an adventurer in my own home town. The very first night I was back, still jet lagged, I went downtown to Notsuoh with a few friends, a funny sight having been to one of the original ruin bars in Budapest. Though I’d missed the Art Car Parade, I still managed to see the cars in their staging area around Market Square Park. It felt like such a fitting way to return to Houston!

Of course, I wouldn’t be around long. I already had a 3-month trip planned from June to September, and I was hoping to make it to Colorado a few weeks before heading out, so I was determined to fill the ~4 weeks I’d have for this quarter with as many excursions as possible! These runs were pretty all-over-the-place. I was starting to get to the point that, other than Downtown, there weren’t many untouched parts of town! Rather than working my way through the same neighborhood day after day, my strategy was to mix it up and visit different places throughout a week. Seeing the beautiful homes of West U, Southgate, and Southampton was awesome, as always. I visited many of these homes and shopping establishments during my time at Rice, and all of them brought back very fond memories.

There were two additional days of “Street Cleanup” in April. I always hope to make more progress on those days than I actually do… it was a painful foreshadowing into how difficult the end of this mission would be. The real highlight of this quarter was my second visit through the Third Ward on May 1st. Not only did I get to see the beautiful Project Row Houses and have 3 separate people hype me up during the run… I even had the pleasure of hearing a man playing the saxophone in front of a crowd of roughly a dozen in a small food truck plaza. After hearing multiple friends sharing concerns about running the Third Ward, it was a pleasant surprise to get such a rich dose of culture.

I was barely around at all between July and September. I returned back to Houston on September 16th, so I didn’t expect to have much to add here, but I managed to visit a few interesting places in those two short weeks! Was it tough to come back to the Houston heat and humidity? Yeah, sure, but I won’t complain since I wasn’t around for the worst of it. Plus, I’m a lifelong Houstonian! My first run was the second-to-last main run through the Third Ward. Maybe I had been gone for a while, but it felt like that segment had the most trash of anywhere inside the loop. At least there were some pretty decent murals there too.

The final two stretches through Montrose proved to be as interesting as always. Whether it’s a mansion 100 yards from a shady apartment complex, or a Latin night at University of St. Thomas, you never know what you’ll stumble upon out there. Of course, the Menil Park and Rothko Chapels were vibey as always. During the early covid days, I’d spend a lot of time at Menil Park, and it made me think back to how far I’ve come since then! I went back to Magnolia Park on the far-east side and saw a new mural of Homer Simpson enjoying a donut, multiple bicyclists selling Mexican sweets like an ice cream truck would, and of course my arch-nemesis: angry dogs without fences. This brief period also saw my first exposure to the streets of the Museum District: generally quite beautiful, with multiple churches and the famous Mecom Fountain. What I didn’t expect to see was a huge crowd (mostly African-American) outside of Turkey Leg Hut and the surrounding bars on a Sunday afternoon!

This season was going to be a big one. Even after being back in town for only a few days, it had become clear that finishing this mission before the end of the year was possible. If I could figure out how to improve the efficiency of “Street Cleanup”, it might even be possible to finish by my 30th birthday on November 19th. I was coming off a lot of momentum and the first waves of decent weather at the start of October, so I knew anything was possible.

I rolled into October hard, starting with almost 12 miles through the Medical Center area. I was surprised at how quiet it was in the late afternoon. This one hurt pretty badly, so I decided that a good step would be to get an official gait analysis done, and get some advice on what sort of insole/orthotic would actually relieve the pain in my left leg. Still, I pushed on. As long as I listen to my body, I told myself, I wouldn’t overdo it. I did decide that it was time to end being so stubborn about my 40 mile-a-week streak, though. Lowering the minimum mileage target to 30 a week felt much safer and attainable.

My final main run through the Third Ward gave me a glimpse of the mural with South Park characters dressed in Houston’s sports uniforms, my undeniable favorite in town. A unique sight that I came across was “Church Under a Bridge”, which was just a trailer going through town bringing praise-heavy ministry to poorer communities. I worked my way through cleaning up streets in the northeast and southeast corners of town, seeing a fair share of run-down homes, interesting sculptures and murals, and cars with the Houston-favorite swangas rims.

I knew the last run through Southampton and the Museum District would be a good one. The Boulevard Live Oaks made for a beautiful backdrop. I stumbled upon the inevitable quinceañera outside of the science museum. And of course, I had to stop and take a moment to enjoy myself at the Cullen Sculpture Garden outside of the MFAH, even if that bean installation is a ridiculous ripoff of Chicago’s. Running through the Medical Center on a weekday afternoon was an enjoyable experience: seeing such a diverse population often walking/taking public transit was a beautiful sight! It felt to me like that is the Houston that the city ultimately desires to be.

This is when things got interesting… All I had left at this point was a small section around NRG stadium, all of downtown, and a lot of cleaning up to do. I was ready to power through the last spots that were remaining! In mid-October, my friend Slone gave me a ride to help wrap up all the remaining streets I had in the heights, and a few days later I had a great time cleaning up almost everything left in Midtown. A few days after that, an interesting situation popped up. One of my best friends, who was sharing a car with his fiancee, managed to total their car. Knowing that I didn’t need a car, and that they really did, I offered my car to them, which would effectively put the project on hold.

I still made some pretty good progress over the next month, though, during just 4 separate activities. The first run was with my friend Brandon as chauffeur, and the rest started from my house and ran Downtown via the Buffalo Bayou. I even managed to crank out 30 miles for my 30th birthday, an impressive but possibly regrettable feat. Running through Downtown felt magical, like the culmination of multiple years of painstaking effort. I planned for the last run of the project to start and end at Discovery Green, running up McKinney and down Lamar with as many of my friends as are available.

In late November, I took off on one last trip for the year, with ambitions of finishing the last 50 or so miles of streets between Christmas and New Years.... to be continued