Why not? It’s a great way to train and explore your hometown through a unique lens. I love maps and geography almost as much as I love running and traveling, so this seemed like a perfect intersection of these interests.

Don’t go too hard out of the gate. If you run 20 miles a week, don’t start running 40 a week from the get-go. It can be tempting to push yourself when you’re really motivated early on, but doubling your weekly mileage is a recipe for disaster (or at least shin splints).

Citystrides.com is a great way to track all of your efforts. In the two years, I can only remember one instance where the site was down, and there has been no loss of data.

Running on the side of a freeway obviously wasn’t required, nor were the frontage roads or any of the streets that crossed over/under freeways. But I still made it to quite a few of them.

If a bayou trail ran along a road (TC Jester, Braeswood, and MacGregor, for example), that was enough. But I still made it to quite a few of those, even when there was both a ”north” and “south” street.

Of course, I skipped any gated communities or unnamed streets that serve solely as alleyways or parking areas.

In a cul-de-sac situation, I ran to the center of the “bulb”. On a dead-end street, I would turn around at the front door of the final house, or something equivalent to that.

I loved getting to be a part of so many peoples’ days. Whether I kicked back a soccer ball to some kids, helped an old woman get her garbage can out of a ditch, helped someone push a car off a busy street and into a parking lot, or witnessed a surprise outdoor musical performance, I truly felt in touch with the community.

The end of the project was certainly the least fun. I had inevitably missed quite a few streets on my first pass of certain neighborhoods (often because I was overly ambitious in my goals for a day’s run), and was left with hundreds of missing segments of just a few streets. I painstakingly drove around town to revisit every single segment that I missed. Usually, I would spend around 3 hours logging 25-40 separate Strava activities that only totaled about 10 miles. There were 3 occasions when a friend offered to drop me off and pick me up at the end of a street to save me from duplicating my efforts. An, Slone, and Brandon, thank y’all so much for the help!

I spent many hours staring at the City Strides map and am pretty sure I didn’t. There are quite a few areas marked as streets on Google that are no longer streets, and I went back to the same areas multiple times to “clean up” areas that I missed. If you look closely at my map view, you will see a handful of times where the GPS reading on my phone was clearly way off and it looks like I ran right through a few houses. Verizon, Strava, and Samsung all seem to think it isn’t their fault, so I’ve got no choice but to deal with it. I took note of which streets I actually ran whenever that happened, though.

But hey, I’m only human. There are also probably some new streets that have been added since I finished the project. So feel free to email me if you think that I need to revisit anywhere!

Two things come to mind. First, the dogs. In some of the poorer neighborhoods, I got chased by dogs quite often. Usually, they were little yappy dogs that I knew couldn’t cause any harm, but occasionally big dogs defending their turf got awfully close to me. Most of the time, I would stop running to calm the dogs down, and I did carry pepper spray, but never felt inclined to use it. In one of the final clean up runs, I could see a huge off-leash German Shepherd at the end of a dead-end street and was unsure how to proceed. A man driving a pick-up truck actually stopped by me and said “that guy at the end of the street has two German Shepherds that’ll eat you alive”, which I thought was a good sign that I should turn around!

I also felt a bit nervous on the final clean up runs driving around town, since my focus was clearly more on the segments that I needed to run than the road. Fortunately, I managed to navigate all over town and emerge without any scratches or dents on my car.

The best discovery was the mosaic-laden Smither Park near University of Houston and the (more popular but less cool) Orange show. I had no idea it existed before, but now hope to take future Houston visitors out there. The Project Row houses in Third Ward were another beautiful art installation I had never heard of.

Overall, the highlights centered around the murals and sculptures all over town, which you can look at in my interactive map!

Absolutely not. The “cost of gas to entertainment” ratio drops significantly in some of the further-out parts of town, so while there are still many unique sights to see outside of the loop, I don’t want to have to drive 45 minutes to run a half marathon through a massive suburban neighborhood over and over again.