Walking and running

I've always enjoyed walking and running. I think better when I'm moving, and they're things that don't requires a whole lot of equipment.

I started recording my walks in the fall of 2023, with the goal of trying to walk or run every street in Seattle. Luckily, there's some tools for tracking this, especially CityStrides. This gives a completion percentage, based on the % of routes where you've covered all the vertices on the route. It's a fun site.

I started running pretty regularly in August of 2025. Partly it was a health thing, partly it was wanting to do some races, and partly it was motivated by wanting to cover more of the city faster. I think this combination of motivation was critical for sticking with it - but whatever it was, it's worked.

As with other areas of my life, I do like quantification and tracking. So it's great to have a repository of all these runs and walks. I've built a tool to distill these down into a visualization.

Coincidentally, as of July 2026 I've covered just over 25% of Seattle streets (in about 2 years 9 months). You can see the 25% that I've selected so far. Mostly in North Seattle, but I'm now making progress on Central Seattle, and then South Seattle is up (the map doesn't show the full Seattle city bounds at the southern extent, there's nothing I've covered down there). Generally I've preferred flatter terrain and more gridlike areas for my coverage numbers - it's easier to track during a run. Likewise, I don't like industrial areas or large commercial zones as much (such as Northgate) so these have lagged a bit.

I like mapmaking so I also view this as a sort of personal mapmaking experiment and an information visualization experiment as well.