ITHACA, N.Y.—Do you happen to know how many streets there are in the City of Ithaca? There are 301, to be exact. And Conrad West, a Corning-native and freshman on the Ithaca College men’s cross-country team, has run them all.
When West arrived in Ithaca in August, he decided to learn his way around Ithaca by familiarizing himself with the streets. All of them actually.
“I thought it would be a fun way to get to know the town, so I was like, ‘I guess I’ll try to run all the streets in Ithaca now,’” West said. “I have four years here, so originally I was like, ‘I’ll do it over the course of four years,’ but I didn’t realize how many more miles I’d be doing in college and how much more fit I’d be, so I did it in one semester instead.”
To fit in this goal between classes, cross-country practice and everything else going on in college, he planned his street runs on the days he had to run twice anyway.
“In college, I have to run twice a day three times a week, and I run with the team six days a week, and we just do our own similar loops,” he said. “But the three days out of the week in the morning, I have to get miles in myself, so I’ll normally run anywhere between three and six miles in the morning, a couple streets at a time.”
This idea came after he ran all the streets of Corning for fun when he began using a website called CityStriders to keep track of and visualize where he had run before. “It’s a giant heat map that shows the borders, so I ran all the streets in the City of Ithaca,” he explained.
West’s project spanned the fall semester and began Aug. 30, 2021, ending Dec. 11 with a grand total of 27 runs distancing between three and 10 miles. Each run included an average of eight city streets with an average elevation gain of 411 feet.
West said that he hopes to run streets within the Town in the future. Technically, there are 608 streets in the Town of Ithaca, but because the City has 301 streets and is within the Town, he’ll only have approximately 307 if he works toward that goal. West said he also hopes to hit some of the trails in the future.
“I haven’t run hardly any trails yet because I’ve been just running on the roads,” West said. “I’ll eventually get that done, too.”