WOW!
Thank you James.
PS. This topic was a cool idea.
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Can’t remember! 
It was there one day and didn’t go away
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A post on the facebook group of the running club.
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I was chatting with one of the hosts of the excellent ‘Running is Bullshit’ podcast and trying to explain my penchant for planning running routes that ‘drew’ aesthetically pleasing shapes on the map (e.g. a bit like ‘Strava Art’, but without it necesarily having to be a recognisable image). I had various preferences, like routes not ‘crossing over themseves’, and having graceful shapes, or sometimes being more geometrcially defined (I could go on…).
Anyway, inbetweeen scoffing and saying I was a nutter, Stu casually dropped into conversation a reference to CS, and mentioned how much fun he was having with it. I think I’d heard about it elsewhere a while previously, but this gave me the impetus I needed to give it a try.
Pretty much straight away I was hooked! It felt really fresh as a way to plan runs, and really shook me out of a bit of a rut. I really liked the sense of a new challenge and the opportunity to feel tangible ‘progress’ with runs, even in the absence of specific performance goals or races to train towards.
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Thanks for that link! You wouldn’t happen to remember which podcast the mention was in, would you? I looked, but couldn’t find. No search (or comment) feature there, that I could see, and Google didn’t find it either.
I was chatting with Stu by private message in Twitter… I’m not sure to be honest if they’ve actually talked about it (much? at all?) in the podcast itself. If you message them they might have a better idea.
Also, I was mentioned on a different podcast and went on a livestream zoom broadcast organised by them after I was the first person to complete the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in CS. That was ‘With Me Now’ (the unofficial parkrun podcast). I think that community was the way that a lot of parkrunners heard about CS.
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Thanks Matt! I can’t actually remember exactly how I found Citystrides, I think it must have been a reddit post. Loved it from the start, it was idle curiosity at first just to see how much of the city I’d ran, and then I realised the potential.
@ericjrw we haven’t ‘featured’ Citystrides (though @JamesChevalier ) is on the wishlist!) but it’s one of those things I bang on about every now and then when I go through a phase of it. I’m always happy to talk about maps.
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I would be one of those people from GVRAT that found their way over here 
I was planning a route to do every street in my suburb - about 20km and was keen to see how many streets I could do but wasn’t sure how to track it all. Within a few days I saw a post in GVRAT about CS and was hooked! Nearly all my GVRAT miles are about extending my local city coverage, it has kept things interesting.
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I think it also started after the Ricky Gates article. I wanted to plot all my run maps together to make a heat map of where I was running, so I started to make my own in Google Earth. I would download my Garmin runs and import them into Google Earth. It looked cool, but I didn’t want to import so many on my own. I did a search to see if there was an easier way and came across a Reddit discussion about CityStrides and now here I am.
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This is so bloody true!! I started running all the streets of my city. Then I started to really learn how because of City Strides!!
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Not supporting Garmin and then supporting Garmin again is what got me here oddly. In a running club I am in someone posted a thread titled “CITY STRIDES IS SUPPORTING GARMIN AGAIN!!!”, and despite not using a Garmin GPS I opened the thread to figure out what city strides was and why this person was so excited.
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I got the idea from Ricky Gates as I’m sure many people did. I started just using Strava and then found VeloViewer which worked well for mapping but then came across City Strides whilst researching certain perimeters to set myself… That’s when is alllll got wry specific and particular.
Love it!!!
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I was looking for something exactly like CityStrides! During lockdown I had started walking around the city and tracking my routes with OsmAnd so that I could see which streets I had or hadn’t walked yet… and tonight I thought, “there’s an app for almost everything and I’m sure that I’m not the first person who has had this idea!” – So I googled “walk every street app” and an article about CityStrides came up. I’m so happy that I found it!
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Random Google search in 2016 to find a free “heatmap”. I’m obsessed with maps already, and this website made it more fun to connect my running to maps.
Living in Colorado, we also have an embarrassment of riches in terms of beautiful trails, so I use Citystrides to connect tons of networks of trails on my lifemap even though I get no credit towards completing streets to help keep me competitive in the top 100 of Citystrides users I now have northern CO connected to almost central Colorado via mostly trails.
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I was doing a mileage fundraising challenge for MND/ALS in January this year and half way through somebody on our FB group asked if anyone was using CS to track their runs, or slow walks in my case. I took a look at that was me hooked! It was an absolute godsend through lockdown and the continuing restrictions and kept me very focused. I documented the things I spotted on my FB page and kept my friends entertained as I went along. I finished my city of Edinburgh last month and I’m now a wee bit lost and am losing the fitness I’d gained so I’m trying to figure out how to challenge myself for this year’s #DoddieAid MND challenge starting on January 1.
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