A good friend of mine, Maggie Bergin, is going to fix up lots of marketing content & overall copy throughout the site. I’m psyched because CityStrides needs this & she has the expertise to deliver it.
Part of the content that she needs - that I don’t have - is a collection of testimonials from you.
If you have a few moments and like CityStrides I’d love if you could share why.
How has CityStrides improved your running/walking overall?
For any subscribers happening upon this post - how did was your experience improved after becoming a subscriber?
I discovered CityStrides maybe two months ago or so thanks to a post on the FB page of the running club, and I only wish I had come across it earlier.
It has changed the way I plan my runs: instead of following the same old same routes; I now check out were I ran and where I did not in order to explore the city, and as someone who loves running in a city; that is brilliant!!
I love CityStrides and seeing my map develop. I’m looking forward to expanding out of my city and connecting to other cities I have run in. I also use the feature on my walks in my lunch break that lets me track where I am, so I can collect streets I don’t have.
I am also a parkrun tourist, so I run different locations each week (when there isn’t a pandemic), so I love using CityStrides to motivate me to run new places in my city that I’ve not been to before.
Citystrides has really connected me to my city. I run at places I would normally never go to and now that I know what is in the hidden side roads and behind the main road facades, I sometimes return to one of my ‘discoveries’. It has also improved my overall fitness as it is a great motivation to do one street more.
Wow, did citystrides changed my sportlife. When training for long distance i stumbled on Citystrides and from the first day on I was hooked. Discovering the cities in my region, planning the runs in advance and seeing the results afterwards on the lifemap is what keeps me occupied on a daily basis for years now.
It helped me making the long runs bearable in the start, but after achieving my initial goal, i made citystrides the new goal. systematically i tackled city after city around me and i kept shifting the borders of what to do.
For a short time I did run with music in my ears, but I soon discovered that enjoying the discoveries the runs give me were much more enjoyed without, so the music stayed home. All the houses and gardens with their architecture and the vast differences individuals have in maintaining their houses, industrial area’s and the strange looks i sometimes get from people going to work (what is a runner doing here?), nature and flowers, fields of crop growing and harvesting. Famous landmarks known and unknown pass by.
Running in the heat, the dark, snow, rain and sun. Each run is a new adventure and I can’t wait to get up and upload the gps results to citystrides driectly afterwards and plan the next day.
I LOVE CityStrides! It has really allowed me to fully explore the town I recently moved to and neighboring towns! It gets me out there everyday running, and has kept me motivated when there have been no races.
As a subscriber, I love the node hunter feature! Prior to that I would often find that I missed a node and would have to go back another day to get it.
I love getting home after a run and logging into CityStrides to see how much progress was updated! Its made running fun!
I am a subscriber so I can see the live map, hit all the cul de sacs on my route, and plan which neighborhood to run next.
I am really appreciating running different parts of my city now that the trails, greenways, and common running destinations are overrun (pun intended) with too many people to allow proper social distancing during COVID-19.
I’m staying safer by running where there are few people and cars.
The director of the Air Force Marathon told me about CityStrides in 2018. Since then, I have ran all of the streets in Urbandale, Clive, Windsor Heights and West Des Moines, IA. I have lived in Iowa since 2001 and still have been able to discover so many new areas around Des Moines that I have never been. CityStrides makes it very easy to manage the process of “running the streets”. CityStrides has really energized my running in the pandemic. CityStrides gives me that little extra nudge to get out the door and get my run in because I know I’ll be in a new / interesting part of town. It’s kind of like putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle.
CityStrides is an awesome motivator and makes running so much fun! I ran the NYC Marathon in 2018 and the percentage of my city I’d run during training was one of the metrics I tracked week-over-week - my favorite thing was to sync (subscriber benefit!) as I cooled down and check my new numbers. The interface keeps improving and it’s a project I’m so happy to support on an ongoing basis.
As a runner you always need challenges, and new challenges at that, not just doing the old challenges again. I done a sub 1:30 half marathon, I’d done London Marathon, I’d run a 1000 miles in a year, I’d done a self supported moorland 50k.
But I was bored. I’d seen Rickey Gates do his SF run every street, so was interested in doing that. With a bit of searching I found my way to City Strides and the rest is history. A fantastic tool to use, and James is very helpful and supportive
I discovered CityStrides after seeing people on Strava running very tortuous-looking routes and being curious. When the COVID-19 pandemic reality settled on us in March, I further wanted to avoid crowded pedestrian areas to socially distance. CityStrides helped motivate me to get out and explore my town, and kept me entertained during this period when there wasn’t much else to do other than go run and get lost for an hour every day.
What I also like about CityStrides is the lowkey, unpretentious nature of the community that is working to help it change and evolve in a user-oriented way. Doesn’t feel like CityStrides will “sell out” or try to make a huge profit off of us anytime soon, and that means a lot to me these days. I look forward to what the future holds.
Kevin took mine! I signed up for CityStrides a long time ago (apparently twice! - thank you James for helping me fix that!) because I wanted a personal heatmap. The novelty of a personal heatmap wore off pretty quickly for me at the time, but with the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to find places to run that were not crowded became a priority. My city has a very active running community, and some awesome amenities for runners, including many miles of greenway and well-appointed parks and facilities. During the pandemic, as more and more people take up walking, running, and biking, it has become impossible to maintain social distancing on these routes. I began using CityStrides to plot parts of town I had not yet run in. Because I was finding the service so valuable for this, I decided to make a one-time contribution. Immediately, I noticed how much more quickly my stats updated as a paid member, and I found that instant gratification very satisfying. I have continued to be a monthly supporter and look forward to maintaining that indefinitely. I am also recommending the service to others. Though I am only at just shy of 6% completion in my city, I am the current leader in my city. This tells me that my city has a LOT of streets, and that it needs more CityStriders. I have also been very impressed with James’ attentiveness and responsiveness in the forum, and the painstaking efforts he makes to keep things running smoothly.
CityStrides and it’s community has been an exceptional experience for me as a runner. The excitement that this service brings is unlike any other running platform out there. Although I am new to the community, I feel as though the transition into becoming a supporter has been extremely beneficial. The other main aspect of this service/experience is the collaborative aspects of the developer being open to new ideas and really talking to their community. It is hands down the best online running interface I have come across since getting back into running in 2018!
Before I found CityStrides, I ran the same 5 mile stretch of roads 5 days a week that I selected to avoid stoplights. There was nothing particularly enjoyable about the route, so the focus was mostly upon reaching the point to turn around and go home. After I joined CityStrides, I have run over 100 “new” streets giving me a new appreciation for the volume of beautiful homes in my neighborhood, finding new restaurants I plan to try, and am more motivated to run. I am excitedly striving towards 100% of my city and have already decided which neighboring suburb I will tackle after achieving this goal.
CityStrides makes me excited to get out the door for a normal run. I love exploring new places and working toward a goal of running every street in a town/city. I’ve now finished 3 cities and will certainly be doing many more in my life! It’s so easy to sync all of my runs to the site.
Since becoming a subscriber, the two added features I got access to that were the best was the time filter and the quicker syncing. When I finish a new city the time filter feature allows an awesome time lapse look at your “heatmap” getting larger over time. I also love to see my progress as soon as possible, so the faster syncing was definitely a plus for me.
I have joined a long time ago - and it changed the way I run, making it far more interesting. It is not just a website which organises geographical information about the runs which I would run anyway: this was why I was originally attracted to the website and the site makes an excellent job delivering on that. But this chase after new streets encourages you to explore beyond what you would normally do, and discover new places. You have much more interesting runs, but you also discover the less frequented parts of the country you live in, your holiday destination, or just a pit stop when you drive somewhere else.
I believe I am the person with the highest number of streets recorded (close to 11 thousand now) and I’ve already run cities which are yet to be covered by Citystrides (in Romania, Malta, Georgia and Slovakia) expecting that they would count one day. The improvements are constantly coming in and are very user-driven, there is a lively community and I only wonder how James manages to be so responsive - it looks as if he needed to clone several times .
Citystrides has encouraged me to explore parts of my town and the neighboring towns that I have never been to before. I have found some beautiful neighborhoods that I never knew existed. I have also found a few that have seen better days. It always pushes me to go a little (and sometimes a lot) farther than I planned, just to get a few more streets. I love the idea of exploring by foot and Citystrides keeps a great record of my travels.
few words: awesome;
changed my life;
one of the reasons it keeps me running
I like givig feedback and seeing there is something done
one of my year goals f.i. this year is to run my (big) city complete
I’ve been avidly running around my city for almost 10 years, though not until discovering CityStrides did I realize that ALL THAT MILEAGE had been on the same 2% of roads within the city. What a sad thought! Running has frequently been an outlet, sometimes a chore. But now with CityStrides, it’s always an adventure. Thanks @JamesChevalier & team(?)
I had been looking for a place to track all the places I had run for ever until a running mate told me about CS. It delivered all I wanted and more. CS is one of the very few that I pay monthly subscription for. Not only for the cool LifeMap with nodes but als because it feels good to contribute to this great project
I’d love if you could share why. 
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