RW does every single street and trail 2020

Update: this is now live on rwesst.com

We know that a lot of runners are eager for community run projects. Our RW goes global was a big hit in the spring, with hundreds of runners participating (independently of course) to collectively cover the earth’s circumference in eight weeks. Our second project is RW does Every Single Street & Trail. 

Every Single Street (ESS) was a project by Rickey Gates in 2018, who got to know his city of San Francisco better over the course of 45 days. Our very own Cory George did this in Waterloo in 2019 too!

We are recycling this concept and applying it on a community-wide scale. We want to see if our community can cover it all: every road, every trail, every path, anywhere runners can run in Waterloo Region. We will take your GPX files and overlay them in a single map, so you know what has and what hasn’t been covered.

We invite anyone who runs or walks within the borders of Waterloo Region (all cities and townships) to join in. Maybe this means exploring some different routes, such as going progressively one street over, to cover your entire neighborhood. We are definitely going to need some help in areas with fewer runners to kilometres, such as the very rural parts of the region. 

We hope you have fun with this!

Details and rules

How do I participate and when does it start? It started on August 1. Optional: join the facebook group. Required to participate: a free account on rwesst.com.

Can I do this with others? This is an individually collective project. Running with others is not a factor here, because two people covering the same stretch has literally no value to the project. Use your sound judgment, and be safe. The bottom line is, the whole point of this project is to provide motivation for people to run, while being able to do so entirely independently.

What types of activities are allowed? Running, walking, and hiking are all encouraged. Please no cycling, at least, yet! We might need help with the extreme rural areas.

Where do we run? We want to cover all roads and trails within Waterloo Region. Please restrict activities to areas that runners and walkers are allowed to be. We know that sometimes private roads can look uncovered by the map, but use your discretion. Another example: someone please cover Schneider’s Bush by walking/hiking only – no running!

What if my area has already been covered? Early adopters will have ample opportunity to cover lots of KMs in their immediate proximity. Even if many parts of your route are already covered, you can still upload if it supplements any part of the map. If you entire route is already covered, the system won’t stop you from uploading, but it will have no additional value to the map.

What if I don’t have a GPS watch? Even without a watch and without data, anyone who runs with a smartphone can create a GPX file, if you start recording your activity on an app such as Strava. But you don’t even need any devices – you can map out and export suitable GPX files from websites such as mappedometer.

What is the end goal? The point of the project is to help us get to know our community, both in actual space, and through the collective effort. But as for covering every single street and trail, we don’t have an exact amount of distance (maybe close to 5,000km?), and we also don’t have a statistical way to track our progress. It will be mostly a visual progress on the map. As for when it finishes, depending on how many people are participating (and how enthusiastic), we don’t know how to answer that yet.