In Spring 2019, inspired by Rickey Gates’ “Every single street” project, I ran/walked (mainly walked…) every single street in Chesterfield as part of my build up for the EMU 6 day. I had to make some slightly arbitrary decisions about where Chesterfield ended, but stuck to them and declared the project ‘done’.

When Covid hit in Spring 2020, I initially didn’t do much running. I’d done the Rovaniemi 150 in February and hadn’t yet started building up for my next race, the Kauhajoki 6 day in June. It soon became apparent that wasn’t going to happen. The last 2 years have been a bit of a slog, but I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I quite enjoyed the first few months of the pandemic (once it became apparent that society wasn’t going to immediately collapse). No commuting, so lots more time to spend with the OH, and nice weather. Work was a bit frantic at times, but supporting students through a global pandemic felt more worthwhile than the admin-crap that often fills my days. And strangely I didn’t feel any need to run. By June I wanted to get back to some aerobic exercise, but without any races to train for I needed a project, and one that was close to home. I decided to extend the Streets of Chesterfield to include every single road within the ~34 mile, roughly circular, ‘Round Chesterfield walk’. Motivated by having a project, I went out every Saturday and Sunday and covered up to 20 miles. I finished the last roads in late August, when I had a week off work and nothing better to do.

In September (after a not particularly thrilling week’s holiday in a self-catering cottage in Yorkshire) I decided I needed another project, and embarked on completing every single footpath within the Round Chesterfield walk. This ground to a halt in early October when my mother became seriously ill and I spent the next 2 stressful months frantically dashing between Somerset and Chesterfield. She died in early December, and it was mid January before I felt like getting back to the footpaths. Surprisingly the footpaths weren’t as big a project as the inner and outer roads, and with one longish walk a week I got them done by early March. The one issue was that not every footpath that’s shown on an OS map exists, and is traversable, in reality. One footpath literally had a house (a not particularly new looking one at that) built on it, and some were completely overgrown, despite it being Winter. I decided to take a practical approach and define ‘every’ as ‘every single footpath that exists both on an OS map and in reality, and is traversable without a chainsaw or dynamite’.