It was a cold one!

Quick one today - home late from work so the sun was setting, I was hungry, the wind was fierce, etc. Excuses, excuses. But, I knocked off some local lingering roads with the 3.5 miles today and have finished all of the Cindy Ann area.

Will have to venture further down Division, across Middle, or west of Rt 4 now to make significant progress...

Progress - 3/29

Making progress, mostly within a few miles of home as I begin to add distance to my runs. Completed paths are in green; private roads are colored purple.

One problem that has appeared is that of literally retracing my steps. When I head south, it's about a mile from my house to Middle Rd and even longer down to Howland, which means that I'm 'wasting' 2+ miles on any southerly run without adding to my goal. Heading out to Division is definitely shorter but doesn't help with the southern coverage as I'd just be duplicating the Rt 2 or Shippeetown miles (and risking my life every time I cross the Rt 95 and Rt 4 on/off-ramps... That's definitely adding to the difficulty of achieving this goal. If things get tough, I might get creative to workaround this limitation - unfortunately, with the Rt 4 boundary directly to my west and it essentially being interstate-like and not pedestrian friendly, I can't take any shortcuts in that direction...

Not bad progress so far - I think I'm going to continue to concentrate on the NE and knock that area out while building up my distance, and then venture over to the west.

Introduction to the goal

Very stretch goal for me this year... I decided to try to run every public road, end-to-end, in East Greenwich, RI. It's not a large town, so it's not an impossible task. I'm situated almost centrally from east to west; however, I am about as far north as you can be without being in Warwick, making the southwestern roads a significant distance. But, I'm getting ahead of myself...

I'm a 44 year old guy who, as my wife likes to say, is a "daylight savings time" runner and has been for 10-15 years. About 4 years ago, I decided to add distance and run more than just 5Ks - I've since completed 4 half marathons and I ran the Blessing of the Fleet (10 miles) twice. I have never exceeded 13.1 miles, which is where the "stretch" portion of this goal comes into play.

My goal is to always depart from and return to my house on these jaunts. East Greenwich is officially within the red boundaries shown in the image below - essentially a rectangle to the west of Rt 4 and a top-heavy triangle to its east. I live a little to the east of Rt 4 at the north end of the town, in the Cindy Ann neighborhood.

This location gives me easy access to most of the eastern half of the town; however the western half is a challenge. Heading out of Cindy Ann to the north isn't bad - there's a walking path to get to Division - but heading west means navigating the 95N on-ramp and the Rt 4 off- and on-ramps. Not something I'm looking forward to... Southwest is an issue of distance - the furthest point from my home base is 8+ miles, meaning a simple round trip exceeds my longest distance and that's not counting the side-roads that I'd ideally be covering along the way.

So, in a nutshell, this might turn into my launching point for completing a marathon later in the year assuming all goes well with health, injuries, weather, etc.