WHEN IN A RESTRICTION ZONE, WHAT CAN YOU DO BUT #RUNEVERYSTREET

Contributed by Stephen Redfern, AURA Secretary

#runeverystreet Challenge 96.1km, 17-18 June 2021, Engadine NSW

I call this the Tetris Ultra.

Every street completed in 10 hours and 55 mins with a distance of 96km covered.

With the 10km restrictions for travel from our home currently in place in Sydney at the moment, I had decided to set myself a new challenge to complete.

After having run my postcode back in the 2020 lockdowns, there was one challenge that I have also always wanted to do and that was to run every street in my suburb of Engadine, NSW.

A few days before the weekend I sat down and mapped out a route through the suburb that took in every street within the boundaries of Engadine. Once it was finished it came in at a massive 99km to cover every street – this coming about due to there being so many dead ends and cul de sacs, so I’d have to do quite a few out-and-backs along a lot of the streets, with no real way around it.

This was okay as I certainly liked the idea of possibly being able to complete another 100km challenge. The best part about this challenge was that at no time throughout the entire run would I be any further than about 2.5km from my front door.

I had decided to start the challenge at night knowing the streets would be much quieter, with the challenge started at 11pm and completed at 9:55am the next day. The best part about doing it at night was not seeing a single car till after 5am in the morning so I was able to run the entire night time on the road making it so much easier.

After starting, I soon realised that navigating was not as easy as it looked on paper and even though I had uploaded the course onto my watch, it didn’t always work out because my device couldn’t always distinguish between the different directions the course was going. With this I had to improvise as I went and found that breaking it down into smaller sections at a time, I could work out a better route to take, and with this I ended up not having to do as many double ups as previously mapped saving myself approximately 4km in the end.

By the time daybreak had come at around 7am in the morning I had managed to knock over 65km of the streets, which is where I was met by my wife Penny who had to drive a staggering 1km from home to reach me. Here I was able to finally top up on some Tailwind to get me to the finish and also what had to be the best vegemite sandwich I have ever had. Just what the doctor had ordered.

From here I headed off to complete the final 30km of road reaching the southern end of Engadine at 9am, where I got to turnaround and head home over the last 5km of roads to finish back at my start point out front of my driveway.

This was certainly one enjoyable ultra challenge and loved how the run route looked once uploaded off the watch.

Now time to think about what challenge I would like to tackle next during our lockdown.