Shortly after the new year began in January, Mike announced to me that he wanted to run every road in Hanover in 2020. He had read about Ricky Gates, a world-class mountain and ultra-runner, who was running every street in San Francisco, which had inspired this “insane” idea. I told him I thought it was crazy, but he was head strong.
He started collecting lists of streets, maps, etc., to plan his routes. Mike ran his first run on January 21, 2020. After he had done a couple of runs, I told him I would join his quest. So, over the next 3 months, we worked on this “mission”. When the COVID 19 pandemic hit, and our lives became more restricted, this became our total preoccupation. Road races were cancelled, so this gave us a goal, and an opportunity to do something unique.

We were familiar with most of the roads in downtown Hanover, near our home, but once we moved to roads further out, especially in Etna and Hanover Center, this involved driving to find them, measuring them, and making sure there were street signs and Hanover Town line signs when we needed them. Since our measurements (by odometer or on maps) were crude and frequently inaccurate, we often found ourselves on longer runs than we planned. Most of the time, we ran together, which meant running both ways on the roads (or twice the distance). Sometimes, I would drop Mike off at the start of the road, then drive the car to the other end, when I would run back towards him. He would continue on to get the car and come back to fetch me – this would mean we each only had to do one length rather than two.

Hanover is 50 square miles and has 255 roads which are runnable. 60% of the roads are paved, and 40% are dirt. 20 roads are categorized as Class VI, parts of which are not maintained. We only tackled the runnable ones. From mid-January to mid-April, we ran a total of 201 miles in 36 runs (average 5-6 miles/run) and had 21,000 feet of elevation gain.

We were surprised by the number of hilly routes, many much steeper than downtown Hanover. Some of the hilliest: Moose Mountain Road, King Road, Pinneo Hill Road, Stevens Road, Goodfellow Road.

We made our dining room into our planning room, with a large map spread out where we could check off the roads once they were done. And, we recorded our runs in Strava.

I suspect we set the FKT (fastest known time) for 75+ year-olds running all of the Hanover Roads – 100 days.