I’m so excited to tell you about this.

Perhaps you already saw it on my Instagram, but here I get to give you the bigger story.

This has been a long time coming.

I’ve tried to do Strava art before - it has never gone well.

I think in the past what I’ve tried to do is, within a street or a certain narrow expanse of road, make a design from my head onto the map through GPS, and it ends up showing up as only a bunch of squiggles.

I think I tried doing names…not sure I ever got beyond that because they came out so poorly.

But then I saw a few people post a “2025” at the beginning of the year and it looked very do-able.

I cropped this image out of a separate Strava run in the area when I saw the streets that would work, and I drew the 2025 on there to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me.

So I started poking around the Google map of Framingham, looking for the right lineup of streets, and lo and behold I drew a 2025. (My sketch is what you see at the right.)

It was definitely a runnable route, it didn’t look terribly long (considering I’d only done a couple of mile-long runs on the treadmill and hadn’t run outside in more than a month), and I was excited to share it with someone.

My friend Jenn is training for the Boston Marathon so I checked to see if she would want to join me for this as part of one of her training runs.

We were able to make it work and on Thursday we set out to do it - well, we set out separately.

She ran 3-plus miles to get to our starting point and I drove and parked near where we’d finish and came back to meet her. (I passed her as I was driving down, which was good, because I was afraid she’d be waiting a long time for me.)

[Side note: Jenn is running the Boston Marathon with Team Framingham. You remember Team Framingham, right? That’s the awesome organization that gave me an opportunity to run the Boston Marathon - twice! They get a number of bibs as part of the BAA’s cities and towns program - since the marathon runs through Framingham - and Team Framingham holds a lottery for runners interested in running and local charities. So Jenn was selected, and she’s running for Bethany Hill Place. You can visit her fundraising page to get more information, and if you’re feeling generous, make a donation. Thanks!]

I wrote down the running route on a piece of paper that I carried with me while I ran. It reminded me of the ‘Running Every Street in Framingham’ days, and also like those days, I realized that if I lost that piece of paper and someone found it and read it, it would make people think there was a dangerous person on the streets of Framingham with some weird agenda. (Left on Mansfield, Left on Concord, Left on Pond, Left on Bishop…etc.)

My sense of direction is terrible. Immediately when I met Jenn I thought I had screwed it up because I was looking the wrong way.

So good thing I had it all written down. When she set me straight, we were off, and we successfully created a 2025. A nice souvenir, I thought, for her, running Boston in 2025. I guess it’s a good Chicago souvenir for me, too, even though that’s six months later - but still in 2025.

Maybe I’ll re-run it during my Chicago training - another great thing about it is it turned out to be an exact 5k run.

For safety reasons, Strava automatically hides the first and last tenths of a mile of your runs. So when I realized that I quickly panicked thinking I had messed up the run (we should have run longer on either end so the full 2025 would show up)…but I looked at the settings and was able to undo the hidden parts for the run and show the full route.

The run was a nice reminder that - even though I dreaded getting out there in 20-degree temperatures - I really like running in the cold weather. (Even though my nose gets so cold. I might need to break out the gaiters again if I’m going to do this often.)

Also good news - it didn’t hurt my foot any more than I expected it to, so I think I’m recovering well. I’ll still be taking it easy for a while and really not running more than a 5k too often over the next few months.

I don’t know if I’ll re-create the 2025 this summer, but I’ll tell you this - this is not going to be the last Strava art I attempt over the course of this year.

Also, do I have a new banner photo to use for these posts here? It’s a good 2025 image.

All right, don’t forget, if you came here through social media, keep coming back. I’m doing this every day.

And if you came from another source, well, the social media is below and you can keep tabs on me there.