Friends Run Every Street In New Haven

Matt Goldenberg returned to New Haven after running a half marathon on Halloween, picked up Sara Zuba — who was dressed in a garden gnome costume– and drove to Sleepy Hollow Circle. They ran the .3 mile-long street in Fair Haven Heights and returned to their homes across town in Westville to celebrate the holiday.

“The beleaguered half marathoner and garden gnome complete the NHV side of Sleepy Hollow Drive [sic] on Halloween,” wrote Zuba in her running log.

The run was one of 13 that the pair completed in October as part of their goal to run the length of every street in the city: a challenge they completed last week.

Goldenberg said the short distance for Halloween run was an anomaly — the two wanted to commemorate the holiday with a themed run on an otherwise busy day. Most other runs were around five miles. The longest was 11.

Zuba and Goldenberg, neighbors in Westville, have been running together since the start of the pandemic. They met through mutual friends in the running community; they both work in the psychiatric department at Yale New Haven Hospital.

In the early months of the pandemic, Goldenberg would drive to Zuba’s former house in Wooster Square to join her for runs. That was until Zuba, her husband, and 4‑year-old son Harrison moved to Westville last spring, just two doors down from Goldenberg on West Rock Avenue.

Around that same time, Zuba and Goldenberg heard on Facebook that a mutual friend had completed a challenge to run every street in Milford. The news inspired them to do the same in New Haven.

“We’ve lived here for a long time, we work here, we run this city. Why don’t we just do it? What better way to see the city than to run the streets?” Zuba said.

“Also, as a runner, the other motivating factor is having novelty of challenges. It’s helpful in terms of increasing the likelihood that you’re going to run that day, it helps if you can have an accomplishment to tick off,” Goldenberg said.

“We probably talked about it for a while, then we talked about it some more. And then some more, and then we finally did it,” Zuba said.

Zuba and Goldenberg had both been using fitness watches to track their jogs. When they decided to challenge themselves to run every street in New Haven, they uploaded their data to CityStrides, a website that James Chevalier developed in 2013 to track his own progress running every street in his city.

“It was humbling when we first put our data into CityStrides. I’ve been living in New Haven for nine years, and I run a lot. Yet I’d only run 20 percent of the city. When you think about it, you don’t drive to go for a run where you live. You’re running the same streets over and over again. It’s not like there’s a lot of variety,” Zuba said.

“As a new challenge, we didn’t have a sense of exactly what it would entail, in terms of how many runs it would take. The app showed us that it was 769 streets and almost total 300 miles. We didn’t have any sense of whether it would take us a few months or a few years,” Goldenberg said.

On Aug. 29, 2021, the pair embarked on their first official run in Morris Cove as part of their challenge.

“It was an inauspicious beginning,” Goldenberg said.

“I locked my keys in the car. Matt couldn’t find his wallet, and then we had to go to the local Krauszer’s in Morris Cove and call my husband to drive over with our 4‑year-old to give us the keys to the car. We finally got a hold of him, because who answers strange phone numbers these days?”

After regaining access to Zuba’s car, Goldenberg and his running mate drove to East Rock Coffee, only to find that it was closed.

“After that, pretty much every day, one of our routine questions to each other was, ​‘Do you have the keys to the car?’ ” Goldenberg said.

In the first few months, due to scheduling conflicts and Goldenberg recovering from a back injury, the pair’s pace was relatively slow. They each had to go on some independent runs to complete streets that the other had already run.

“There was a run that I had done by myself. Matt warned me that I would have to run down a dead end road and that there would be a lot of dogs that were barking behind a fence. When I ran it, it was uncomfortable and uneasy. I ran on the opposite side of the road, but there was a big sign that said private property. And there were these gigantic German Sheperds barking at me,” Zuba said.

“That was probably the most scared I was running. I was running very fast, I ran all the way to the end. And as I turn around, the guy comes out of his house and said … some things that I don’t need to repeat. I yelled, ​‘I’m just trying to run every street in New Haven!’ I don’t know how much he appreciated that, but then I immediately got off the street,” she said.

Eventually the two synced up with the streets and had a common goal for the remainder. ​“Over the months, as we saw our progress on the website increasing we became more into it and more regular with it,” he said.

“And there was somebody we wanted to beat,” Zuba said.

They had noticed that there was another user on the app who had completed around 60 percent of the streets in New Haven, but her progress hadn’t changed in months.

“We both made the assumption that she’s not doing this anymore. And then all of a sudden, after we surpassed her, she started inching up. I’m a super competitive person, so at that point we both agreed: we got to beat her,” Zuba said.

“Originally, we just wanted to do it and finish. But once there was an opportunity to do it and finish first, then it became a competition,” Goldenberg said.

“It’s a little bit of asymmetric warfare because we have no idea whether she even knew of our existence. We were in competition with her, but she wasn’t necessarily in competition with us,” he said.

Throughout their journey to beat their unknowing competitor, Goldenberg and Zuba found ways to make some runs special, like the Halloween run. ​“I designed a run to make sure that on my birthday, we ran Matthew Road,” a one-block street in the Annex, Goldenberg said.

“Part of the fun was mapping out the runs and trying to do it as efficiently and logically as possible. Earlier on, when we were less committed to finishing or less knowledgable how to do it, we were less attentive to this. But toward the end, I had pretty much mapped out in advance every run,” Goldenberg said.

“I don’t have a very good sense of direction. He would show me the map before we would start, and I’d immediately forget where we were going. At one point, he would say, ​‘Do you even want to see this?’ ” Zuba laughed.

“It was inspiring because at the end we were able to look down the road a little bit and say, ​‘Oh we only have nine runs left,” Goldenberg said.

“Another fun part was finding all these little nooks and crannies in our neighborhood,” Zuba said, in reference to a section of East Rock off of St. Ronan Street that had several roads she didn’t know existed.

“I felt like I knew the city reasonably well, but there were definitely a lot of parts of the city that I’d never been to before. One of them was at the base of West Rock behind the Pond Lily area, there are a bunch of little streets that go up the mountain,” Goldenberg said.

Traversing through the city allowed them moments of appreciation for nature. One week, the pair was supposed to fly to Georgia with friends to run a half marathon; the trip was cancelled due to a hurricane. They agreed that if they couldn’t fly to run, they might as well have completed some streets in New Haven.

“We were running down Columbus Avenue towards our car, and as we were running, a bald eagle comes swooping down in front of us. Apparently, there’s a nest of them in the cemetery area off of theBoulevard. So I was like, alright, if we’re not going to go to Georgia, at least we got to see a bald eagle. We both kinda like birds, so, that was pretty cool,” Zuba said.

On another day while running in Beaver Hills, Zuba ran back to the car to get her phone to take a picture of the sun illuminating the West Rock foliage. ​“It was beautiful. It’s a reminder of: I live here, and this is pretty cool,” she said.

“Every neighborhood has its own hidden gems, like restaurants or parks. You have to really get out there and find it. I was impressed to see so many playgrounds everywhere,” Zuba said, adding that it gave her new ideas of places to take her son.

For Goldenberg, he said the challenge helped him gain a perspective on the city’s history through architecture and community. ​“We ran by a lot of buildings that used to have a different use that have been repurposed for something else or abandoned. The family friends that grew up in Fair Haven were Italian, and now it’s largely a Spanish-speaking population that lives in that neighborhood, so seeing the demographic transitions was illuminating.”

And both said that seeing every street has helped them connect with colleagues and patients at work.

“As a social worker in an inpatient psychiatric unit, I work with a lot of people in the community. Now, I have a greater appreciation for where they live. I can build a rapport with patients more than previously,” she said. ​“I’m connecting people to different community resources. Some of them, I never knew where they were, and now I know exactly where they are, because I ran by them. That also gives me a greater appreciation of where we’re connecting people when they leave the hospital.”

After about eight months and over 300 miles, Zuba and Goldenberg ran their last street in the challenge on March 6. The final street? The Grand Avenue Bridge over the Quinnipiac River, which had been under construction until January.

Initially they had hoped for a celebration with family and friends; the weather had other plans. So instead, they celebrated privately with a selfie and getting to watch the website progress tracker read 100 percent.