Runner has city covered — every inch of it
Robin Cohn isn’t the sort of woman to give up on anything. When she starts a movie, she finishes it. When she opens a book, she reads to the end. And when she decided in October 2018 to run every single street, trail and staircase in San Francisco, completing the daunting quest was predetermined.
“When I start something, I have to finish it. I can’t stop,” explained Cohn, 56. “Something about thoroughness is really satisfying to me. It just makes me feel really calm.”
And she was entirely calm as she sauntered up her megaroute’s final stretch on Saturday afternoon to the tip of Candlestick Park where the city’s southeast corner juts into the bay, and there’s no more San Francisco left to run.
A small group of friends waited at a picnic table sipping cold drinks in the hot sun as she ran her last few miles. The Hunters Point Crane loomed nearby. The tip of the Salesforce Tower was visible in the distance. Pelicans flew over the water. Families had picnics and played Spanish music. It was quintessential San Francisco, the city most people never see in its entirety, but which would soon be fully traversed by Cohn.
“I have trouble understanding running in this heat,” said a friend, Rena Frantz. “Well, I have trouble understanding running.” You and me both, Rena. But Cohn has always loved it, running track and cross country in highschool and running
regularly as an adult. Soon, she emerged from the trees and ohsocalmly jogged toward her friends like it was no big thing that she was about to finish running everywhere one can run in San Francisco.
Cohn’s two partners — she lives in a triad in Sausalito — held each end of a colorful finish line made of tissue paper.
“There she is!” hollered one of them, Gordon Priatko.
She broke through the paper, hugged Priatko and her other love, Phyllis Gardner, and shared some words with her friends.
“I’ve been waiting 3,000 miles to say this, but I didn’t step in dog poo the entire time!” she said with a laugh. “I wanted to wait until now to announce it.”
Gardner gave her a keepsake: a navy Tshirt reading, “3,000 miles, every street, every stairway, every hill. One amazing Robin.” It was a goodnatured, lowkey end to a goodnatured, lowkey adventure, which suited Cohn just fine.
“She was just doing it as part of her normal routine to run 6 miles to 10 miles a day,” Gardner said. “The end kind of snuck up on her. She’s realizing, ‘Oh yeah, this is a big deal.’ ”
It sure is. A handful of people have run every street in San Francisco, including extreme runner Rickey Gates, who ran the whole city in just 46 days back in 2018. But Cohn is pretty sure she’s the only woman to have achieved the feat — at least when it comes to running every trail and clambering up every staircase, too.
“At most, everybody just does the streets,” she said. “There are very few people who do everything like I do.”
In any case, it’s a tiny club. And for good reason.
There are more than 1,200 miles of roads in San Francisco and hundreds more miles of park trails. Plus hundreds of staircases. Adding them together — plus counting the occasional doublingup to get back to her car and backtracking on dead ends — and her Fitbit tells her the whole adventure spanned 2,987.22 miles.
“I am rounding up to 3,000 miles for boasting rights,” she quipped on Facebook.
The crazytome journey began when Cohn, a retired owner of a construction company and the mother of two college students, was living in Seacliff and started running in her neighborhood. She likes to explore cities in a systematic way, running different streets daily in a pattern.
“I thought, ‘What if I just ran everything?’ ” she said.
She divided the city into three sections and ran each one over the course of many months from west to east. Land’s End to the Financial District. The Sunset to Dogpatch. Lake Merced to Candlestick Park.
She made printouts of each neighborhood, designing her daily routes like a puzzle piece to traverse every last inch of road and marking her accomplished path each night. Different neighborhoods required different patterns. The Sunset, for example, looked like a comb on her printouts, as she ran the huge grid up and down, up and down.
She didn’t rush, pausing to take photos along the way to post on social media. But she never walked.
“It’s all running,” she said.
She said she loved running in Sunnyside because “it’s underrated, but really quirky and snarky” with funny things in front yards and windows. She also loved Hunters Point, which has great weather, beautiful views of the bay and a lot of art.
“I really like Bernal Heights, too,” she said. “I think it’s mandatory in Bernal Heights to have a Black Lives Matter sign in your window.”
Now, she said, she can drive through San Francisco and say, “I did that! I did that! I did everything I can see!”
“I really like that I know San Francisco really well now,” she said. “I’ve been on streets that most people have never been on, and there are so many little hidden parts people don’t know about. The murals and the views, and then I’d meet interesting people along the way. It’s been quite a wonderful adventure.”
She’s not done with her quirky running adventures. Next up? Running all the roads and trails in Marin County, which is roughly 16 times larger than San Francisco. And which includes Mount Tamalpais and its countless trails.
“That will take me many years,” she said.
She’ll surely finish it now that she’s decided to begin. And hopefully she’ll have an even larger celebration. She almost didn’t tell her friends or me about the big, final day of her San Francisco adventure.
“But I thought, ‘You know, this kind of a big event in my life and I should mark it with some kind of ceremony, some kind of ending,’ ” she said. “I don’t like promoting myself, but I feel like I should honor what I’ve done because it is pretty incredible that I actually did it.”