Joabe Barbosa hates running. But he loves to explore.
Since August 2024, the Roosevelt University graduate student has been chipping away at an ambitious, if a little unwieldy, personal feat: to become the first person to run every single one of the city’s streets.
What began as a means for Barbosa to get his muscles moving following an injury has since grown into a year-plus pursuit, spurred on by the 25-year-old’s inclination to get to know more of the city after moving to the area more than three years ago.
As of the year’s end, Barbosa had just over 79% of Chicago’s more than 4,000 miles of street covered. He plans to finish by the spring, then eventually move on to other cities and repeat the venture on a new maze of streets.
“Some people travel by plane,” he said. “I travel by foot.”
He isn’t the only one. For years, from coast to coast, “run-every-streeters” have been taking on their version of the challenge, turning their metropolitan areas into bona fide treadmills. In 2018, a man ran every street in San Francisco over a span of 46 days. A couple years ago, another runner spent the better part of 12 months jogging every street in Manhattan, a 750-mile endeavor.
There are several apps and websites out there that allow urban explorers to track where and how far they’ve gone, and how they measure up against one another. One popular tracker, CityStrides, shows that in Chicago alone, some 50 runners have more than 10% of the city covered.
Barbosa leads the pack
Born in Brazil and raised in England, Barbosa came to the United States for college after earning a sports scholarship to a small school in Kentucky, then later moved to Chicago in 2022 to pursue his doctorate in clinical psychology at Roosevelt.
Barbosa was never a runner growing up, instead pouring his athleticism into soccer. But a March 2024 mountaineering accident caused Barbosa to change course just over a year ago. Barbosa traveled to New Hampshire to summit Mount Washington, a peak notorious for its unpredictable and often brutal weather conditions. Barbosa started his ascent mid-morning and reached the top late afternoon — but by then, it was starting to get dark.
Losing light as the high altitude winds picked up, Barbosa, who candidly noted he wasn’t adequately prepared for the grueling trek, knew he had to get down as fast as possible.
However, on his way down, he fell and hit his head, breaking his teeth and nose, while the cold left him hypothermic. He had to call 911 for help and was rescued, then spent three days in a local hospital.
It took months to recover and while Barbosa wasn’t at risk of losing extremities, doctors did tell him that he had to get his blood flowing to avoid long-term damage, he recalled. While a lifelong athlete, soccer was too high-impact after the accident, so Barbosa turned to running.
The catch: running is far from Barbosa’s favorite form of exercise.
“There are some people that go crazy for running, they love the runner’s high,” he said. “They go every day or every week to the Lakefront Trail, do the same thing over and over again. And I’m like, that’s not me.”
But he does like to expand his horizons. He started to use running as a means to explore new neighborhoods and the more he ran, he questioned just how much ground he was covering. Barbosa found an app to track his progress and when he saw there was a leaderboard of others doing the same, with the top contender hovering at about 55% of the city completed at the time, he thought, “‘I wonder if I can beat him?’” He’s been gaining traction since, both in mileage — and followers.
While taking on the challenge for himself, Barbosa has also taken to documenting his street crusade online, posting videos about the experience and live footage from his runs on social media. In mid-August, in one of his first videos of the venture, Barbosa filmed himself running through the Parkway Gardens housing complex, the notoriously high-crime strip of South King Drive known as “O Block” on a Friday night. The post garnered thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, which ran the gamut from critique to praise.
Barbosa said he welcomes the response, positive or negative. His videos often show him running late at night (a function of being too busy during the day with work and school to get a run in, Barbosa explained). He’s even started to up the challenge’s ante with encouragement from his online audience. In December, at the suggestion of one commenter, he wore just a short-sleeve shirt and shorts for a night run through the snow.
“It was brutal,” Barbosa said.
With the newfangled following, Barbosa also found himself embracing an unplanned goal of showing off Chicago, especially neighborhoods not often highlighted in the media. He said he’s challenged his own perceptions of the city since opting to run anywhere and everywhere and hopes he can help others do the same.
Barbosa said he’s found Chicago “extremely safe,” despite the Trump administration holding the city out to be a national punching bag on violent crime. Chicago just logged its fourth consecutive year of declining gun violence.
Last week, Barbosa posted a video to Instagram captioned, “Why Chicago is the Greatest City in the World.” Mayor Brandon Johnson reposted it.
Barbosa didn’t expect his runs to resonate so widely, but now that he’s started, he wants to keep going as long as he can, even when he has Chicago down in the books. After Chicago, once he earns his degree, he wants to take on Las Vegas, followed by Los Angeles and possibly New York.
Meanwhile, though Barbosa may be the first, other Chicagoans are on their way to completing their own maps of the city.
Matthew Plese, per CityStrides, has about 27% of the city logged. The 37-year-old West Town resident began tracking his progress as part of marathon training.
Distance running since 2020 and a repeat marathoner, Plese in 2024 realized he’d often run the same routes over and over, so he decided to step out of his regular routine and run somewhere different. He hasn’t stopped.
Jogging every street in Chicago has been a goal of Victor Gutwein’s long before Barbosa started making headlines. Running since he was a middle schooler, Gutwein said, for him, the aspiration was born out of his love of maps.
He began filling out the streets in and around his South Shore neighborhood in 2021 and as of today, has about 44% of Chicago completed. His ideal pace, he said, is running 10% of the city a year, noting that’s about as fast as he can go with work and a family of four kids.
Though he’s hit his own stride, Gutwein is keenly aware of the small contingent of runners pursuing the same feat. He’s even started a group, called the Chicago Completionist Club, of run-every-streeters across the city in the hopes of connecting with like-minded runners, for camaraderie and some friendly competition.
They’ve gone a few runs together this year, Barbosa and Plese included.
“We (had to) get a couple runs in before Joabe finishes this thing,” he said.
