Man runs every street in Wichita

WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — Jason Niblack has been a runner for 10 years but typically runs the same route.

“You mostly leave your house, and you run your neighborhood, or you meet friends at a park on a Saturday and run,” Niblack said.

In 2021, Niblack’s friend Lacy introduced him to City Strides, which tracks your progress running throughout a city.

“That sounded very interesting to me, so I thought I would try,” Niblack said. “I’m very goal-oriented and goal-driven. When I found out about it, and I looked and uploaded my data, I’d been a runner for about 10 years, but I only had 3% of the city.”

Typically, Niblack runs five days a week, and took on the challenge to run every street in Wichita.

“It started off pretty simple because there were a lot of streets I hadn’t run that were close to my house,” Niblack said. “By year two, you’re driving 15, 20 miles each way to run four or five miles, which some people think a little insane. You get a lot of questions like, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Or people call you Forrest Gump.”

Many others in Wichita are on City Strides working to run every street, but Niblack finished it first, running his last street in March 2024, completing every street in three years.

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“I really enjoyed the adventure, and I like when you run every day and you run five or six miles and you see the same house at three miles, and the same dog barks at four miles,” Niblack said. “It’s mental. Running a new place every day was also kind of a way to break those miles down, and you see new houses, and you see new things, and the miles just kind of fall off when you’re running, so that made it easier to go. I’m also competitive. So when I was behind people, it was just like, ‘Let me try to catch that next person.'”

Niblack ran a new route every day.

“Running all over and just running about six miles every day, and as soon as I caught up with Lacy, who was in first place, then I was like, ‘OK, I think I can do this,'” Niblack said.

Niblack has lived in Wichita his entire life, but seeing it on foot showed him the city in a new way.

“It was interesting because a lot of times you think you know the city well, but you really only go on the major streets,” Niblack said. “You don’t get off into the neighborhoods. And even though I’ve lived here my entire life, I found a lot of little parks and neighborhoods that I hadn’t seen before. I found a lot of loose dogs that were sometimes a little scary, but it was interesting to see parts of the city that you thought you knew well and some that you didn’t really know that well at all.”

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Niblack says there are nearly 2,000 miles on 4,000 streets in Wichita. Throughout the journey, he got to see people he hadn’t seen in a while and also explored new places in Wichita.

“I’d see people, I’d run in the neighborhood, and I’d hear somebody say, ‘Jason Niblack,’ and you turn around, and it’s somebody you haven’t seen in 10 years, and they’re like, ‘Do you live here?’ ‘No, I’m just running all the streets.’ And then they kind of look at you. It’s like, ‘Why?’ So then it would always lead into some conversation of things like that. So it was interesting also seeing old friends,” Niblack said.

Experiencing all of Wichita on foot gave him a new perspective on the place he calls home.

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