RUNNH234 is  ...... something I came up with while on a car ride with my wife, Nancy, while driving from our home in Dublin, NH to Walpole via local roads.  Along the way we saw signs for different towns and I would invariably ask:  “have we been there before?”.  In a number of cases the answer was no, so we took mini detours to see the towns.  There are a number of towns in NH where bypass roads were built to go around towns and unless you have a reason to go there all you see for a town is a directional sign.

 

While checking out some of the towns I wondered aloud how many towns there are in NH and if it would be possible to set up a route that connects all of the town halls in NH county by county in a way that could then be run.  It was just a whim, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.  At least the idea of researching it.  

 

I found there are 234 incorporated towns and cities in NH and then Googled the addresses of every town hall and then went about seeing if there was a way to plot a map to connect them all for pedestrian travel where the distance between the town halls was reasonable to run.  Thus RUNNH234 was born.  Before I knew it I was building a spreadsheet with entries for each town.

 

Lo and behold I came up with a course that seemed reasonable with a route just over 1800 miles and an average distance of just under 8 miles between town halls.  Sure some were long (especially up in Coos county) with distances over 15 miles, but my running experience told me that could be overcome.  The elevation changes were the more challenging part of the equation and I still haven’t fully researched that element beyond the first 70 legs.   Plenty of time for that.  With no indication that anyone has ever done this before I went about setting up my own guidelines (rule book) and planned how to record and chart progress (more to follow later).