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By Katrina Margolis
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Alyssa Adreani is no average Walpole resident. She and her husband moved to the area about a year and a half ago. While most people get to know the town through their own interactions and businesses in the area, Alyssa has taken it upon herself to learn Walpole in an entirely different way: she is currently a few months away from running every single street in town - no casual undertaking.
“I’m pretty close,” said Adreani. “I would say I will probably finish it in, like, six more runs, but it’s hard to say how quickly six runs will happen, because I usually only run in Walpole once a week on the weekends. So I’m guessing with the next few months.”
How did this idea come to be?
“I’ve been a runner for about twenty years or so, and two years ago, I ran across the state of Massachusetts from west to east and that was really fun. It was a really fun goal to focus on and work my way towards, but it also took 10 days to do it,” Alyssa explained. “With work and life and everything I needed something that was a little bit more doable with the schedule I have right now. So I thought, ‘Hey, we just moved to Walpole, I don’t know a whole lot other than the street I live on,’ and so I thought ‘Why not? It would be kind of cool.’”
The idea is something other runners have done in the past, and is sometimes picked up by hikers as well who decide to hike all of the trails in a certain geographic area. Alyssa tried to find a map of Walpole online, but had a hard time finding one she could print out. “I started in April because we went down to town hall and got our marriage license and a map of Walpole,” she said. Since then, she’s been highlighting the streets she’s run in what she deems a very old-fashioned way of following her progress.
“It’s a really cool way to get to know the town. You can sort of trace the historical periods of time through the houses in a certain neighborhood, so you have your older houses and then the ranches from the 70s and the bigger houses and the colonials,” Alyssa said.
While she isn’t certain, Alyssa thinks she will reach her goal within the next months. Who knows what lies ahead for the ambitious runner?
