Richard Boxhall knows Victoria’s streets better than most people.
He knows where free little libraries are located, where the hilliest streets are concentrated and even where a cow lives in someone’s front garden.
He’s seen it all, because he challenged himself to bike every single road in Victoria this year. He reached his goal last weekend.
Asked why he took on the challenge, Boxhall can only quote a line often associated with Everest climber Edmund Hillary.
“Because it’s there. There’s no real reason,” he said.
But he finds joy in discovering quirky parts of the city.
Like the cow he found in a yard outside a house near Blenkinsop Road. Boxhall was so surprised to see the bovine that he drove by the house a couple of days later to check if it was still there. It was.
“That’s what I take from this. There is a cow living in someone’s yard in Victoria,” he said with a laugh. (It should be noted that Boxhall’s definition of Victoria includes the municipalities of Victoria, Oak Bay, Esquimalt and parts of Saanich — roughly wherever a rented bicycle can go.)
Cycling every road is a lot more work than it might sound, because Boxhall was constantly doubling back on himself and riding the same bit of road twice or more in order to hit every single street.
He totalled more than 100 hours of riding and 1,500 kilometres, which you can see in the video illustration below.
“Four entire days of my life just spent cycling around the streets,” he said. “If you think of it as a job, I’ve done an additional three weeks of time.”
That’s on top of working full-time, parenting a toddler, training for a triathlon and all the biking he does regularly as a commuter. His daily ride to work at Victoria Shipyards adds up to more than 100 kilometres a week.
Boxhall started the challenge in February, during a rare snowy spell. A friend suggested the idea of cycling every street, and Boxhall rolled with it. A fan of setting challenges for himself — he also hiked up Mount Douglas 43 times in 24 hours to support muscular dystrophy research and earned $1,000 busking as a one-man band — Boxhall upped the ante.
He decided he would ride the streets on a rented bike, because he wanted the challenge to be about experiencing the city, not setting a killer pace. He often rides a U-bicycle, which he finds dotted around the city wherever the last user finished their trip.
When he started the challenge, he had to set a few parameters, most importantly deciding what counts as a road. He came to the conclusion that any street with a name is fair game.
Boxhall has his phone set up on his bike and uses an app to track his rides. He decided early on to stick to right turns as much as possible to keep things simple, and rides mostly in loops.
No-exit roads are the bane of his existence, especially when they come at the top of a hill, because he’s forced to ride all the way up just to come back down.
“I normally like riding uphill. But it’s just so soul-destroying when you just go up and down hills,” Boxhall said.
There have been low points, like the time he had to cycle the same street five times while soaked to the bone, because the rain caused his app to malfunction.
“Even though I’d cycled it, I wanted to be able to prove I’d cycled it,” he said.
He’s not sure he’d recommend the challenge to anyone else, but said it’s been an adventure and a good conversation starter.
“It beats watching Netflix, I guess,” he said, pausing.
“Sometimes.”
One of the many things he discovered over the year is how many parks there are in his neighbourhood that he’d never known about. He plans to check them out more thoroughly with his dog in 2020.
He’s not sure what his next challenge will be. With a second child due at the end of January, he’s thinking he’ll keep it simple for now.
“I was thinking of trying to learn French.”
