This could be a good quiz question for the Needham Trivia Bee: How many streets are there in town? The answer, according to the town, is 538 and Needham resident Abe Ringer is hoping to run as many of them as possible. It’s his fun way of training for the 129th running of the Boston Marathon. “Very quirky,” he said. “But if you’re crazy enough to run a marathon you’re probably crazy enough to do this.”
Ringer said when he first moved to Boston over a decade ago, he had no interest in marathoning. But he and his wife took the MBTA to Boylston Street to watch the Boston Marathon one year and they experienced the magic. “We were there during the heart of the marathon, the 4- to 5-hour finish,” he said. “We were overwhelmed. It was so beautiful and emotional; nothing like we had ever seen.” That was the beginning of his Boston Marathon journey.
For his third (and last, he said) marathon Ringer decided this time he wanted to abandon the podcasts and audiobooks on his runs and do something different. “There are 150 miles of streets in Needham. That’s approximately from here to Conway, New Hampshire. It just makes the run more interesting to be able to go down all these streets and neighborhoods and see things you haven’t seen before.”
Ringer, 46, wears a Garmin tracker that feeds his running data directly into an application called CityStrides. “It tells you every street you’ve done and what you’ve covered and what’s left to do,” he said. In order to experience a flow, he tries to plan his route in advance so there isn’t a lot of simply running up and down streets. At the end of each run, a typical conversation with his wife goes like this: “How was your run?” “Great,” he responds. “I got 20 new streets!”
Ringer has discovered Needham is shockingly hilly, a good thing for marathon training. “On my last 18-mile run it was 1,000 feet of elevation gain. To give you an idea, the Boston Marathon has only an 800-foot elevation gain on the entire course.” Sounds like the observation of someone detail-oriented. Ringer is a financial planner who admitted, “We are goals-based people and I have multiple goals.” One of his key Marathon goals is to raise money for the Hale Reservation, which brings Boston kids to its Westwood campus each summer to enjoy an outdoor camp experience.
Ringer said he enjoys the neighborhood feel of Needham and loves that most people say “Hi” or nod when he runs by. But one thing surprised him. “When we all stay in our own neighborhoods,” he said, “we kind of assume the whole town looks exactly the same as our neighborhood, and when you start exploring a little and seeing the whole community of Needham it’s a lot more nuanced and can be different from YOUR neighborhood.” Ringer said he’s learned there are a ton of businesses in Needham which you would otherwise not know about. They run the gamut from TripAdvisor to a small business tucked away at the end of Reservoir Street called Star Fencing Academy.
He has a little advice for all Needham residents: “Get out and just take a different road, walk down a different street or go to a different neighborhood and just check it out. You might be surprised.”
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