The idea of ‘walking as art’ has been around for a while now, but Rickey Gates pushes things even further—upping the pace to turn running into an artform in its own right. 

Although he started out in the competitive world (winning some of the most notorious trail marathons our planet has to offer), over the last decade he’s pivoted towards a more imaginative strain of athleticism which he dubs ‘conceptual running’.

In 2017 he ran the width of the United States on an unsupported solo-mission which took him from South Carolina to San Francisco. Neither record attempt or brand-backed marketing stunt, his Transamericana project was more like Travels with Charley in a pair of Salomons, as he used the 3,700 mile jaunt as a way to process the country and its people.

A year later he kept things a little more local—zig-zagging around San Francisco with mathematical precision as he ran every single street in the city. Focussing less on time, and more on experience, his projects go beyond the usual metrics running is measured in to delve into bigger and deeper subjects.

With a new book on the way cataloguing the 50 classic trails of the USA, we called him up to talk about this ‘conceptual running’ business and the reality of running across America with a thrift-shop golf caddy…

Before I get into my ‘real questions’, I’ve got to ask, what are all those jars behind you on that massive shelf? 

When I first started travelling about 25 years ago I came home with a bunch of souvenirs from South America. I had this backpack of things that I thought would help me remember the places I’d been, but I didn’t like any of them and I ended up getting rid of all of them. 

After that I started collecting dirt from my travels rather than souvenirs. I’ve got dirt from every corner of the globe now—there are about 230 jars of it. The meaning of a simple object that you purchase in a shop can change over time, but dirt is eternal—or at least it is on a human timescale. It stays the same, so we get to interpret it differently as we grow older.

It’s valueless too. Some souvenirs might accumulate in value so they kind of take on another meaning, but a jar of dirt is always going to be a jar of dirt. It’s strictly about the meaning to you.

Exactly. And if you want to go even deeper, I have two relatives up there as well. My grandma and my wife’s grandma are each in a jar up there too. This wasn’t a project I was anticipating to take the form it was 25 years ago, but it’s a nice way to keep these memories.

That kind of brings me onto what I was going to ask anyway. You’ve described yourself as a ‘conceptual runner’. Can you explain that a bit? 

The term came to me from a dear friend from San Francisco who has been in the art community for his entire adult life. When I was running the ‘Every Single Street in San Francisco’ project, that struck him in particular as a piece of art. 

I hadn’t thought of it like that, but there has always been an element of art in what I do. To me art has always been a form of communication that we use when words fail us—it’s a way to interpret the world either through sculpture or visuals or sound or action. So looking back on my project running all the streets of San Francisco, I graciously accepted that title. 

It’s helped frame further explorations for me in the running world—trying to think about it in different terms. I felt like I had been growing distant from the competitive side of running for quite a while, but then the potential of art just opened up such a humongous world for me. It’s something I can do for the rest of my life—and I’m not talking about on a professional level—but on a level of process and understanding this world and the ‘who’ that I am.

Where did the idea for the San Francisco project come from? 

I’d just ran across the country, and had re-settled down in San Francisco with my then-girlfriend, now-wife. I think my run across the country was a result in part because of a certain level of restfulness—so fast-forward a year and we’re in San Francisco and I’m still living this lifestyle in a grey-area of employment, being a professional runner and not necessarily wanting to get a real job. I was like, “Alright, let’s figure out another big project, but maybe one that doesn’t take me away from home for so long.” 

I literally just Googled how many miles of streets there were in San Francisco—and I saw that it was 1,170 miles. If I was in Mexico city and saw that it was 20,000 miles to do it all, I probably wouldn’t have done it, but San Francisco is so perfectly contained—it’s just seven miles by seven miles.

It’s compact—it’s more or less on a grid pattern—so comparing it to other cities around the world, it’s kind of an easy city to do a project like this in. 1,170 miles to me was immediately like Denver to San Francisco—it was a third of the distance I’d just done, and I could do it in a few months quite easily.

Someone had walked it before, hadn't they? I remember when I was there years ago I saw someone had written in the concrete that they’d walked every street.

Yeah! There were a few different people who had walked it. The first person was a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle—and he did it over the course of six or seven years while living in the city. His articles about the project were still online so it was pretty cool to read them. 

And then there was the gentleman you’re talking about—I think he was a Frenchman—I never saw any of his etchings in the pavement, but other friends saw them and sent me the photographs. But you bring up something that became super-curious to me—this desire for people to leave their mark in the urban environment. It can feel like the city doesn’t belong to you whatsoever, but just scribbling your name down on a piece of metal, saying “I was here, I have a bit of ownership here in this city,” is important. 

I became super-interested in that and started photographing all these small little tags that people were leaving throughout the city. I was amazed to find repeats of these tags—and not just close together either. We’ve got this network, just like the brain has a network or ants have a network—and I could see that on a scale I can comprehend.

How do you start a project like that? I imagine there was a bit more to it than just running down the street one morning. Thinking about maps, are there certain routes that make more sense?

Yeah—the first few days were a humongous learning experience and I quickly learned how exhausting the project would be on a mental level.

I didn’t know about this until just before I started, when I reached out to a couple of friends who had followed a life of mathematics and physics. One of them told me that this was called ’the Chinese Postman problem’. A Chinese mathematician came up with this equation that solves the problem—you’re starting and finishing at the same point, and you’re hitting the streets, not the intersections—how do you get back here with the most amount of efficiency? 

My friend created small computer programs using maps on the internet—and I used those for a while, but it ended up being easier to have a physical map and mark off the streets with a four-colour Bic pen. 

It was actually quite fun—it was like I was playing this game that only I was playing. I can see how people get interested in playing crossword puzzles and stuff like that. But the consequences of me playing my game poorly meant I was adding on miles to my day…

How did a normal day go during the project?

I thought I could do 30 miles a day, so I broke the city down into 45 sections and just picked a spot. I had a mini-van at the time that I could sleep in, so I’d park where I was going to start in the morning, then wake up and get going. I’d do 10-15 miles, then get back to the car and eat some food before getting back out there. 

If I was working through a grid, and there were 12 miles of streets in the grid, then it’d take 15 miles to cover that grid. I had to wrap my head around that, because it’d be frustrating to have to go down the same street two or three times, but there was also something very zen about it, like, “That’s just how long it takes.”

What do you find out about a place by doing such a deep and monotonous expedition through it?

I’d lived in San Francisco for six or seven years by that point—and I thought I knew maybe 3/4 of the city, but it turned out I knew less than 10% of it. I’ve done the project in other places, where there’s definitely the potential for it to be really monotonous, but San Francisco is so diverse—there’s Korea Town, Japan Town, all sorts of different African-American neighbourhoods, and then there’s a Mexican part of the Mission, and an El Salvadorian part of the Mission, and it’s such a beautiful city. It was hard to get bored. 

And there’s the hills too—it’s not flat.

Yeah—I calculated that I climbed Mt Everest five times from sea level in that five weeks.

What was ‘the art’ of the project? Was it the doing, or what came out of it?

That’s the age-old question. I’d certainly say that the doing was the most special part of it. There’s something human in us that wants to have an experience like that, and I’d love to communicate how special it was and can be—so it’s an ongoing thing in terms of what I think the art work is to come out of it. 

I still have around 4,000 photos—all very organised—and I still play around with the GPX files. In a normal setting I don’t usually find a line that interesting, but creating a digital breadcrumb image of a run and having it all fit into a small area is pretty interesting. The way I visualise these is by completely removing the map out of the image so it’s just a line on a white canvas, and I tend to colour it through the rainbow from beginning to end so you can see where the start and the end was. And more importantly you just have an outline of how us human beings built an urban space in what I consider to be a relatively short time—in San Francisco’s case it’s 130 years. And you can interpret a lot from those simple lines of how I moved through the space on a given day. 

The connections you make are important too. I’m doing a similar project here where I live in Santa Fe now. It’s a super-diverse city—and there can sometimes be a bit of a bubble mentality, but this project allows me to soften the bubbles a little bit. Bubbles are comforting for people, but dialogue and communication is really helpful—and by doing this project and understanding how people who live just a couple of miles away from me live is really important for me.

I imagine that was a huge thing on the Transamericana project, where you ran across the USA. I know when people set off on trips like that there’s always naysayers saying things like, “Oh it’s so dangerous out there!” but what was the reality?

I think it’s part of the human condition to be a bit nervous about our neighbours—but without question we live in a time when that can get exasperated, and the media that we consume certainly has a lot to do with that. Going across the country I encountered nothing but kindness and generosity. 

I was specifically going across the country rather than doing one of the long trails because I wanted to have more interactions with people who were unaccustomed to people running past. Going across the country and running all the streets of San Francisco were two very different experiences. When I pulled into a gas station in Kansas wearing running shorts and a teeny little backpack with a three month beard, looking and smelling the way I did, it was pretty clear that I was up to something at the very least interesting, but no one gave me any attention in San Francisco, because it was so hard to stand out in a city of one million people.

What were the logistics of the Transamericana run? I saw you were pushing a pram at one point. 

It was a five month trip covering 3,700 miles—self supported. I started and finished with a small backpack, but there were a few sections where I stand-up paddleboarded—like when I was on the Tennessee River for ten days. I was very fortunate I didn’t flip the SUP because nothing was in bags—it was just exposed out on the front. 

Then when I got to the desert I realised the amount of water I needed to carry was so much that I didn’t want to carry it on my back. So I found a golf caddy at a thrift shop for $5 and outfitted that with a five gallon bucket, and then pushed that for 200 miles. A friend saw my set-up and he mailed out a baby jogger that he’d found at a yard-sale for $40 in Cleveland—I picked that up in Utah and then I pushed that across the desert for 600 miles before switching back to the backpack for the last few hundred miles.

I’ve seen you’re now working on a book, cataloguing 50 trail running routes across the United States. Can you tell me a bit about that? 

I’m working with two other guys on this project, 50 Classic Trails of America. There’s a book called The 50 Classic Climbs of America which came out in the 1970s, and the book itself is a classic. For a long time if you had the book, you were a climber, and if you didn’t have that book, you weren’t a climber. It was almost as simple as that. 

During my time living in Boulder, Colorado I saw how much the climbing community appreciated it—so I started thinking about what a book like that would look like for the running community. I started working on the list back then—it was very rudimentary and I doubt I even made it into double digits, but I remember that the double crossing of the Grand Canyon was on the list, along with the Presidential Traverse in New Hampshire were there. 

Fast forward to three years ago I started running for Janji, an American apparel company. They’d heard me talking about the project some years ago, so we’re like, “Come and join the team and start working on this project, it doesn’t seem like you’re doing it on your own.” 

A couple of months into working on it, Mike asked if I knew these photographers, Ian and Andy, who were starting to work on a project called the 50 Classic Trails of America. We were basically working on the same project at the same time, so after a meeting, the three of us compared notes and decided to give it a try working together. That was two years ago, and currently we have a signed book deal with Rizolli. We’ve run all of the 50 trails, we’ve photographed them and we’ve written about them—so it’s actually coming to fruition after 15 years.

How did you pick the trails? What makes a ‘classic trail’?

We had some parameters. Number one; can the trail be completed in the day. That was very inspiring for me, because narrowing it down to sunrise to sunset, with possibly a few lamp-hours after that, feels like a comprehensible experience to me. 

And number two, do all 50 trails paint an ecological picture of the United States. The Presidential Traverse and the double crossing of the Grand Canyon are very different—one’s very mountainous, one is in the desert—but there are so many environments in between those realms. 

The third parameter focuses on that word ‘classic’. How do you define a classic trail? To me something like the Presidential Traverse is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement that people will tell their grandkids about. How do you capture that experience and tell people, “You thought that was cool? Well, try this...” Is it worth flying across the country for? Is it worth your precious time? Andy, Ian and I have had something like 30 hours of conversation working out which trails we should feature. 

And once you release the book, you’ll be snowed under with people saying, “What about this trail?” These three projects we’ve talked about are very different, but they’re all pretty serious undertakings. Is having something like that going on important for you?

I definitely feel more complete when I have a project in the works—whether it’s thinking about it or researching it or physically doing it or figuring out how to tell the story. I think my project in San Francisco was in part due to an emptiness felt after running across the country—I wanted to have something big again. 

And then with the book project—it’s not as conceptual as the SF project, but equally rewarding. With all this research I feel like I’m in high school again, learning about the geology of all these different places. Reading all these words like ‘Pleistocene’, I wish I’d paid more attention in school. I’m learning so much about these places and what was lost and what still remains. 

With trail running there’s this idea of ‘the FKT’—to be the fastest person to ever do a specific route—and that’s exciting and it brings a lot of new people into the world of wilderness and out onto the trails, but I think it’s way more important to remember all the people who have been on these trails for centuries before us. 

Trails exist because they’re connecting one thing to another thing—I know there’s modern trails that don’t follow that same rubric, but historically trails have connected a water-source to a village, or maybe a village to another village. So many of these trails that we run on in the States have been connecting indigenous populations for thousands of years—and that’s not something I really paid attention to prior to this project, but in researching these trails and trying to tell their story, it’s essential to look into that history. That part has been very rewarding.