Rickey Gates is a professional athlete and endurance runner known for redefining what it means to explore on foot. After racing at an elite level, he ran 3,700 miles across America and later completed every street in San Francisco. Nearly seven years later, Rickey is tackling his latest challenge: identifying and running 50 Classic Trails across North America. His adventures go beyond distance—they are a way for him to explore, connect, and see the world in a whole new light.
Rickey Gates is a professional athlete and endurance runner known for redefining what it means to explore on foot. After racing at an elite level, he ran 3,700 miles across America and later completed every street in San Francisco. Nearly seven years later, Rickey is tackling his latest challenge: identifying and running 50 Classic Trails across North America. His adventures go beyond distance—they are a way for him to explore, connect, and see the world in a whole new light.
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Shelby Stanger:
Professional athlete Rickey Gates isn't your typical runner. While he started his career racing at an elite level, he's always dreamed of crossing huge landscapes at his own pace. Rickey is now making those dreams a reality. In 2017, he ran 3,700 miles across America. The following year he spent a month and a half running every single street in San Francisco.
Rickey Gates:
How many miles of streets are there in San Francisco? And I just Googled it right then and there, and it just came up immediately, 1,173 miles of street in San Francisco. I'm like, "Oh, that's like going from Denver to San Francisco on foot." That took me six weeks or seven weeks. I think I can do that here.
Shelby Stanger:
Rickey completed that project almost seven years ago, and now he's taking on a new challenge, identifying and running 50 Classic Trails in North America. As with all of Rickey's endeavors, this wild idea is about more than the miles. It's a way for him to explore, connect, and see the world in a whole new light. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. An REI Co-op Studios Production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. Rickey Gates, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. You are a man of many, many wild ideas.
What about running lured you in? You could have been a soccer player, you could have been a motorcycle rider, you could have done anything, but it seems like you were naturally good at running. Did your brothers and sisters run, or was there just something about it that, I don't know, for me, when I found running, it quieted my mind in a way that nothing else did? I think I was born with more energy than the average person, and I had to burn it or it was a little destructive, but also I just loved what my mind did when I ran.
Rickey Gates:
Yeah, so I think that going back to the early years for it is, is that it just, I appreciated team sports, but the solo aspect of running the loneliness of the long distance runner, even though cross country is definitely a team sport, it really comes down to me, the individual and pushing yourself and kind of going inside yourself in a way that I hadn't found with any other sport. And then part of the cross country program that I grew up in Aspen, Colorado, the coach that I had moved to Aspen from, I think Pennsylvania, in order to be on the trails in Aspen, he made sure that we were on the trails at least two runs a week. It was important to him to expose all these high schoolers that might not see those trails otherwise to their incredibly beautiful backyard. So that was really, to me, that was magical.
It was getting out into the mountains, onto the trails, being one with nature, quieting my breath, and to this day, it's the most important thing to me, and looking back on 22-year-old version of myself that would do a two-hour run on a trail and not stop, and the 44-year-old version of myself does that same run and takes a nap on the trail or is seeing which birds are out there or identifying flowers. That same two-hour run now takes me four hours, not because running that much slower, but because the curiosity just keeps getting deeper and deeper about the environment that I'm going into.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm curious where your first big wild idea started. What was it? Was it in college or was there something even before then?
Rickey Gates:
Let's see. I guess it would be kind of in between high school and college. The normal path for so many people is to immediately go on to college. I did exactly that before realizing that I was going to go completely into debt for many decades, paying for that education out of my own pocket. So I took two years off from a school and I traveled down to South America for five months, went to Italy for six weeks, came back to Aspen, worked what I still considered to be one of my favorite jobs that I've had in my life as a backcountry hut maintenance person during the wintertime, and then went back to school. But by that point, the travel bug had very much set in, and so I looked for a study abroad program that I could ride a motorcycle to, and I found one in Valparaiso, Chile and rode my motorcycle from Aspen, Colorado to get to my first class on time.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow.
Rickey Gates:
Yeah, I guess it's been going on a while.
Shelby Stanger:
What is it about pursuing these wild ideas that really lured you in and attracted? Was it knowing that you would grow or was it just like, "Oh, this sounds fun?"
Rickey Gates:
I think the very first one, it sounded fun going to South America for five months, and it was new and scary, and I wasn't too concerned about safety. I remember buying either three or four Lonely Planet guidebooks because the internet was... I was able to send emails back home, but it wasn't a source for where I was going to stay or anything like that while I was traveling around. This is Bolivia, Ecuador, Northern Chile and Peru, and so I just kind of put my trust in those books and just kind of went for it.
The second trip, which was a few years later on the motorcycle going from Colorado to Chile, that one, there were a lot more unknowns. So I would say that trip more than any other trip, just put a lot of faith in myself and into adventure and to embracing the unknown. It's always going to work out some way or another, and kind of getting rid of the fear factor there, maybe not getting rid of it, but acknowledging it and not succumbing to it became super important and really fueled a lot of adventure and crazy ideas that I had going forward from there.
Shelby Stanger:
Riding his motorcycle from Colorado to Chile gave Rickey a taste for long distance travel. He learned that he loves taking it slow, meandering through small towns, quiet back roads and meeting new people along the way. Once he came back to the US, his life started to shift. He had taken a break from cross country running during college, but once he graduated, he decided to return to the sport.
Rickey Gates:
I entered my first mountain race and I met a few people at the finish line that said, "Oh, you should maybe try mountain running." There's the US mountain running team, which I had never heard of before. They're like, "Go out to Mount Washington next year and try out for the team and see how you do." That's where the current path of running started for me.
Shelby Stanger:
Rickey made the team and he spent the next few years competing around the world. Still his fondness for open-ended adventures never went away. Eventually, it led him to a new wild idea, to run across America. Why did you decide to run across America in 2017?
Rickey Gates:
So it had been in my mind for quite some time, and I had also recognized that the desire to compete was waning. Of course, it's not a win or lose sport. We all compete for ourselves, but in reality, if you're pursuing a athletic career and especially in a sport like mountain running or trail running, it is a win or lose sport. People aren't talking about who came in second place, at least they weren't a few years ago. They just talk about the winner, and I just wasn't really quite there anymore and didn't have the desire to chase that top spot on the podium. And so my then girlfriend, now wife, Liz, she was in grad school in Madison, Wisconsin, which left very little room for the relationship for our relationship, which isn't to say that there was much negative about that. Other than that I felt like I wanted to do my own project.
I had intended to do my run across the country regardless of how the election went that year in 2016. When the election went a direction that I didn't anticipate and a lot of my peers didn't anticipate, it just occurred to me that it was going to be a much more interesting run than I had originally thought. And I take an immense amount of joy in planning these trips. I don't lay out an entire route, but I do know approximately where I want to go. I wanted to start in the South because I'd spent very little time in the South. I think that it can be a rather misunderstood part of our country.
I wanted to pursue as many trails, hiking trails as possible, and so I looked for as many trails that were kind of in an East, West trajectory. So I found a lot of trails that I was able to connect up. I know that through hiking trails, the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail are becoming super popular. They have become popular. I think they're amazing. I think that going across the country is a similar sort of feat for those that are curious about people. Curious about the diversity of ecosystems. I went across 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 mountain ranges and then several submountain ranges, the great American desert, just so much out there that I was able to really dive into just based on the way I went about it.
Shelby Stanger:
Rickey started his journey in South Carolina and ended in San Francisco five months later running about a marathon a day for 153 days. All expenses for the trip came out of his own pocket, so he kept things minimal with just a sleeping bag, a thin sleeping, water, food, and a camera. As he ran, Rickey took photographs of the people he encountered. He also met up with a videographer at the beginning, middle, and end of his run. Together they made a beautiful film called Transamericana. Aside from occasionally linking up with that cameraman, Rickey traveled completely alone. He wasn't focused on speed. His priority was to meet people and see the landscape. What did you learn about people?
Rickey Gates:
Almost immediately, it occurred to me, if you're feeling down on people or down on yourself, like a long walk will cure pretty much anything. So much kindness. People stopping by the side of the road, just checking up on me, making sure that I had food, water, complete strangers inviting me into their house, giving me a shower, washing my clothes. I had one gentleman in Arkansas that stopped by the side of the road and he got out of the car. He had a bandage around his arm. It appeared as though he just got out of the hospital, and he comes over to me and says, "I don't know what your cause is, but I want to contribute."
And I'm like, "I don't really have a cause." He's like, "Well, I'm contributing." And he pulled out his wallet and he literally... I saw his wallet. He pulled out every bit of cash that was in his wallet and handed it to me. It was $160, and I was trying to give it back to him, and he pointed to the bandage on his arm, and he's like, "You can see I've been somewhere, but I just need to do this." And I'm like, "All right." So I took the money from him. Just even seven years later I just think about that guy.
Shelby Stanger:
You're going to make me cry, Rickey. That is so sweet. People really are good. And it sounds like what you learned from crossing the country is that we have some different views, but I think most of us are kind and want the same thing.
Rickey Gates:
And it feels important to me. Again, I do think that we need to stay informed about what's happening around the world, but I also recognize that we have never had as much access to information in the entirety of human history as we do right now, and that it's okay to kind of turn that dial down a little bit and receive a little bit less information and go talk to people one on one. And I was exposed to that before, but I never felt it as intensely as I did during my run across the country.
Shelby Stanger:
On August 1st, 2017 Rickey finished his journey across the country in San Francisco, though it was the end of this wild idea. In many ways, Rickey's grand running projects were just getting started. Runner Rickey Gates takes out projects that are less about speed or miles and more about places he goes and people he meets. After a stint as a competitive trail runner, Rickey turned to a different kind of adventure running 3,700 miles across the US in 2017. That journey turned out to be the beginning of Rickey's unique project-based runs, epic adventures that often last more than a month and require extensive planning. So how soon after you ran across America did you have this other wild idea, which was to run every single street in San Francisco?
Rickey Gates:
So finished in 2017. Yeah. The finishing a journey like that without question opens up a massive void in what my purpose was.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, yeah. We talk a lot about this on the podcast. I mean, not enough people talk about these post-adventure blues, but they're real.
Rickey Gates:
They're very real. And the very next day after finishing my run across the country, just kind of psyched to be done, but I was wearing normal clothes again at that point, and I just walked into a store and no one's looking at me here. Something's been kind of taken away from me or something's missing. And so I came to terms with that, but also just recognized I had more in me. I knew what my body was capable of. I knew what my mind was capable of, and I knew that I wanted to do an adventure that was sort of similar to what I had just done, but I didn't want to leave my girlfriend for another month or two months. I wanted to find an adventure close to home. And being that we were living in San Francisco at the time, I just wild ideas. Where did this one come from?
I have no idea, but I had this question, how many miles of streets are there in San Francisco? But I just Googled it right then and there, and it just came up immediately, 1,173 miles of street in San Francisco. I'm like, "Oh, that's going from Denver to San Francisco on foot. That took me six weeks or seven weeks. I think I can do that here." And so then the planning, it just went off from there. Had anyone ever done this before? I'd learned about a guy that had done all the streets in San Francisco over a seven-year period, and I tried reaching out to him, couldn't get ahold of him, but he had left some articles around and it just looked like really cool. And I started looking at all the neighborhoods in the city. I'd lived there for six years at that point, all the neighborhoods in the city that I'd never even set foot in.
And it just occurred to me that there was so much about the city that I had the opportunity to get to know in a similar way that I had just gone across the country that I am like, "All right, I'm going to run every single street in San Francisco." I don't know how this is going to go, but I had a very small Ford transit van, and I'm like, "All right. I'm just going to plant myself out of the van and treat this like a proper mission," and set off, I think it was the day after Halloween from the Golden Gate Bridge and moved very methodically throughout the entire city, neighborhood by neighborhood, covering about 30 to 35 miles a day and print out maps was easier for me at the time to just use print out maps and covered every street in San Francisco. Yeah, it was amazing.
Shelby Stanger:
So when you cover every street in San Francisco, you have to backtrack because you can't just do every street once. It's a maze. So you have to go backwards and then forward and then backward and forward. So you end up running a couple streets twice. It seems like it was a bit of a math problem.
Rickey Gates:
Yeah. Let's see. The math problem is called the Postman Problem, and it is an actual math problem. So if you can imagine a postman going from door to door, they are going to cover every single street, and there's inherent redundancy. So that 1,100 miles ended up being more like 1,350 miles, an additional 200 miles of streets of just backtracking in order to cover all the streets.
Shelby Stanger:
It took Rickey 46 days to run every street in San Francisco. Along the way, he saw new parts of the city that had been the backdrop of his life for the past six years. Each day he ran for about 11 hours and several times a week he spent the night in his van in the city, which made it easy for him to pick up where he left off the previous day. What did you notice as you ran through the city that most people miss?
Rickey Gates:
So much wonderful graffiti and very small graffiti. In particular, I started paying attention to... They're called water plate covers. They're the size of a coaster that you would set your beer down on, and they're on the sidewalks. They're on every single sidewalk, and I'd never seen them before, never really paid attention. And then I started paying attention and recognized that nearly every single one of them has a very small tag on them written in whiteout. And so I imagined someone probably shoplifting a whiteout pen from the office max or wherever, and literally getting on your knees to write your little tag in tiny little letters on this little water plate that 99.9% of people are not even going to see. But it's just kind of like this fulfilling this desire to be seen in the city, even if it's being seen by your own eyes going by that water plate the next day and like, "Yep, there's me. I was here."
So I just started... For me, it became a scavenger hunt through the entire city. Oh, gosh, what other little things there. For that project, it was much more challenging for me to approach people and get portraits of them. I found that not having, I call it a costume, not having the costume that I was wearing while running across the country and the nature of just being in a city, people were more standoffish, less easy to strike up a conversation with. But I did get quite a few portraits of people out there just kind of explaining to people what I was doing. A lot of people just not really believing it and shrugging it off. But you can get a lot out of just being in a neighborhood for an entire day in some of those neighborhoods, being as big as they are, several days, just absorbing the vibe, the feeling of that place.
Shelby Stanger:
Along with the portraits, Rickey also recorded interviews with folks he met as he ran, both are featured in a short film about his project titled, Every Single Street. Rickey's storytelling has attracted partnerships with different outdoor brands. Salomon sponsored his early films, and now he's on Janji's Field team. In fact, Rickey's current project running the 50 Classic Trails of America, came about through his connection to the brand.
Rickey Gates:
Janji actually learned about this project that I have been thinking about and talking about for over a decade, the 50 Classic Trails of America that I had never really gotten off the ground, and they approached me and said, "This is a really cool idea. Let's work together on this and we'll support you on these 50 trails." Three months into working on the project, the co-founder of the company sent me a text message and he's like, "Hey, do you know these guys, Andy Cochran or Ian McClellan?" And I'm like, "No." He's like, "Oh, well, they're also working on a project called the 50 Classic Trails of America." And I'm like, "Oh, no." And he's like, "Do you want to meet them?" I'm like, "I guess." I was hesitant about it. All of these things I've just done on my own, and I was determined to do this one on my own. And so we got a Zoom call together, me and these two other guys, and compared notes, and just recognized that our projects were nearly identical, and we just agreed to work together on this project.
Shelby Stanger:
When are you going to start and which are the 50 classic trails?
Rickey Gates:
So the list is our list, and it's based on the parameters that we agreed on and to differentiate, these trails can all be done in a single day by a strong person. So our shortest trail is 17 or so miles. Our longest trail is the Wonderland Trail, 94 miles in Washington that goes around the base of Mount Rainier. But the happy zone in there is in the 25 to 40 mile range where you're not completing half of the trail at nighttime, that you are enjoying it in its daylight hours. I believe our tally right now is that we've run 37 or 38 of them. So it's a project that's very much happening right now as we speak.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, I didn't know that. That's awesome.
Rickey Gates:
And it's been super fun. Whereas I was in years past training to make sure that I could finish on the podium in a race, in a place where I knew nothing about or maybe didn't speak the language, now I'm training a little bit more casually in order to be sure that I can cover 42 miles in the Southern Sierras in daylight hours. The parameters for me are a lot more approachable and friendly on a trail that I'll spend literally hours and hours and hours finding as much material on that trail and on that region who came before us, settlers, native people who built the trail, what the geology of the trail is like.
So all of these things, it's just like this self-appointed goal of being able to give a little TED Talk about every single one of these trails that I'm doing, and in order to be able to say confidently to a friend or to a stranger like, "Oh, you've got a three-day weekend. This is a bucket list trail. You can go across the country, do this trail, and you will not forget about it for the rest of your life."
Shelby Stanger:
I love that. So you're just flying to these places, running them, going for it, or driving to some.
Rickey Gates:
Yeah, flying, running to them, or driving to some of them. The funnest part about our discussion is deciding which trails are on the list and which are off the list.
Shelby Stanger:
All of your wild ideas seem to have this methodical mathematical ring to them. Why do you think that is?
Rickey Gates:
That's a good question. Yeah, I suppose that's maybe how my brain works. I love numbers. There was a time, I couldn't do it now, but there was a time that I could tell you the exact elevation of every peak that I'd ever climbed. I just loved it. I loved collecting baseball cards growing up. I knew the stats of the baseball players and some of their birthdays. They would just go into my brain and just stick there. For me, if that's what drew me into it was just numbers, then that's fine. If that gets me out onto the trail listening to birds and taking a nap in some Aspen leaves in the fall, then whatever it takes.
Shelby Stanger:
You can find both of the films about Rickey's big runs on YouTube and will link them up in our show notes. Rickey and his colleagues are also working on a book about the 50 Classic Trails in America, and Rickey's photography skills will be on full display. I can't wait to get my hands on it. To follow Rickey's adventures, you can follow him on Instagram, @rickeygates, or on his website, rickeygates.com, that's R-I-C-K-E-Y, G-A-T-E-S. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stangerr, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Motila and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.