Marion employee hits the streets — all of them

MARION — A Marion city employee decided to get to know his city this year one street at a time.

Thomas Doyle, Marion’s environmental specialist, ran cross-country when he went to Linn-Mar High School but fell out of the habit during and after college. This year, he found a way to motivate himself to get running again — by setting a goal to run on every street in Marion.

“I learned that I really hadn’t explored much of the city when I was in high school. I lived in Robins, but I went to school in Marion. Even with doing cross-country in high school, there was probably 90 percent of the city that I had never visited before,” Doyle said.

Between Jan. 1 and Nov. 5, Doyle went on 101 runs, running a total of 713.5 miles in 89.6 hours, according to a city news release about his accomplishment.

Each run started and ended at Doyle’s house and took him only on city streets — not using trails for shortcuts. The longest run was 13.3 miles and the shortest was 2.3 miles.

“I hadn’t really been running at all recently, when I started, so I wasn’t in the best of running shape. I was struggling to knock out 2 or 3 miles, so at the beginning I knew there was no chance I was going to do any of the areas that were farther away,” Doyle said.

“The beginning was dedicated to just getting all the residential streets around my house, and then I was hoping that I would get in good enough shape by the end of it to run those 12 and 13 milers, and luckily I did,” he said.

Toward the end of the project, Doyle said there were several runs where he repeated an already accomplished route for most of the run just to cover a couple miles of untouched road on the city’s outskirts.

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The idea for the run came from an article Doyle saw about someone who ran every street in Salt Lake City.

“Since Salt Lake City is a lot bigger, though, they had to start at different places. I was thinking about Marion and I thought, Marion is probably small enough I could just do all of it from my house. And that would look pretty cool on a map,” he said.

Doyle made an animated map of his runs, which he updated monthly, showing the speed at which he completed each route. He made it using a free geographic information systems, or GIS, software, which he said was a learning experience.

“I had used GIS enough where I could put together a normal map, but I hadn't dealt with animations or trying to make a map that actually looks nice before. Most of my stuff had just been doing spatial analysis, so I hadn't really tried to put together a product that actually looked nice and let alone one that was animated,” Doyle said.

Doyle uses GIS software in his work as the city’s environmental specialist as he tracks information about the city’s stormwater sewers and what the city is releasing into the Cedar River. But for his running project, he didn’t have access to the paid software that he uses at work, so he had to get comfortable with a new program.

“It seems simple now, but just learning all the very simple tasks is confusing when you’ve never used the interface before. But I was really happy with how it ended up,” Doyle said.

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Doyle has been working as Marion’s environmental specialist since May 2022. He got his undergraduate degree in environmental science from Iowa State University and a master’s degree in geology from the University of Iowa, and has worked as an environmental intern at Braun Intertec Corporation. Doyle is the city’s first environmental specialist, but it’s a common job in cities across Iowa.

“At the end of the day, my role is to make sure that our city is in compliance with our stormwater permit from the (Iowa Department of Natural Resources). It sounds a little more boring when you saw ‘stormwater compliance,’ but at the end of the day, that’s generally what it is. All the storm sewers go to the rivers and people tend to not know that, so we have had stuff getting in the rivers and my job is pretty much to help reduce the amount of pollution,” Doyle said.

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