Joabe Barbosa tied a Chicago flag around his neck and ran toward Buckingham Fountain on Sunday morning, becoming the first person known to have run every street in Chicago. He had been working at it since 2024.
The final stretch started at Oak Street Beach and ended on Michigan Avenue, with hundreds of supporters running alongside him, many wearing Chicago flags of their own, ABC7 Chicago reported. Barbosa, a 25-year-old clinical psychology doctoral student at Roosevelt University, covered more than 4,000 miles across all 77 of the city’s neighborhoods over 680 days, averaging roughly 8.7 miles a day. There is not a single block within the city’s 234 square miles he has not run.
“The streets aren’t going to run themselves,” Barbosa has said, a line he repeated throughout the project.
The Brazilian-born, London-raised grad student only picked up running in 2024, after a mountaineering accident in New Hampshire. Doctors told him to keep moving as part of his recovery. He found the sport “extremely boring” and started exploring different streets and neighborhoods, logging his routes on Strava and CityStrides to make it more interesting. When he learned no one had run every street in Chicago, the unclaimed record was too tempting to skip.
Barbosa already holds three Guinness World Records, including the fastest time to travel to all Chicago subway stations. He has also run a half marathon in rain boots, and another in a giant inflatable bee costume. He calls these “sidequests” and documents them on Instagram, where more than 85,000 followers have tracked his progress.
Running every street is harder than it sounds. Barbosa eventually stopped thinking in streets and started thinking in neighborhoods, accounting for every dead end and cul-de-sac so he wouldn’t have to circle back. Western Avenue alone, the longest road in the city, runs 27 miles. He does not own a car, and often spent more than an hour each way on public transit just to reach a starting point. On at least one night, rather than make the trip home and back, he slept on a bench outside, Runner’s World reported. His longest outing was a 50-kilometer loop around O’Hare International Airport, run mostly in the dark, from 8 p.m. to past 2 a.m.
That kind of near-daily double-digit mileage is not for most runners, even most ultramarathoners.
“There’s this gritty, steady beauty of it,” Victor Gutwein, who founded the Chicago Completionist Club Barbosa joined, said of the project. Gutwein has logged 38 percent of Chicago since 2020. “It’s like a mind-numbing curiosity and persistence that a lot of people don’t understand.”
The project also took Barbosa through neighborhoods many Chicagoans tend to avoid, including O-Block in Woodlawn and Englewood on the South Side. He posted about both as places where people live, not as backdrops for a stunt. In Englewood, he met a man named Jerome, returned to run the neighborhood with him, and brought along a Chicago flag to give him.
“I went out to different neighborhoods in the winter, nothing happened to me. I went out to different neighborhoods in the summer, nothing happened to me,” Barbosa told CBS Chicago. “People were being so, so nice to me. Every single neighborhood in Chicago deserves respect.”
The project nearly ended in March, when Barbosa learned he had gone unmatched for the clinical internship required for his degree and his student visa. He shared the news with his followers through tears. A GoFundMe raised more than $8,000, hundreds of people sent messages, and several tagged Mayor Brandon Johnson asking if anything could be done. Roosevelt University eventually came through with a teaching assistantship that secured his visa through 2028, a relief that arrived as Chicago was still feeling the effects of Operation Midway Blitz, the federal immigration operation that swept the city earlier this year.
While he waited on an answer, he kept running. “I viewed it as an opportunity to focus on what I could control,” he said.
Asked by ABC7 Chicago to pick a favorite neighborhood, he refused. “That’s like asking a parent what their favorite kid is.” The mayor joined him for part of a run on a bike, he told the station. The governor walked with him.
Barbosa is not stopping. He plans to take on a new big goal: running every street in Los Angeles, then chasing the Guinness record for the fastest time to all New York City subway stations. He also expects to return to Chicago, where new streets keep getting built.
“They’re going to build more roads. They’re going to build more streets,” he said. “That’s what makes it fun. I’m never going to be finished.”
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