Running the bridges of Stockholm

When I was living in Stockholm and running was my main outdoor sport, I came up with an idea. Stockholm is built on islands and I run around Stockholm, why not run across all the bridges? I thought about the idea for a while and then started semi-systematically running the bridges – “collecting bridges”.

To make the plan clear I needed some definitions.

Bridge. Many kinds of constructs can be called bridges. In this project, a bridge needs to connect to distinct land masses (an island to another island, mainland to island etc) over water. Things like piers would not be bridges nor bridges crossing railways or streets (if they at the same time don’t cross water).
Stockholm. Stockholm means multiple geographical areas. In this context geographical limitation would loosely be Stockholms innerstad (Stockholm City Centre), i.e. the bridges within it and connecting it to other geographical areas. Stockholms kommun (Stockholm city) could have been another possible limitation, but because of the definition of a bridge, this wouldn’t add much more bridges, since the excluded areas are mostly “inland” and don’t have bridge, e.g. Skärholmen and Skarpnäck.
Running a bridge. To run a bridge (to “cross a bridge”) I’d run the bridge from one end to another end, one direction is enough. If the bridge comprises multiple bridges (e.g. Västerbro) or some other way is more complex (e.g. Kungsbron), crossing one of the bridges would suffice.
Evidence. I’d take a photo of each crossed bridge and record all the crossings to a Google sheet with the date, name of the bridge (if there is one) and the photo.
Freshness. I had crossed many bridges in Stockholm already before the project. These wouldn’t count, but all the bridges would need to be re-collected.

With the definitions in mind, in practise collecting bridges worked so that when going for a bridge collecting run I’d create a route crossing bridges in Garmin Connect, upload the route to my watch and run the route. I don’t know Stockholm well enough to run without a route. En route I’d take a photo of each previously uncollected bridge. Later I’d update the Google Sheet. This way little by little the Sheet would fill up.

To make things slightly easier I actually first created the sheet with all the bridge names to be able to track which bridges remain uncollected. In practise I found more bridges while running.

In the blog post the bridge are grouped by the source, from smaller to bigger. This means that a bridge connecting islands A and B would be defined as bridge of A if A was smaller. A bridge connecting island A to the mainland would be defined as a bridge of A, after all A is smaller than the mainland.

With this all I can present all the bridges of Stockholm I run grouped by where the bridge location. I think I ran them all.

Happy reading!