Crawling is a fundamental locomotor pattern that leeches use to move in shallow water. It consists of sequential waves of body elongation and contraction, alternating with attachment and detachment of the anterior and posterior suckers. This stereotyped behavior requires precise coordination across multiple body segments. Previous studies have shown that individual ganglia contain the neural circuitry to generate the sequential elongation–contraction movements, but how these oscillators coordinate across segments remains unknown. To provide a behavioral framework for physiological experiments, we recorded crawling in freely moving leeches. Using ad hoc markers and DeepLabCut, we tracked the kinematics of multiple body regions. We found that elongation in the anterior regions occurred while posterior regions were still elongating, and that elongation propagated from head to tail with deceleration, whereas contraction propagated with acceleration. These findings suggest that elongation and contraction are coordinated by distinct mechanisms. By calculating the displacement of the center of mass during crawling, we found that it shifted backward during elongation and forward during contraction. This suggests that proprioceptive signals may influence how long the leech remains supported by the anterior or posterior sucker.