It is November 4th and I walked 1000km in 2021!
(Ok, it’s November 15th and I finished a week and a half ago but I needed my medal to arrive before I posted this)
Last year I did a similar challenge, aiming for 500km of exercise in 2020. I achieved that by September and was very proud. So for 2021, I thought I’d upgrade and the logical next step was 1000km. I could have gone for 500 miles, which is about halfway between the two but for reasons I can no longer remember, I decided to be ambitious and go for the 1000km.
There was a slight hiccup that I didn’t notice until I’d got started. The 500s are for just about any exercise you feel like but for the 1000s and up, it has to be the same form. You walk 1000km or you run 1000km or you swim 1000km or you cycle 1000km or whatever, but you can’t mix it. No way was I going to swim 1000km (or even 500) so it was a walking challenge for me. It was a bit frustrating to see me reach 1000km overall a good month before I reached it on foot and not be allowed to count 63.63km of swimming over the summer or the 30.2km of kayaking and canoeing that I recorded (and there was at least that much again that I didn’t).
After 500km in 2020, doubling that and not including swimming seemed like a daunting prospect. I’d have to make my daily walks much longer, I’d have to do regular Serious Long Walks. I’d be pushing it right into December. But actually, it’s all been quite attainable. Not easy – I have indeed had to make special efforts and keep an eye on my monthly mileage and there are definitely a few longer walks I’d rather not have had to do but on the whole it sits absolutely perfectly in that gap between “challenging” and “not demoralisingly difficult”. I’ll be doing it again next year. Upgrading to the 1000 miles challenge would be too much – that’s 1600km (134km per month) and I think I’d just fall further and further behind each month and give up on it by March. But 1000km is just right, with a promise of another shiny medal at the end if I achieve it again. And I will, and maybe I’ll do it even earlier. Aim for October and hope to do it by September. Oh yes.
But here I am with 1000km walked! And it’s only mid-November and I’ve submitted the evidence and received my medal!
I had a spreadsheet. I’m a data analyst; of course I had a spreadsheet. I divided the year up evenly. To walk 1000km in a year meant 84km each month. Well, technically it’s 83.33km but I deal in whole numbers, thank you. Since May 2020, I walk 2km a day, come hell or high water and I still haven’t broken that streak. But you can see that the numbers don’t add up. 30 or 31 days x 2km does not make 84km in a month. Don’t worry, those are minimums. Minimum 2km a day, minimum 84km a month. Most of my ordinary evening walks are between 2.2km and 2.5km and I have a few variants that go up to 3.2km. And of course, I have to do at least one longer walk per month, usually two, to top those up.
My dad was very invested in me achieving this target. I measure it with Strava and I like to do their monthly walking challenge virtual badge. It’s usually only 50km so I pick that up automatically on my way to my 84 so it’s hardly a challenge. January is never a normal month, though. In January Strava decided to challenge us to 100km “to get the year off to a good start” and my dad nagged me for a longer walk just about every weekend to make sure I got that 100km badge and 10% of my annual challenge completed in a single month.
You see, he’s a bit like having an overgrown Labrador. Eats anything in sight, makes a mess and needs to be taken out for regular exercise. Not every day or even every week and he’s missed entire months because of his precious buses. But sometimes he wants to go for a longish walk and he doesn’t go on his own. No, I have to go too because it’s me who “needs the mileage”. And I admit, without him at least 100 of my 1000km wouldn’t have happened just yet and I’d be more in line with my meticulous plan, trying to do those last 2km on New Year’s Eve instead of having that medal safely around my neck by mid-November.
My good months, as you can see, were January, March, June (in June I had some Girlguiding Sussex East county walking challenge badges to complete, so that gave me another extra boost towards my 1000km) and October. I knew I wouldn’t actually finish in October without some extra extra-long walks but I made an effort to get as close as I could. I swapped a lot of my ordinary daily walks for the longer variants and I did a few walks that were a bit longer than usual, which meant I hit my target 84km on the 24th. I daresay I’d done something similar three times before but with my 1000km looming on the horizon, it felt like I’d given myself a free week of bonus mileage. Could I sprint to the finish line by the weekend?
…no.
No, I still had 10 or 12km to go on Sunday night and that was never going to get done on winter work days, when I have to go out in the dark and cold in the evenings. Winter daily walks are, by necessity, a bit on the shorter side and I have to make up for them at weekends. But I did manage a bit of a miracle. On the 4th, my due date as it were, I still had about 5km to go. No way can I do 5km in the dark on the local streets of an evening. However, my ex-chief accountant at my old job had messaged me to ask if I wanted a pile of old payslips and having failed to pick them up the week before, I went on the 4th, the one day of the week she works from home and is easily and readily available. She lives just down the road from me and that gave me 1.56km at lunchtime, which left me with a little over 3 still to go.
I didn’t think I was going to do it. I thought I’d be getting up on Friday morning for a circuit of the dogwalking field so I could apply for my medal before going out for my real walk. If I could reduce that as much as possible, that would be good. I wouldn’t do one of my ordinary dark-evening 2.2km walks, I’d do the 3km circuit via the road out of town. It wasn’t pitch black, I could do it for once.
I usually turn left out of my house and do various variations on a few circuits. Then, 20m down the road, I realised if I turned right and went the long way round to the beginning of my 3km circuit, I could add a bit more to it. It was just enough. On Thursday 4th November, my evening walk was 3.81km. I can’t remember exactly what I needed that day so I can’t remember how much over my total 1000km it went; probably just a couple of hundred metres, but I’d done it. I’d done it on my due date. I’d walked more than 5km in total on a dark cold November work day and I’d completed my 2021 walking challenge!
1000km! Of just walking! Medal applied for! I’d doubled what I did last year! It sometimes crosses my mind that there’s a lot of people I follow who could do this in a month or two, to whom my achievement is absolutely nothing. I also think they’re the kind of people who’d be the first to tut-tut those thoughts and congratulate me. And let me just clarify: these are all walks where I’ve put on my shoes, switched on Strava and gone outside. These are not “daily steps as I go about my life”. These are deliberate walks. More than that, these are deliberate walks that I have recorded and then listed in a spreadsheet. The walking is one thing. The admin is another. You have to provide evidence and as I needed to separate out my swimming, kayaking and walking, a simple screenshot of my Strava training calendar wouldn’t be enough.
I know a lot of people say “if I can do it, anyone can!” and it’s very annoying because a lot of the time, anyone can’t – you know, “I bought a six-bedroom house in London at the age of 22 and if I can, anyone can (as long as their parents give them a couple of million pounds and a free flat to rent out)!”, that sort of thing. But in this case, I think it’s true. A lot of people, if not exactly everyone, can fit a twenty-minute walk into their life every day and a longer one sometimes at the weekend. I’m not always enthusiastic about my daily walk but it’s probably a good thing to have a break from screens and get regular, albeit quite gentle, exercise and fresh air. Get to know your local area. Discover allotments and meet cats and watch the seasons affect roadside trees. And then discover that it all adds up to enough to get a medal as a reward for your efforts.
I’ll see you in October with 2022’s medal!