I’m going to walk a thousand miles this summer. That fact makes me feel unequivocally good.

I’ve walked 200 miles before, on the coast-to-coast path across Cumbria and Yorkshire (read about that here, if you like). It took two weeks, and we figured out – my walking buddy, Sarah*, and I – that we walk at around two miles an hour, over the day, including breaks and periods of ambling. So, I can assume that I will be spending 500 hours this summer just putting one foot in front of the other. I’m not ready in many ways (donkey hates me, website’s a bit thin, Facebook account not set up yet, kit not yet purchased, missing four maps from the set, not yet sure whether to go clockwise or anti-clockwise, etc), but in terms of the simple act of walking, I am raring to go. Especially as a burst of uncharacteristically forceful February sun just flung itself into my studio.

Nice old map I found in a bookshop. Pre-Google. pre-Amazon, musty and delicious

167 fish & chips

Walking uses something like 100 calories per mile, so I’ll burn 100,000 additional calories over the walk. That’s 167 portions of fish and chips, or 556 welsh cakes, or 600 bowls of porridge. According to this man, a human being runs at about 40 miles per gallon of ordinary food, so I’ll be needing 26 gallons of food.

Two miiiiillion steps

The average person’s stride is two and a half feet, so that’s 2000 or so steps in a mile (not taking into account that I’ll often be doing mincy steps up narrow paths, or sideways leaps across puddles, or walking back to get the munching donkey). So that’s two million steps.

People sometimes ask, once they’ve asked all of the the other frequently asked questions, whether I’m going to do any training, and the answer is no. I’ve got two million steps and five hundred hours of walking to do – surely that’s plenty!

* Sarah had a baby. I’m acquiring a donkey. That’s all.