What began in January of this year, has finally come to an end. It took me 11 months and 2 days to finally walk the distance Frodo walked from Bag End to destroy “The One Ring” in Mordor. 1,779 miles, which is approximately 3,543,997 steps! My Walk to Mordor challenge is finally over (and I did it better than Frodo because I still have all ten of my fingers)! I think next year I will try for the extra 1,625 miles, which is essentially from Minas Tirith back to Bag End, so I guess I will have to update my little calculator on my website to include those milestones. Since I got a bit of a late start this year and I didn’t start exercising consistently in the mornings until July, I think I have a pretty good shot at completing the extra distance.
So 1,779 miles is the hypothetical distance between Bag End and the point inside Mount Doom when Frodo destroyed the ring. I’m sure most of you, like me, probably can’t fully appreciate that distance in terms of two fictional locations, so I did some research to find some actual locations. I used the map coordinates of Cincinnati as my starting point and I picked the more interesting locations and points of interest that would be within that distance. So, after having walked 1,779 miles, I could have essentially walked from Cincinnati to …
[table]
Location,Distance,Direction
El Salvador – San Salvador,1772 miles,South
Canada – Nunavut – Coral Harbour,1731 miles,North
Canada – Alberta,1689 miles,Northwest
Dominican Republic – Santo Domingo,1669 miles,Southeast
Phoenix – Arizona,1581 miles,West
[/table]
There are several more locations that are within that distance, but I just picked a few to give the distance some perspective. I found the following website to find these distances. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/distances.html?n=414. I don’t have any reason to question if the calculations on this site are legitimate so I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Anyway, since I am going to do this again next year, who will be brave enough to do it with me?? I can add you to my calculator to help you keep track of your progress if you like. Frodo didn’t do it alone, so why should I!
/cheers
I could get so much more accomplished if I only had minions!
Back in January of this year I told folks on Facebook that I was going to participate in the Walk-to-Mordor Nerd Fitness challenge. I can’t remember how I originally found out about this challenge. I feel like I read about it on someone else’s feed and searched for it on Google. I found most of the logistics from a blog site called