A couple of months ago I got a FitBit Luxe. I’ve long used the pedometer on my phone for step tracking, but it’s not always accurate and I don’t always have it on me. (Plus, I really wanted longitudinal heart rate data, which isn’t feasible with something like a phone.)
To “celebrate” having an always-on health tracker, I’m going to start on a project I came across a while back but for which I hadn’t put together the pieces of participation until now: taking the One Ring to Mordor with Frodo.
§ Walking to Mordor and Back
This is most directly influenced by Nerd Fitness’s “Walking to Mordor and Back” Google spreadsheet. It’s a fitness motivation tool that, in turn is based on the Éowyn Challenge. The Éowyn Challenge takes all the traveling various characters do in The Lord of the Rings and breaks it into segments, as shown on their “Walk to Rivendell and Beyond” page. The goal of the Éowyn Challenge is to pick a segment and track your personal progress in traveling the same distance as the characters. Each segment has a breakdown by day and mile of where the characters went and what they did.
Nerd Fitness has taken all of Frodo’s segments from the Éowyn Challenge (Hobbiton to Mount Doom back to Hobbiton and then to the Grey Havens) and put them into a spreadsheet for ease of tracking. They omit all the mile-by-mile details in favor of looking at the overall distance traveled—a bit over 3,600 miles.
§ My Plan
Nerd Fitness’s spreadsheet is designed around having a group of participants and adding their miles to get a total. (Which is not how group travel works, but we’ll ignore that for now.) I’m just going to track myself and see how long it takes me to hit all the landmarks myself. I expect it’ll be significantly longer than it took Frodo.
I have an IFTTT rule to add each day’s fitness summary to a Google spreadsheet. So I added a sheet to my copy of the “Walking to Mordor and Back” document; that sheet just imports all the lines from my FitBit spreadsheet and calculated a running mileage total. I’ve modified the main sheet of the “Walking to Mordor and Back” to automatically pull data from that secondary sheet. It’ll update the mile total and arrival dates all on its own.
With all of that automated, I just have to wear the FitBit and live as usual. As long as I remember to check on the spreadsheet periodically, I’ll be able to see how I’m doing.
I’m starting the mile accumulation today, January 1. Let’s see how long it takes me to finish!