The Maths

In the Julie & Julia project Julie Powell set herself the challenge of cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Childs’ cookbook in 365 days. My own challenge lay in translating that idea into a walking and cycling project.

Doing something every day towards completing it was going to be a vital element – both in order to keep the momentum going (see my ‘Cornwall Project’ above...) and to actually complete the mileage in a year (ditto).

So – the idea about walking around the village didn’t seem so very silly after all. I already knew that the circuit starting and finishing at my front door was 2 miles and took me about 35 minutes – a manageable distance, even on a working day, and great for general fitness. I once reduced my blood pressure, dropping it out of the ‘borderline high’ zone, by doing exactly that walk regularly for 4 weeks.

365 days x 2 miles = 730 miles

Now was the time, I decided, to look up the actual mileage - and I uncovered the first flaw in my thinking: I hadn’t taken into account the difference between driving the distance, and walking or cycling it. 

If I were really doing it I would want a reasonably quiet, scenic route and not necessarily the shortest.

The distances given on various “go on, ask me another!” websites range from 616 to 1,000 miles, but one bonus was that the search led me to the ‘Jogle and LeJog’ homepage and I was thrilled to discover that I have plenty of virtual company - and of course there is an echo of ‘Julie & Julia’ in the name.

I decided it would be fairest if I asked my friends Jill and Ian (who have twice cycled End-to-End – really) to share their routes with me. That involved an invitation to supper to explain the reason for my request, and so the next two features of my project sprang into existence - 

1) Involving other People

and

2) Food

How it all began

It was watching the film Julie & Julia that got me thinking. 

What fun it would be to have a project – something that you decide to do and keep doing, and then eventually finish. And then you’ve done it. You get the satisfaction of having completed it - and then the pleasure of being terribly boring and nauseatingly triumphant about it. 

But what could I do? I had plenty of ideas: “go on a weekend break to every European capital city”; “go to a performance in every major opera house in the world” - but I couldn’t consider anything that involved any great expense. My redundancy kicks in at the end of February 2011 and there’s nothing new in the pipeline yet. (The project could of course be “Get a new job” but, hey, that sounds way too sensible).

It must have been around the time of Chris’s wedding that I found myself sitting in the kitchen with the kids, tossing the idea around. And then it just sort of happened - the project came to me – fully-formed, as it were.

I’ll walk from Land's End to John O’Groats and cycle back again but (and this is crucial) simultaneously, and ‘not really’.

It was a ‘eureka’ moment and I shared it enthusiastically with the kids. They in turn exchanged furtive glances, their fingers twitching in the direction of the phone. “Isn’t Mum a bit too young for senility? Early onset maybe?” They looked increasingly perplexed when I suggested that I might carry out the project without ever leaving the village – and their anxiety intensified when I started to calculate how many times I would have to walk around the village per day in order to complete the mileage in a year. (Little did we realise that within the week I would trip up and break my arm, thus consigning myself to a period of car-less-ness that severely restricted my walking options.)

With a cruelty that only kids (of any age) can muster they reminded me of my ‘current’ project. “Weren’t you going to walk the Cornwall coast-path, Mum, in this decade of your life?” “Isn’t that why the walls on the upstairs landing are papered with OS maps of Cornwall?”

“Yes”, I sighed. “But I’m more than halfway through the decade and nowhere near halfway round the coastpath. I keep repeating the sections I love – and I just can’t get down to Cornwall often enough. And then there’s the cost – the petrol, the B&B or campsite – not to mention the logistics of doing a linear rather than a circular walk – timing the buses, doing the ‘2-car trick’ with a companion etc.”

So – if the distance is 1,000 miles (I haven’t actually checked that yet...) how will I walk end-to-end (and cycle back) in a year (simultaneously, but not really)? 

Watch this space.