Wednesday 1 December 2010

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