A few people have asked me how we’re tracking the “walk to Mordor” challenge my fiance set up for us this year. I asked him, and he is happy for me to share what we’re doing!
This was all inspired by The Conquerer Virtual Challenges, which I’ve decided to pay to do this year. They have offered an officially licenced series of LOTR medal challenges for a few years (judging by how long I’ve been getting targeted ads for them). Personally, I’m not at all interested in LOTR, but I am interested in Star Trek, so I’ve paid this year to work through a couple of Trek-themed challenges myself! I am personally very excited to get my medals!
Meanwhile, the fiance was also interested in incentivising himself to walk more this year, but he’s not interested in the pretty medals or paying £30-40 a challenge for the full virtual experience so he decided to come up with his own way of doing it using Google Sheets!
Google Sheets has the advantage of being free and we can share the link so that our friends can join in, and we can all see each other’s progress. Plus, since it’s a spreadsheet there are lots of cool ways you can play with the data.
Our group decided that steps were how we wanted to track the distance. So there is an average steps-to-miles calculation happening in the background. I think that’s based on my (6’1 tall) fiances’s last few years of data tracked by his phone, so likely not super accurate but close enough for this bit of fun. It should be easy to adapt if you want to tailor it to your own step-to-mile calculation.
I’ve unhidden the reference tabs so you can play about with the calculations and see how this works. There are references for the location distances and miles per step and for the running total displays. He also built a tab with a Map overlay that plots you on the map, but that will only work if you view it on a desktop! I have no idea how he did all this, but I was very impressed with the effort that went into it!
If you’re not interested in the “behind the scenes” or making adjustments just hide the last three tabs, all you need to access are the first three!
I am told the data for the locations and distances he got from the LOTR Project, specifically “eyeballing” this insanely cool graph. They have a tonne of other resources on this website, I can see they have a donation button on their website so I’ll chuck them a few quid!
For some reason, I had in my head that this was 1,000 miles but now I’m looking at the data properly it’s 1,784 miles from The Shire to The Crack of Doom! I don’t think I’m going to get all the way there in a year, maybe by the end of 2026!
The final added touch our challenge group is getting, inspired by the “postcards” you get with The Conquerer Challenges, is that he also set up a Signal group chat where he posts a weekend update on how everyone is doing, including a quote from the books! I’m afraid I can’t offer you that service though!
I’ve made a copy of the Google Sheet available here. (Hopefully, you can access this to download a copy, let me know in the comments if I fucked it up!).
I left some data in there so it’s easy to see what’s happening. Obviously, you should just delete that and replace it with your own!
Let me know if you decide to use this, I know Fiance is tickled that people have been asking about it!
Thanks. This looks great. And no problem making a copy. I don’t track my daily steps, but it looks easy to modify to convert kilometres to miles if I decide to use it to track walks and cycles.
Thanks for sharing this! That’s some very impressive Google Sheets skills. I’ve been using the spreadsheet for just over a month and realised I’d have to update the chart – which I’ve now managed, but Google Sheets wasn’t making it easy.