My grandmother started walking 5 miles a day when she was 60. She’s 97 today, and we don’t know where the hell she is.
Ellen DeGeneres
The upside to “virtual walking” is never getting lost unless you live in Ellen DeGeneres’ mansion. I picture Ellen yelling, “Marco”, and Portia responding, “Polo.” Their home is beautiful but appears enormous — from what I saw while watching the Ellen DeGeneres show, Home Edition. I could wear out a lot of shoes in that house! Unfortunately, my home isn’t as big as Ellen’s so justifying buying shoes is difficult. However, I still try to justify my shoe shopping because it is walking, after all.
Even though I can’t justify buying more shoes, I enjoyed my “virtual walks” to cities such as Calgary and Edmonton. These “walks” motivated me, aided creativity in other areas of my life such as writing, and I looked forward to my achievements from “virtual walking” each day.
After completing these “walks”, I decided that I wanted a goal that would push my motivation, endurance, and give me, at the very least, virtual bragging rights. LOL. I searched for a goal that would meet these requirements and struggled to find one. Then inspiration struck me at my physical therapist’s office. As I was waiting for my appointment, I scanned this room to see if I can discover anything interesting in it. (I didn’t always want to be on my iPhone!) The most central item in this room was an autographed picture of Rick Hansen. He was seated in front of a desert background, with hands gripped on the wheels of his wheelchair, biceps tensed, bent forward for the first push of his incredible journey. Rick Hansen’s poster inspired me to search his route to see if it was the right fit for me. After looking up the route for Rick Hansen’s world tour, I discovered that he went to several countries, including Canada. I debated about this route and decided that I wanted my route to focus on Canada alone. This decision to focus on Canada lead me to think of another national inspiration – Terry Fox. When I researched Terry Fox’s route, I could not find the complete route. Most sites showed his route up until the place where he was evacuated to face his last battle with cancer. This detail was both frustrating and sad for me. Frustrating, because I wanted to honor Terry Fox and I couldn’t find his complete route to virtually finish it. Sad, because I was reminded that this was the route that took his life.
After searching Terry Fox’s complete route with no results, I tried an alternative search by entering the phrases “virtual walk” and “across Canada”. The results took me to several “virtual walking” apps where I could map my way across Canada. As I shuffled through these apps, I found some apps were too expensive for only drawing a route across Canada. Other apps were far too complicated to try to create a route. I felt like Goldilocks, looking for an app that was just right. As I was about to give up my search, I found an app called “my virtual mission”. It was moderately priced, and after careful examination, I found that it was easy to use. I dropped one marker (a flag) at where I wanted to begin (Prince Rupert, B. C.), and the other marker at where I wanted to end my route (St. John’s, N. L.). Myvirtualmission automatically drew a blue line between these two points. The app asked how many kilometres I felt that could complete in a day and calculated the length of time it would take me to complete this route. I could either manually enter my kilometers under the “progress” tab or sync my Apple health app with it so that it would automatically enter kilometers. I do need to make a confession here. I did sync this app with Under Armour’s “mapmyfitness” app because I thought it might automatically send my kilometers to the “mapmyfitness” app; however, it did the exact opposite. When I had to log kilometres, in my “mapmyfitness” app, I ended up with double the kilometers in my “myvirtualmission” app. At first, I thought of disconnecting the sync between the two apps, but then I thought, “I am not a professional or doing this route for money.” So, I left it. After all, I needed to give myself a break. For me, how I completed the journey was not as important as the actual completion of the journey. And so far, it has been an incredible journey!
