This time last year I visited the Australian Alps for a week of walking. I’d done similar things after escaping lockdown in December 2020 and December 2021. But this time, it was also the central part of my plan to complete an Everest challenge.

What’s an Everest challenge?

It had all started six months earlier, when my brother talked about a walker he met who said “I try to climb Everest every month”. Not literally climbing Everest, you understand - just having a cumulative elevation change of at least Everest’s height (8,849m) for the month.

That makes nearly 300m vertical each day, so it wasn’t something I could see myself doing in a normal month - but I kept it in mind for when I was next in the Australian Alps. In past trips I’d climbed the likes of Bogong, Feathertop and Kosciuszko and walked long distances across Mount Buffalo, all of which would be over 500m elevation change, and some over 1km (actually, the last time I’d climbed Bogong I’d continued along the plateau to Howmans Falls - making it a 26km walk with 1.8km elevation change - and hadn’t got back to my tent till near midnight).

I decided I should add a horizontal component to the challenge as well, so I set a target of 200km - the same as I had for a company walking challenge a few years back. Though, in retrospect, it should have been abundantly clear that walks with high elevation change were also likely to be longer.

Still anyway, that was the challenge: If within one calendar month I could log a cumulative elevation change of 8,849m, and do it while walking at least 200km, I had completed my Everest challenge.

And December 2023 was the month I’d chosen to try it.

The method

So how did I actually record those stats? It was very simple, really. I didn’t want to be trapped in a particular technology ecosystem (like Strava or Garmin). Also, given I was in remote areas some of the time, I tend to be concerned about the battery usage of such apps anyway.

I just kept track of where I’d been, entered it in Google Maps, and used its reported distance and cumulative elevation change. Where Google Maps didn’t know the exact trails I was taking, I had to try and find the numbers from other sources (most likely Open Street Map). For example, Google Maps didn’t seem to know most of the routes I took in Mount Buffalo, while OSM knows them all.

Choosing the month carefully

Obviously, I wanted to get a head start on the target with a week in the Alps. But I was well aware that would still leave half the target to go, which still meant 1,400m / week - and I was assuming on weekdays 100m / day would be doing well. Yes, I could probably do more on work from home days, but not so much when in the office.

In December the days were longer, so I could go walking after work if I wanted to. But what I was really relying on was 500+m days on weekends - mostly in the Dandenong Ranges or the Yarra Ranges - and long days helped with that.

Finally, the office would be closed between Christmas and New Year, so that gave me a final opportunity to catch up if I really needed to. It wouldn’t have been my preference to do too many high elevation walks in that period - and in the end I only did one - but if I had to, it was on.

Adding stretch goals

When it got to maybe 2/3 of the way through and I was tracking fairly well, something had to change - so of course my mind went “You should make it harder for yourself” 😛. I wasn’t going to actually change the goals (I wanted to make sure I achieved them, after all…), but I was willing to add stretch goals and see how I went with them.

Distance has pretty obvious stretch goals: 250km, 300km, etc. For me, 250km was clearly achievable, but I wasn’t so sure about 300km.

For elevation change, an obvious stretch goal was to reach the 9,000m mark (which only adds about 5m / day…). Then, remembering the commonly quoted factoid “Everest is around 29 thousand feet”, 30,000 feet (9,144m) seemed the next obvious one. Putting those two together would add 300m overall, which seemed fairly achievable.

Then my final stretch goal was 10,000m. I don’t know I really expected to achieve this one. Yes, it would have been cool to be able to say I’d climbed 10km in December, but it was a lot to add to the original 8,849m target at short notice…

The actual numbers

So here’s what I ended up with:
Cumulative elevation change: 9,570m
Distance walked: 289.3km

I said that in retrospect the 200km was going to be a straightforward target. As it was, I reached it on day 22.

To make sure of the elevation change target, I’d organised a 600+m climb in the Grampians for day 28. As it turned out, by the time I’d got there I was only 23m short, so that day I not only completed the challenge but also the first two stretch goals.

With three days left, I could probably have reached the 10,000m if I really wanted to. I only needed another 480m, so one more big walk would have done it. But I was in a flat part of Victoria for those three days, which was why I’d had to ensure I went climbing in the Grampians on my way past.

What I realised was that I’d achieved what I set it out to achieve, and I was happy with that. It wasn’t worth it going out of my way just to reach the next number. Though I think if I ever do it again I’ll aim for 10,000m from the start and see how I go.

A fairly normal holiday

If I’m on holiday, there’s a fair chance that:

  1. I’ll be walking a lot.
  2. I’ll be climbing tall things, often mountains.

I guess my point is that it’s not uncommon for me to complete walks that are 20+ km or have a kilometre or more elevation change, particularly when I’m on holiday.

I’ve done it in Australia, in New Zealand, in the US, in Canada, in the UK, and in Switzerland. I’ll probably do it in other countries in coming years. That doesn’t necessarily mean I would complete an Everest challenge without specifically aiming for it - but it’s a real possibility.

I don’t feel I’ve done a lot of uphill work this year, but cumulatively the Larapinta Track isn’t much less than Everest, and it certainly kept us on our toes.

Then there’s the Pennine Way, which turns out to have a cumulative elevation change greater than Everest. Since I had to take an injury break halfway, it was split across two months, but it was part of a trip in which I climbed each of the UK Three Peaks and walked significant distances in the (European) Alps. Definitely Everest challenge worthy numbers - but also part of being my normal self on holiday.

Turning my focus to the Americas, at the Grand Canyon I’ve twice been down to the Colorado River and back up in a day, and I’ve climbed 14ers in Colorado and Hawaii.

I could go on, but the short version is: Long walks with plenty of elevation change are my thing. And so who I was December last year was just a slightly dialed up version of who I’ve been for 10 or 15 years.

Looking just at that Alpine holiday, in eight days I logged 96.2km with a cumulative elevation change of 4,015m. The maximum distance for a day was 23km, while the maximum elevation change for a day was 1,400m (no, they weren’t on the same day, either…). It sounds a lot (OK, I guess it is a lot), but the equivalent trip in 2021 would easily have reached at least 4,500m, and probably more like 5,000m.

It’s unusual for me to then get back to Melbourne and have another couple of 1,000ish m elevation change walks in consecutive weekends - but individually each of those walks are walks I’ve done before and will probably do again.

And the remaining 4,833m had to be completed somewhere.

The control month

I wanted to see how different my December might be from a “normal” month, so I decided to designate another month the “control” month.

January 2024 seemed best for this. Not only was it the month after, but it was also the month most similar to December: 31 days, and with days at their longest so I’m most likely to sometimes take long walks after work. Though with one important difference: It was a month when I wasn’t taking any leave and definitely wasn’t leaving Melbourne, so that would make it more “normal” than a December I ended up with two weeks off and travelling.

For this new month, I kept the same distance target: 200km.

For elevation change, I thought 3,100m (100m / day) would be a reasonable target, though I’d prefer the stretch goal of 4,000m.

When I say target - strictly speaking, this was the control month, so I wasn’t supposed to be aiming for those numbers. But they were targets I thought I could reach, and I was very aware of them. At any point in the month I would know whether I was ahead or behind.

When I chose a particular walk for a lunchtime or a weekend, I would frequently ask myself “Is this really what you want to do, or is it the target speaking?”. And usually the answer was that yes, it really was what I wanted to do - but I also knew I’d be entering numbers in a spreadsheet at the end of the day.

Looking at how it ended up, there were week on week increases in both the elevation change for the week and the distance covered. Like I said about not pushing myself to make 10,000m in December, I think at the start of January I was just a little over long walks. And over the weeks I was able to remind myself that yes, I did still enjoy walking further and climbing higher (even if in a more relaxing way than December had been).

So, the actual numbers I got this time round were:
Cumulative elevation change: 4,169m
Distance walked: 222.2km

I reached the 3.1km elevation target on day 24, which showed (as I guessed) that 100m a day was a pretty comfortable average. I mean, even the first week when I didn’t quite make 40km distance I’d still made over 700m elevation change. As for the stretch goal, I reached that on day 30.

Distance I was more concerned about. Not that I’d have been worried about not reaching 200km - after all, the goal was to try and find what a normal month was for me, not to push myself like I had in December. But after an Australia Day public holiday where I walked further than I expected, it seemed completely doable, and I did reach it by day 29. And no, I didn’t do anything special to make the distance 222.2km…

Actually, since the reasoning behind the 200km had been “6 km / weekday + 10 km / weekend day = 50km / week”, perhaps the target should have been 218km. And if so, I made that too - but only just.

In this month, the maximum distance for a day was 16.3km, and the maximum elevation change for a day 316m. It makes for a big contrast with December, which had a couple of days over 20km and seven days with an elevation change over 500m.

The truth is that doubling the elevation change in December didn’t mean “Each day I’ll do twice as much as I usually would”. Instead, it meant work days were much as they had been, so heroic efforts were needed on weekends and leave days to catch up. My elevation change on the eight day Alpine trip was almost the same as my entire January.

So yes, it’s largely what I expected to find, but this control month helped confirm it.

It’s never just about the numbers

Some walkers (and runners and cyclists, for that matter) are all about the stats. I don’t have a problem with that. But it’s not me, and I don’t know it’s ever been me. Yes, sometimes (often?) I purposely choose long walks, steep walks, or both. But I’ll choose those walks for what I expect to see or experience on those walks, not just the numbers.

Perhaps the easiest way to improve my stats would have been to find a steep section of trail and walk up and down ten times. I wasn’t going to do that. In fact, usually the walks I did ended up circuits, so I wasn’t even going up and back on the same trail (I tend to prefer circuits because it increases the variety).

Yes, I chose walks that would allow me to have a lot of elevation change, but they were real trails, and I was walking them just as I would have any other month. In fact, the vast majority of the trails were trails I’ve walked at some point in the past, and I’ll probably walk most of them again at some point in the future.

Perhaps I do like some of them for their stats - but there’s so much more to like about them.

Plenty of time for interesting encounters (and photography)

As one concrete example - given 2023 was the year I dubbed “the year photography took over” - I took over 13,000 photos that December. Most of those will have been while out walking, and nearly half of them were in the eight days I spent in the Alps and Gippsland (yes, the same eight days I said I walked 96 km!). I’m hoping to share some of those photos, but like all post plans it’s a “We’ll see how it goes”.

Obviously during the month I wasn’t solely focused on photography (That can be seen from the distances I’ve walked!) But nor was I solely focused on accumulating kilometres or elevation change (That can be seen from the number of photos I took!)

The day near Melbourne that had the highest elevation change was more than 20km with over a kilometre of elevation change. But it also included 20 minutes watching an echidna by the side of the trail, and a call to Santa from a convenient phone box. Yes, I have photographs of both of those, but it’s not even just about photography. Those walks included times to stop. To relax. To breathe. To observe the world about me.

Back to the Alpine holiday, after I’d found my way into NSW, one day I climbed Kosciuszko, Australia’s tallest mountain, walking on snow and through rain and hail. The next day I was in Jindabyne on a warm day playing disc golf and swimming in the lake. And the day after, I was on a beach near the mouth of the Snowy River, watching the sun rise over crashing waves before encountering snakes and goannas and admiring crabs scuttling about.

The first of those days contributed more to my Everest challenge than the other two - but all three days contained things I wanted to do and was glad to have the chance to do.

Leaving behind elevation, perhaps the flattest was the time I was at an opera in St Kilda. Afterwards, I went walking by the bay at night. Google told me it was a 4.7km walk, and that it had a 25m cumulative elevation change though the highest point was 12m.

Conclusion

In the months since completing that challenge, I haven’t done another one (though the Larapinta Track would have been a great opportunity if it hadn’t been split over two months). Truthfully, I wouldn’t want to do it every month. It was a good challenge for me, and I’m glad I did it. But it was also a big commitment which relied on first choosing the right month and then doubling down on that commitment.

It required enough of me that it was still a stretch, while not requiring me to become a completely different person for a month to pursue it.

I’m not going up to the Alps this December, and I’m also not doing an Everest challenge. But next time - if there is a next time - I’d like to try for the magic 10,000m. And that will only happen if I find the right month first…