The route, and the numbers

The route is called the Via Alpina, and the one I walked is the Red Trail — the long one, crossing eight countries. Most people walk it starting in Slovenia and going through Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Italy and France, finishing in Monaco. I did it in the opposite direction. It is not a simple route and I would not recommend it as a first one. It is climbs and descents the whole way. The route itself is about 2,000 km. What I actually walked is more, because of the detours — going off route to resupply, the day we got lost, and the stretches I had to add to reach somewhere I could sleep. So the numbers below are what my GPS recorded, not the route's own length. 2,299 km walked, with 113,786 m of ascent, over 69 days. For a sense of what that ascent means: the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, is 830 m. Everest is 8,848 m. So the climbing adds up to going up and down Everest more than twelve times. The Kármán line, where space is usually said to begin, is at 100 km — and over those 69 days I climbed past that height and came all the way back down again. That one still gets me. How the weeks looked. The whole thing took ten weeks. Shortest day — 9 km. Longest day — 57 km. Most climbing in one day — 2,900 m. Average across the ten weeks — around 33 km a day. Shortest week was the first — 140 km with 9,000 m of ascent. Longest week was the ninth — 300 km with 16,844 m of ascent. Every single week I climbed the height of Everest at least once. In the hardest week I did it twice.