The Walk to Mordor¶
The Walking Data
Exploratory Data Analysis
An investigation of personal walking data spanning three virtual Middle-earth challenges completed through The Conqueror:
| Journey | Character | Period | Target miles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mordor | Frodo | Mar 2024 – Jan 2025 | 1,815 |
| Return of the King | Aragorn | Jan 2025 – Aug 2025 | 1,482 |
| The Hobbit | Bilbo | Jan 2026 – Jun 2026 | 1,100 |
Data source: Google Fit export processed in etl.ipynb.
Only data/processed/ is read here — no raw health data is loaded.
1. Setup¶
Daily rows : 806 (2024-03-27 → 2026-06-10) Segments : 11 Challenge-assigned days : 628
2. At a Glance¶
Before examining the detail, here is a one-table summary of the three challenges.
| Character | Frodo | Aragorn | Bilbo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Period | Mar 2024 – Jan 2025 | Jan 2025 – Aug 2025 | Jan 2026 – Jun 2026 |
| Calendar days | 287 | 225 | 142 |
| Active days | 261 | 225 | 142 |
| Total miles | 1823.0 | 1493.5 | 1148.1 |
| Target miles | 1815 | 1482 | 1100 |
| vs target | 100.4% | 100.8% | 104.4% |
| Avg mi/day | 6.98 | 6.64 | 8.09 |
| Median mi/day | 7.12 | 6.49 | 7.93 |
| Peak day (mi) | 17.37 | 16.72 | 16.43 |
All three journeys exceeded their Conqueror target distances.
Bilbo's 142-day journey stands apart: the highest average (8.09 mi/day) and the highest median (7.93 mi/day) of the three, despite covering the least total mileage. In roughly half the calendar time of Frodo's challenge, Bilbo covered more than 60% of the same distance — a sustained, compressed effort.
Frodo's 261 active days span the broadest range of conditions: from a winter start, through summer, through the 27-day challenge pause, and into the new year — and still ended 8 miles over target.
Across all three challenges: roughly 4,465 miles of walking assigned to a challenge segment, and 5,196 miles total across the full project window including gap periods.
3. Daily Activity Over Time¶
The complete daily record coloured by challenge period.
A 14-day centred rolling average reveals the underlying pace.
The rolling average sits broadly in the 6–9 miles/day band across all three challenges, with no obvious multi-week collapse in pace. What variation exists tends to be short-lived: a dip below 5 miles followed by a recovery within days.
The annotated challenge pause between Mines of Moria and The Eye of Sauron (grey bars, July–August 2024) shows that walking continued uninterrupted during those 27 days — the pause was in the challenge app, not in the walking itself.
The two large grey clusters — Jan 2025 (between Frodo and Aragorn) and Aug 2025 – Jan 2026 (between Aragorn and Bilbo) — are inter-journey gaps. The second of these spans 147 days and 730+ miles walked with no active challenge: the habit clearly did not depend on the external structure.
4. Calendar View¶
A GitHub-style activity calendar for each year of the project.
Colour intensity represents daily mileage; grey cells are low- or zero-activity
days; white cells have no data (outside the project window or before/after the
export range).
Three observations from the calendar:
Near-continuous activity. There are almost no completely light (≤ 1 mile) cells across three years — the walking habit was genuinely daily rather than episodic.
The Aragorn–Bilbo gap (Sep 2025 – Jan 2026) is the most visible quiet period. Even so, the cells are not white — they show moderate activity throughout, confirming that the inter-journey period was not a rest period.
2026 stands out. The Bilbo period (Jan–Jun 2026) shows a consistently dark band across all six months — both evidence of the higher average pace and of the 125-day unbroken streak that spans almost the entire Hobbit challenge period.
5. Accumulated Distance¶
Total walking miles accumulated day by day.
Dot colour shows which challenge was active; grey indicates gap or
unassigned days. The slope reflects pace.
The cumulative chart reaches roughly 5,200 miles by the end of the Bilbo challenge — a figure that includes 730+ miles walked during gap periods between challenges.
Two slope signatures stand out:
- The Bilbo section (far right, green) has the steepest gradient, consistent with the highest daily average of the three challenges.
- The Aragorn–Bilbo gap (long grey stretch, Aug 2025 – Jan 2026) continues accumulating at a steady ~4 miles/day across 147 days — slower than the challenge pace, but never stopping.
The absence of any truly flat section confirms what the calendar showed: this was a walking habit, not a challenge-driven burst.
6. How Do the Three Journeys Compare?¶
Key metrics side by side.
Frodo shows the widest spread: the most days below 2 miles (9.2% of assigned days) but also the highest single-day peak (17.37 mi). His journey's length — 261 days across multiple seasons — naturally accommodated more variability.
Aragorn has the tightest box. The interquartile range is narrower than either other journey and the median of 6.49 mi/day sits below Frodo's 7.12 and Bilbo's 7.93. His walking was the most consistent and the least prone to outliers in either direction.
Bilbo sits highest overall: median 7.93, mean 8.09, and only 1 day in 142 fell below 2 miles. The Hobbit challenge was clearly approached with intensity from the outset.
7. Distribution of Daily Distances¶
What does a typical challenge day look like across the three journeys?
All three journeys share the same general shape: roughly unimodal, centred between 6 and 9 miles, with a right-hand tail extending to 15+ miles and a smaller left-side cluster of lower-distance days.
This distribution does not look like someone walking a fixed daily target. It looks like a person with an active daily life whose walking naturally varies — accumulating distance in stretches of 8–12 mile days punctuated by lighter days, rather than hitting a steady 7.0 miles every morning.
The left cluster (below 3 miles) deserves a note: Google Fit records any detectable movement, so these low-distance days likely represent days when the phone was carried but little deliberate walking occurred — the data does not contain a single true zero-step day.
8. Temporal Patterns¶
Does walking behaviour vary by day of the week or by month?
Day of week: Sunday and Monday produce the highest medians (8.33 and 7.93 miles respectively); Friday the lowest (5.85 miles). The weekend uptick is modest but consistent — likely reflecting longer walks when unstructured time is available. The Friday dip may reflect end-of-week fatigue or early finishes cutting into afternoon walking time.
What's notable is the absence of a dramatic pattern: the medians range only from ~5.9 to 8.3 miles across all seven days. This is not a weekend-warrior profile — it is a daily walker with slight weekend preference.
Monthly totals: Monthly accumulated mileage is broadly even across all three challenge periods, with no seasonal collapse. The long grey bar in the Sep 2025 – Jan 2026 window reflects the Aragorn–Bilbo inter-journey gap: lower monthly totals than challenge months, but persistent.
9. Walking Streaks¶
An unbroken streak of meaningful walking days, using a 2-mile threshold to filter incidental phone-pocket movement.
Total days with ≥ 2.0 mi : 728 of 806 in project range
Total break days : 78
Top 8 streaks:
start end days total avg
2026-02-06 2026-06-10 125 994.0 7.95
2025-03-16 2025-05-19 65 392.5 6.04
2025-07-06 2025-09-02 59 457.9 7.76
2024-12-07 2025-02-03 59 443.3 7.51
2024-06-13 2024-07-28 46 385.0 8.37
2025-05-23 2025-07-04 43 316.2 7.35
2025-10-09 2025-11-12 35 217.8 6.22
2025-02-09 2025-03-14 34 200.2 5.89
The longest unbroken streak is 125 consecutive days (Feb–Jun 2026), spanning the entire Bilbo challenge and the weeks leading into it — an average of 7.95 miles/day with never a day below 2 miles.
The second and third longest (65 days and 59 days) both fall within Aragorn's journey, reinforcing his challenge as the most consistent of the three.
Across all 806 project days, 728 (90.3%) exceeded the 2-mile threshold — only 78 break days in over two years. The timeline is almost entirely green. The white gaps cluster in the transition zones between challenges and in the early months of the Aragorn–Bilbo gap; once any given challenge period is underway, breaks are extremely rare.
Key Findings¶
| # | Finding |
|---|---|
| 1 | ~5,196 total miles across the full project window; ~4,465 miles during challenge segments. |
| 2 | All three challenges exceeded their target distances. Frodo +0.4%, Aragorn +0.8%, Bilbo +4.4%. |
| 3 | Bilbo's journey was the most intense — highest average (8.09 mi/day) and median (7.93 mi/day) with only 1 sub-2-mile day in 142. |
| 4 | Aragorn's journey was the most consistent — tightest IQR of daily distances; 3 of the 8 longest streaks fall within his challenge period. |
| 5 | The Frodo challenge pause is invisible in the walking data. 26 days of walking continued uninterrupted during the Jul–Aug 2024 gap. |
| 6 | The Aragorn–Bilbo inter-journey gap (147 days) produced 730+ miles. The habit did not depend on an active challenge. |
| 7 | Sunday and Monday are the longest walking days (medians 8.33 and 7.93 mi); Friday the shortest (5.85 mi). The pattern is mild — this is a daily walker, not a weekend athlete. |
| 8 | 728 of 806 project days (90.3%) exceeded 2 miles. Only 78 break days in over two years. Longest unbroken streak: 125 days (Feb–Jun 2026). |
| 9 | No true zero-step days in the processed dataset — Google Fit recorded some movement every single day. |
| 10 | Daily distances follow a right-skewed unimodal distribution centred ~7 miles, with a meaningful left tail of low-distance days and an upper tail reaching 17+ miles. |
These findings provide the analytical foundation for the narrative layer of the GitHub Pages visualisation.