via Neil: "The Man Who Walked Around the World"

Headline:

The man who walked around the world: Tom Turcich on his seven-year search for the meaning of life

When Turcich was 17, a close friend of his died, and he had an existential crisis. He decided it was time to seize the day – and to cross the globe on foot

On 2 April 2015, Tom Turcich walked out of Haddon Township. At his sendoff, his father couldn’t have been more excited. “I was like, hey, go for it! Aw gee, just be careful, have a good time!” he says. “But his mother cried for months when he left.”

“I was scared for him, and I was proud of him,” Catherine says. “It was all those feelings mixed up together. I had a very hard time of it at the beginning. But he was so good at calling every Sunday. I depended on that. It was my lifeline.”

Turcich says his mother was right to be worried. “She knew how green I was. I’d grown up in this really idyllic suburb. I was just a soft idiot and a little too trusting.” He was 6ft 2in, skinny, and he’d never had to worry about his safety. He admits that he didn’t really know how to look after himself at all: “You think you’re tough, but you’re not. Now I’m a wholly different person.”

[ ... ]

What does it mean to walk around the world? In a pedestrian circumnavigation, travellers must move around the globe and return to their starting point under their own power. Guinness World Records sets the requirements for a circumnavigation on foot as having travelled 18,000 miles (nearly 29,000km), and crossed four continents.

Turcich walked 21-24 miles a day for roughly half of the seven years he was away. In total, he walked 28,000 miles (and Savannah 25,000 miles), travelled through 38 countries and crossed every continent except Australia, which he couldn’t do because of lockdown restrictions. He is the 10th person to have walked the world, and he assumes Savannah is the first dog to have done so.

Fascinating story even if it is from the leftie Guardian. 21-24 miles a day is a brutal pace (averaging a bit over 36 km—yikes). I've seen stories of military guys walking under 15 miles a day (while wearing heavy packs, of course). Hats off to Tom Turcich. If he's only the 10th person to have circumnavigated the world, he's in a pretty exclusive club.

“One of the best things about the walk was every day I woke up with a purpose. A very immediate purpose and human purpose where I walked a certain amount. So every day I’d accomplish the little goal and within that I’d see new things, talk to new people, learn about the world, just through walking. Then I’d lie in bed, thinking: ‘That was a good day, mission accomplished, let’s do it again tomorrow.’ And now the walk’s over, you don’t have that innate sense of discovery. So it feels like I’m building a life from the ground up again here in Seattle.”

I can relate to that. The simplicity of walking from A to B, combined with that daily sense of mission, is what makes distance walking so worthwhile.