Walking across America is almost as difficult to explain to people as to do. Beyond the initial question of ‘why on earth are you doing that?’ (to which we don’t have much of an answer…), equally difficult to explain is how far 3,000 miles actually is.

So, as a point of comparison, walking 3,000 miles is like…

…covering the length of Oxford Street 2,400 times;
…walking, including crossing several bodies of water, in a straight line from Portsmouth to Lagos, Nigeria;
…sitting on a Victoria line train, from Walthamstow Central to Brixton, 231 times;
…walking along the length of Hadrian’s Wall 80 times;
…going one eightieth of the way from earth to the moon;
…walking over Gok Wan (I’m not particularly fashion-minded, but if I was, I’m sure I’d measure distances in Gok Wans), 1,617,948 times; or
…trekking the length of 50,821,052 Mars Bars.

We will be taking roughly 600,000 steps across the course of the walk, using up 300,000 calories. That means we could eat an extra 1,164 Mars Bars during the six months (my future career as a nutritionist awaits). Or, if we were Scottish, 714 deep-fried Mars Bars. Far more sensible would be to eat 50,000 sticks of celery.

We’re aiming to raise £15,000 through our walk. This seemed like a lot of money to us, but it’s all relative, really. For Manchester City footballer, Yaya Toure, this accounts for around half a day’s salary. Or, what his left arm earns every three weeks (to calculate this, I’ve assumed that each % of body weight contributes equally to salary).

If The Pamir Trust was to spend all of the money we raise on Mars Bars (and don’t worry, it won’t), it could buy 33,333 Mars Bars. That’s around 15 times more than we’ll need to eat. And about 1,500 times less than we’d need to walk over.

It should take around 1,200 hours to complete the walk (not all in one go, don’t worry). That’s about the length of time that the average Brit spends watching TV in nine months. Or you could use that time to get a post-graduate diploma from the Open University (but that way you’d miss the Great British Bake Off). 1,200 hours is also the average amount of time that an American teenager spends reading books outside of school…over the course of 115 years.

It’s probably taken you about two minutes to read this (unless you’re an American teenager, when you’d probably have given up after the second sentence realising there wasn’t going to be anything explicit). You could have spent that time making a cup of tea. Regretting it now?

It probably took me longer to work this out than it should have