28/11/2010: 145.6 kilo

24/11/2010: 135.6 kilo

21/11/2010: 130 kilo

17/11/2010: 118 kilo

0th Run, Bonus 111 Kilos

With the 111 kilometers I have gathered since when I started tracking my run, I've been able to traverse the frontier France-Italy and arrived at the town of Andora, a beautiful town with long sandy beach.

The Route

Thanks to Google Map, I constructed the route from Antibes France, all the back to Beijing China, with only a flaw that Google Map is unable to calculate the distance across the boarder of China so I have to divide the route into two parts. So here it is.

From: Antibes, France, 719 km
To:   Ancona, Italy, 839 km
To:   Igoumenitsa, Greece, 321 km
To:   Thessaloniki, Greece, 593 km
To:   Istanbul, Turkey, 452 km
To:   Ankara, Turkey, 904 km
To:   Erzurum, Turkey, 1,655 km
To:   Gorgan, Iran, 1,598 km
To:   Samarqand, Uzbekistan, 1,160 km
To:   Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, 987 km
To:   Urumqi, Xinjiang, China 2,113 km
To:   Yinchuan, Ningxia, China 1,184 km
To:   Beijing, China

I also provide the dynamic graphs provided by Google Maps, they are fancier but may not work all the time.


View Antibes-Beijing, Part 1 in a larger map


View Antibes-Beijing, Part 2 in a larger map

The Big Project Starts

While running yesterday, a question came up in my mind suddenly, how long can I run with the rest of my life? After a quick calculation in the head, I realized that maybe it's possible to achieve 10,000 kilometers in 30 years. Then the big idea came, 10k kilo is about the distance between Paris and Bejing, why not starting accumulating every kilometer I run until I'm "back" to Beijing? Back from the run, I made a further study, now here is the plan.

The rule is simple, I'm not going to really run across two continents back to Beijing, instead, I accumulate every kilometer I run to reach the distance between the place I'm currently living and my hometown Bejing, China. Currently, I live in a place near Nice, France. Then the objective is to achieve the distance between Nice and Beijing. If I can keep running 10 to 15 kilometers a week, I'll be able to run about 500 to 700 kilometers a year, then it will take me 20 to 30 years to accomplish the whole mission.

In order to keep the project feasible, I decided to divide the long distance into shorter pieces so I will focus on each sub-project a time. In addition, if I move to another place, the objective will not be recalculated because I'm "on the route" already. I'll update the blog with each run and celebrate at each stop. As a starting bonus, I have already accumulated 111 kilos from the my first recorded run. 

I will make a detailed plan and post it later. Just by chance, I found the wiki page of the 1907's auto race from Bejing to Paris and it provides a nice reference plan. Surprisingly, after 100 years, the event came back at 2007, then the 4th race was just last month (Oct. 2010).