How I Exercised my Way to Mordor
- Greg Lomason
- Nov 1, 2022
- 13 min read
Updated: May 28, 2024
The Best Fitness Challenge You'll Ever Do
UPDATE 05/28/2024: I finished this and two other marathons on the app. I never did get the double count fixed but it was and still is a great time!
I'm going to try having this as a concurrent blog. I'll update it daily during each of the 5 challenges (50 total planned). So, while I'm doing a challenge, be sure to check back for daily updates, and please feel free to join me as groups and teamwork benefit all of us.
The invite code is: MASONI6E59
I never thought I'd join a fitness challenge, and honestly, I'm a little apprehensive. At 29 years old, a few months before my 30th birthday, I'm still in decent shape. I work out at least three times a week, and if I'm honest, sometimes I overdo it. I've still got a six-pack, my body fat stays around 12% if my scale is anything to go by (it isn't), and at 6'3, weighing in at 210lbs, I think that's doing pretty damn good for a 30-year-old. I've been a personal trainer for ten years now, helped more than 20,000 people get in shape, and I'm damn good at it. So, now we're at the crux of the issue. Why am I joining a fitness challenge? What do I need help with? After ten years of working out, sometimes you need a little pep, a change in the same old routine.
Before I was a trainer, I was an athlete and a pretty good one. Sure, I didn't play in college, but kids, where I'm from, didn't necessarily have those opportunities. Even the ones offered the opportunities to attend the camps and combines needed more financial resources when push came to shove. So, often the athletes from my school never played in college.
Despite not playing a collegiate sport, I still believe I was a damn good athlete. I had plenty of medals and records to prove it. To this day, I still consider myself an athlete. It's just part of who I am and will always be. I would still bet on myself against anyone given enough time and the right meal plan to train. However, what do you do after High-School Sports? When that huge part of your life ends, and you've no other opportunities to continue? How do you fill the void that being an athlete left? I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
Without a sport to guide you, you are left to anticipate the next event, ready to go at a moment's notice, waiting for the time to take your body to the limit. So what do you do when that opportunity doesn't present itself? In my experience, I was left to prepare. Always training, sharpening my axe for the chance to excel, looking for that sport or opportunity where I could test just how far my genes could take me.
This challenge isn't that opportunity. This challenge isn't the one that will push you to your limits. However, it can get you in the headspace to want to test those limits. It can be your guiding light toward whatever goal your fitness journey takes you on. Any one of these challenges has something for someone. So what is this challenge? Well, it's the "Lord of the Rings: Virtual Challenge," and I found it while scrolling through Instagram.
Today, November 1st, 2022, during week 10 of my Fall Semester, I'm starting the 1st of five consecutive challenges. Challenges that, upon completion, make a collection of medals/pendants. They can be completed with any activity, come with a fitness app to track your progress, and integrate with the most popular fitness tracking software and brands on the market. You can join and get 10% off your challenge with my code here: https://www.theconqueror.events/r/GL8615. Full disclosure I do NOT get paid for this, but I really like their idea.
Day One: Set Up
Logging onto the website is easy. Just click the link posted above, and you will be there. The next thing you need to do is select a challenge. There are 50 to choose from, and you can choose any that fits your liking. Sort them by distance or popularity, pick a singular one or a group, and make a simple payment.
You guys know what happened next; the first email confirmed your purchase. Then, a second email arrived in my inbox after about ten minutes. This one was the registration and installation information for the challenges app.
The app was simple enough to download; after it did, I registered a username and password and then joined the challenge using the challenge code from the email.
The challenge itself was preselected for me. The next step was to select the timeframe I thought I might need to complete the challenge. I was doing about 8 miles every workout.
Using the wheel for the timescale and its estimated distance per week, I landed on 24 weeks for the 145-mile challenge. Giving myself extra time to complete it made sense in my mind as I've just come off of appendix surgery and been sick. k.
Then it was time to pick/create my fellowship or choose whether I wanted to join one. Doing so would help me rack up the mileage faster. However, as I have no friends who enjoy fitness challenges like this, I selected it anyway, hoping that creating one instead might encourage others to join me (like you, yes, you, the one reading this). Last but not least, it was time to choose a cause. Paper or Plastic? Whichever you choose will help keep our world a better, cleaner place for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.
After setting up your goals, your time to complete them, and the cause you wanted to help most. It was time for some demographic questions. Things ranging from what you think your best motivator is for activity:
To things like diet and if you're intentional about how you eat and basic height/weight measurements:
Once the demographic setup was complete, I was welcomed to a home screen for the app:
The next thing to do was set up how the app would track my progress, and that was done through the "Posting Preferences" and the "Add Connections" tabs.
I chose to connect both Garmin and Strava as those are the two fitness tracking apps I use daily.
Check out my Strava activities here: https://www.byronjamesfitness.com/blog-articles (right-hand side), and join me on my journey.
The tutorial was a standard overview of what to expect and popped up immediately after setting up my trackers. You can also manually enter distances, but I prefer to let my fitness apps track for me. Number one, it's more carefree, and number two, it keeps me 100% honest; even a shortage of a few feet would make me feel like I didn't deserve the reward. Who gets a medal if they stop five feet before the finish? If, for any reason, you ended up skipping out of the tutorial by accident, don't worry; you can view it again under the Challenge Settings menu. See Below Note: Click Here
The third email came about an hour later with many helpful hints to get started. Most of which I was reading long after I started writing this article. The email included some great introductions to all the challenges the company offers, a walkthrough of the app, and a walkthrough of how to navigate the "street view" portion of the map linked here: https://help.theconqueror.events/en/articles/5240526-a-virtual-tour-of-the-conqueror-challenges-app
Note: If you skipped the tutorial by accident, you can follow these directions: To get to the "Challenge Settings" menu, you'll need to navigate to the "My Profile" Icon and click on the challenge you're currently doing. This will bring you to the "Map" page (shown in the pictures above), and then in the right-hand corner of the map, under "Time Goal," click the green "Rocket Ship" icon. Under that menu, click "settings," and the "see tutorial" is in the top right corner.
After set up was complete... Boom! We were off to the races, no pun intended. The only thing left to do was to put on my racing bib and start logging miles!
Day Two: The First Ride!
I woke up this morning pretty tired. Not much sleep. I stayed up a little too late writing the novel (and this) the night before. Ah well, what are you gonna do when you have both a need to create and a need for physical fitness? I'll tell you. You do your best to get eight hours of sleep after a long day of school and work and still find time to work out and write. Unfortunately, what usually happens is a mix of insomnia, restless sleep, poor performance, and lots of caffeine. The things we do to make life a little more worth living, huh? I've got to live my life, man. I'm not trying to work the entire thing away.
People say the best way to take a bandaid off is to do it quickly, right? So, here's the deal. With my work and school schedule, my only days to work out are days that don't spell Wednesday. That's if I've finished enough schoolwork to spare 30-60 minutes for myself and my personal sanity. I don't usually get those moments throughout the week. Though, I'm trying to prioritize them. It's a fine balance between "good grades" and your mental/physical well-being. Most of the time, I can squeeze out 3 workouts pretty easily. Just not on Wednesdays. Day Two was a Wednesday.
So, what did I do instead? Well, since I started the challenge at 8 pm on a Tuesday evening and I'd already biked for 8.7 miles on Zwift. I manually logged my first ride. So, why would I waste my effort on Tuesday and not log it? It's not my fault I didn't get stopped by an ad on Instagram for this challenge until then!
So here's what it looks like after you log an activity, your icon will move down the map, and you'll have unlocked a "Story." the "Story" can be found by clicking on the glowing icon at the top of your "map" page. It's the brown button labeled "The Shire" in the video below.
Note: the video has no sound because the app doesn't play the stories with sounds (a bit of a disappointment here).
Let's be real, though. We all signed up for the sick pendants we get from completing the challenges. Not the stories we already know...buuuuut I'm a little disappointed there's no sound.
Day Three: Bag End
Day three happened in my sleep. Remember how we set up activity tracking on day one? Well, I've got some kinks to work out. Somehow my walking activity was recorded as 10 miles. Let me tell you. I did not walk 10 miles on top of my 8-mile workout from Tuesday...that workout was a workout from the devil. Serves me right for all the fun I had on Halloween, right? (I literally stayed home) There has to be some divine sign in there somewhere, right? (it's improbable) Anywho let's get down to business. Here is one of the nifty postcards you're sent each time you make it to a waypoint. If you're a scrapbooker, I suggest you get your book and scissors out; boy, are you going to have a story to tell.
So my biggest event for Day Three is to figure out how my steps got to be 10 miles for the day. I have a few ideas.
First, I think my steps (probably only 2 miles) got added to my biking total. How? Well, I still have no idea. It's 12:20 am as I write this, so practically day four...this whole problem is one for another day. While I'm still awake, it's still day three, and we're listing the probable reasons why it got added on day three.
Second, in connecting my watch to Zwift to track HR, Garmin has me use a workaround, and that workaround entails logging a virtual bike ride as a virtual run. I hate that they have me do that. I mean, for one, runs and bike rides will give vastly different outputs in data, and the inconsistency between the two is a pet peeve of mine, mostly because I'm unaware of how Garmin tracks the metrics. Second, the virtual run has relative efforts for anaerobic and aerobic efforts. My Zwift ride, though shown on Garmin Connect, doesn't give me the same aer/ana metric. Which drives me absolutely insane.
Thirdly, this one will probably give me the most headache. I'm not sure if the https://www.theconqueror.events/r/GL8615 app receives data from both Strava and Garmin and uses them even though the activity might be the same.
Or Four, maybe because Hobbits/Harfoots are way shorter than your average 6'3 guy; perhaps the https://www.theconqueror.events/r/GL8615 app has a conversion for human/hobbit steps? Maybe my 1.5 miles of steps is the Hobbit equivalent of 10 miles? Make it make sense.
The solution to all of these should be easy. I should be able to just "edit" or "delete" an activity, right? Turns out you can't "edit" something imported, and you can't delete an activity either. Seems like another missed opportunity here. Ah, well, what am I to do? I am a simple peasant. If only companies would hire me as the "idea guy," I think that's CEO. Alas, one day.
Besides making it to a milestone in my sleep, the headache of realizing I have a little troubleshooting to do, and the happy surprise of a nifty postcard (definitely adding this to my scrapbook) and update to the glowing story button (I don't scrapbook), my day was pretty uneventful, my current mantra being "Work and School," and I'll say it until the wheels fall off.
They did send an additional email today. This one covered a few brief topics. You can check out some brief excerpts below. Oh! Before I forget. If you get the urge to travel and that little travel bug nips your butt after you complete one of these challenges (if it's one from the real world), the company also functions as a travel company. You can book a fully itineraried trip here: https://theconqueroradventures.com/?utm_source=conqueror_app&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=postcard_shire
I'll tell you, though, all this talk about work, school, app troubleshooting, and possible problems needing to be solved makes a guy want to work out. I hope to squeeze one in tomorrow between an Anatomy One and an Organizational Behavior Exam. Anyway, It's 1:14 am...off to bed, I go!
Day Four: South Farthing
I can't tell you guys enough how much I love this challenge. Sitting here at my computer, drenched in sweat from a hellish workout (the devil would be proud of the people who programmed it), I'm completely wiped, yet the challenge keeps motivating me to push on. As most of you know, a certain part of your workout or certain types of workouts become all mental and less physical. You know the types, cycle for sixty minutes at 100 rpm, burpee-over-box with rope climbs, multiple sets of thrusters, etc. However, when you simultaneously get reminders of challenges and milestones you complete, emails and discounts on products, and notifications that you're making a positive change in the world, even at your lowest, it can feel like you have this motivation to keep going.
I'm going to be completely transparent. In the last third of today's workout, on an almost entirely uphill course, I was forced to cycle for five straight minutes and increase and decrease watts while maintaining 100+ rpm. I wanted to quit. I thought about quitting. I was so tempted to scroll my mouse to the little "x" in the corner and tell Zwift to fuck itself. Frodo Baggins and The Shire be damned. Then I got an email. I'd completed 20% of the challenge, and this is what the email said:
I know it's simple. It's such a tiny thing. Just an email with a jpg of trees but that last sentence, that's the one that got me through it. Everyone has something that triggers their inspiration. Mine might be cheesy, it might be a cliche, I don't care, and fuck whoever thinks those two descriptors justify using them to hurt others. The one thing that's been consistent in my life until now is the overwhelming urge/desire/duty I feel to improve the world. If doing that comes in the shape of planting a tree in hopes of preventing our world from dying, well, you've got me for life.
With that said, you've got to do some due diligence. So I did a little digging into https://theconqueroradventures.com/ partner who plants the trees. Thankfully they provided a link to their partners' website, which you can find here: https://www.edenprojects.org/, and I liked what I saw. Not only do they have transparent financials, but they also work with those who are local to the area.
I'm unsure if I've ever said this to anyone besides family. Still, if I were ever to win the lottery or come into a position where money was no longer needed, I would devote my life to helping people in small villages around the world. Those people whose daily lives depend on manual labor to go to market or have a home to stay in or get fresh water.
I'd dedicate my life to the work of a missionary not because God or faith commanded me to but simply because it's the right thing to do for your fellow man. I love humanity, I think we're amazing. Sure, a good portion of us has done terrible things in pursuit of power, money, religion, technology, or whatever. But those who live closest to the way our ancient ancestors did have the right idea. They are living as God truly intended; sure, it's a hard life, but it's our natural way, and that honesty feels right to me. So, given that money was no obstruction, that's what I would do, I'd lend a helping hand.
In addition to the amazing work https://www.edenprojects.org/ is doing, and https://theconqueroradventures.com/ is providing by partnering with them, today's progress was filled with some cool things. The second was, of course, a second postcard, thus continuing on the journey from The Shire.
The third was the general sense of accomplishment as the percentage complete bar ticked its unyielding tocks toward completion. Twenty-one percent of the way done in only one percent of the time? LET'S GO!
The next were some of the stops along the way (it is the journey that's important, right?) Including the stop at South Farthing and the previously mentioned twenty-percent tree planting milestone.
After that was the relief that somehow my step goal for today and my Zwift workout made it onto the app without much challenge. Of course, I made no changes personally, so we will see how tonight's steps to transfer. And lastly, some cool updates and quotes from The Lord of the Rings movie. I like how they give you the scenes exactly where Frodo and Gandalf would have had those scenes, and let's be honest, it's nice to see the old geezer. "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" (this is not that scene, but I sure hope its in one of the future challenges)
I'm just now realizing...if we're watching the story unfold, from the Shire to Mordor, and at the end of the Journey, we'll acquire the ring...does that mean I'm Sauron? (Better look out, Halbrand, you've got some competition) In any case, we've got seventy-nine percent to go if my math holds up. Well, that's the end of Day Four. I'm exhausted. Two days in a row of only six hours of sleep can not improve overall health. See ya tomorrow!
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