This week, internet marketing from a few years ago finally caught up with me. I signed up for a virtual race from The Conqueror… and one of the more nerdy ones, at that. I signed up for The Shire virtual challenge, the first part of a 1,061 km (660 mi) journey à la The Lord of the Rings.
Frodo Baggins may have done this trek barefoot, but I have my walking shoes on and am ready to go. And also, like Frodo, I’m not doing this journey alone. A couple of friends were interested, and have signed up for their own walks, which is a nice nerdy motivation for one another. If you’re interested, technically I have a referral link which gets you 10% off… but full disclosure, I also earn a free challenge when two people sign up. Don’t feel you have to. That’s not why I wrote this.
On one hand, I love the premise of a virtual race. To start, it provides me with a measurable goal I’d like to achieve, and helps me break down both the time and steps to be able to get there. I can set my routes, have it fit into my own unique routines, and work through it at a pace that makes sense for me. It’s adaptable to me and my needs, which I appreciate.
It also means I can earn a participant ribbon medal for a race, but without the hustle and bustle of a large crowd on race day. Or with the pressures of feeling like I’m in direct competition with other people, when my personal focus for exercise is for health and wellness. (…or feeling like I’m going too slow because I haven’t been consistent with training. Being at the back of the pack isn’t embarrassing because it means you showed up. That’s a big thing! But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with a lot of stress and anxiety to show up…)
It provides me with something tangible at the end as proof of my achievement. In this case, it’s a geeky but beautifully designed medal that includes the One Ring (my precious…) that may even spur me on to keep active and collecting the rest. Let’s not kid ourselves: it’s a beautiful piece of experience design to receive the One Ring as a part of the first medal, and having an interactive component where you drop that ring into the fires of medal of Modor at the end… That’s a smart motivator, in addition to the lovely artwork for the medals themselves.
But this, in turn, is something that really bothers me about this personal experiment: it’s producing clutter and “stuff” that doesn’t help the environment, or my own personal environment. While the company includes environmental offsets, it feels like a heavy brushstroke of greenwashing. In the case of The Shire, five trees will be planted with my purchase, and each will serve as waypoint reward incentives throughout the race.
But I can’t help but envision the destruction of the Fangorn Forest surrounding Isengard to fuel the furnaces of the production of armour and weaponry. Or perhaps less cinematically, what impact the manufacturing and transportation process in our world is for this medal to be delivered to my front door once I’ve completed the first 233 km, and the subsequent races.
In this case, I signed up for the version with the physical medal (despite my misgivings) because I’ve never been the person who puts out awards or achievements on display. (My degree is hung at the back of my closet for no one in the world to see, despite being fiercely proud of that achievement. No, that’s not going to change because of this blog post.) But because I’m a person who has always hidden away achievements, it means I don’t have visual reminders of things that can help with a positive mindset, especially when I’m trying to make changes.
In this case, I have a goal: make small healthy decisions to move more, that will become habits that enable me to stay active and healthy. Not to go all Duhigg or Clear here, but I’m hoping that having a visual cue like this in my environment is a visual reminder of that goal. It’s not directly a part of the habit loop, but worth a shot to see if it contributes to a mindset shift.
