I’m tackling Garmin’s hardest virtual fitness challenge in 2026 — walking the length of the Appalachian Trail

There are a lot of ways to motivate yourself to move more, and I find gamifying my activities through long-term challenges irresistible.

I particularly like a long-term distance challenge where all of your daily steps count towards completing a long journey virtually, via an app or one of the best sports watches.

In the past, I’ve completed a LEJOG (the length of the UK from Land’s End to John O’Groats) this way, and I got halfway to Mordor using a Garmin Connect IQ app before I swapped watches and lost all my progress heartbreakingly.

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I still have ambitions to return to Middle Earth and start my journey to Mordor from scratch — fortunately, our UK editor-in-chief managed to complete this journey last year, so the One Ring did get destroyed and the Shire is safe — but my main challenge next year is to hike the Appalachian Trail.

(Image credit: Future)

In the challenges section of the Garmin app (via the three dots in the corner of the home screen), you’ll see a load of different badges you can earn for varying physical feats.

Some are short-term, like a monthly steps challenge, while the expeditions section has a series of epic hikes and climbs to tackle.

The longest of these is the Appalachian Trail, which is around 2,175 miles, or 3,500km long, which Garmin estimates will require around 4.9million steps to complete. That’s around 13,500 steps a day to complete it in a year.

(Image credit: Future)

I first read Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods book as a teenager and have reread it several times since. It recounts the author’s attempts to complete the route, and as someone who lived in the British countryside, the Appalachian Trail sounded impossibly long and exciting — there are very few, if any, bears in East Sussex, or indeed mountains – and you’d have to walk the length of Britain almost three times to hit 2,200 miles.

Bryson made it around 800 miles into the trail before calling it a day, so my first goal will be ticking off that number. I’m a keen runner, so I will hopefully be able to stick to my regular training to hit the distances required, especially when marathon training kicks in.

I also gave myself the last week of December as a head start, though I didn’t log a huge amount of activity over the Christmas period.

If you complete the hike from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, Garmin awards you the Appalachian Trail badge, which must be one of the hardest Garmin badges to earn, just behind the Mythical Sleep badge awarded when you record a sleep score of 100. With two young kids in the house, that’s one I’m unlikely to achieve in 2026.

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