100 Days of Adventure

I know what you’re thinking: superbly crafted logo. But there’s more to this project than 1990s wordart.

In 2020, I spent a total of 2,117 hours on my computer and my 100 Days of Adventure project began on 1 January 2021 with the firm ambition of spending a lot more of my time outdoors, adventuring.

In order to judge whether my vague ambition was working, I needed to develop a metric to measure my relative outdoorsy-adventureyness from year to year.

Introducing: Days Of Adventure (DOA)

DOA is simple to calculate. Every day of the year gets a binary Y/N score: did I spend a significant chunk of the day outside on an adventure?

Then you count the Ys and — voilà — you have your DOA score for that year.

SIDE NOTE:

‘Outside’ is deliberately wide open because I’m a firm believer that adventure can be found anywhere.

‘Significant chunk’ and ‘an adventure’ are both deliberately relative because DOA is a simple binary measure that should work for everyone.

‘An adventure’ for an experienced touring cyclist will look very different to ‘an adventure’ for someone who’s never camped before.

Likewise, ‘a significant chunk of the day’ could be a very different timespan for a freelancer with no dependents, compared to someone with a 9-5 job and two kids.

The point of DOA is not competition between adventurers, but a measure of outdoor adventure against your past and future selves.

Oh, and, yes, I am aware that DOA also stands for Dead On Arrival, a definition only metaphorically compatible with the very best adventures.

The project is now entering its third year and its longevity is a measure of its success: my DOA score has almost doubled, from a baseline of 67 in 2020 to 127 in 2022.

In reverse chronological order, here’s a record of all my DOA going all the way back to 2020.

Current Score DOA 2023: 1

🟢

  • New Year’s night was spent sleeping in my car on the isle of Purbeck and 2023 began with a walk to see dinosaur footprints and Dancing Ledge.

Other than that, my adventures have been hobbled by a pre-Christmas trauma to the knee.

Final Score DOA 2022: 127

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Final Score DOA 2021: 102

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Midterm Updates: Spring Equinox (1 DOA), Summer Solstice (28 DOA)

Baseline DOA 2020: 67

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In 2020, the baseline year before this project began, my DOA score was 67. Not bad for a pandemic year.

To give you an idea of what qualifies as adventure for me, those 67 DOAs included:

This was about 18 percent of my days in the three months pre-Covid and, happily, about 18 percent of my days in the nine months post-Covid.

Hopefully that proves that days of adventure aren’t impossible to find, even in a pandemic world. We just have to choose our moments carefully.

67 days also compares favourably with 2019, when my DOA score was approximately 56. I say ‘approximately’ because these things are difficult to measure in retrospect and, depending on my definition, I could easily add many of the 50 days that I spent travelling in Italy and Greece.