How long would it take to walk around the Earth?
About 334 days if you never stopped, or a little over three years at a walker's day of 35 km. The Earth is 40,075 km round at the equator, and nobody has walked all of it because most of it is water. Here is the arithmetic anyway, in steps, days and routes.
The numbers
40,075 km · 24,901.5 miles, in steps
| A child, 1.2 m (3 ft 11 in) | about 80,666,300 steps |
| 1.6 m (5 ft 3 in) | about 60,499,700 steps |
| 1.7 m (5 ft 7 in), the average adult | about 56,940,900 steps |
| 1.8 m (5 ft 11 in) | about 53,777,500 steps |
| 1.9 m (6 ft 3 in) | about 50,947,100 steps |
| A giraffe, 5.5 m (18 ft) | no idea, sorry |
Step length is about 41% of height. Give or take 10% for how you walk.
How long it takes to walk
| A stroll, 4 km/h | 417 days |
| A normal walk, 5 km/h | 334 days |
| A brisk walk, 6 km/h | 278 days |
Walking without stops, on level ground.
Calories, by body weight
| 55 kg (121 lb) | about 1,405,029 kcal (1,867,895 incl. resting) |
| 70 kg (154 lb) | about 1,788,219 kcal (2,377,321 incl. resting) |
| 85 kg (187 lb) | about 2,171,408 kcal (2,886,747 incl. resting) |
| 100 kg (220 lb) | about 2,554,598 kcal (3,396,173 incl. resting) |
The walk's own cost at 5 km/h. The second number adds what you would have burned sitting still, which is what some fitness trackers show.
On a reTrek route
40,075 km is about 51 times the Camino de Santiago.
About the Camino de Santiago routeTry your own distance
Steps
about 56,940,900
51,246,800 to 62,635,000 depending on your stride, about 0.70 m a step at this height.
Distance
40,075.0 km · 24,901.5 miles
Time on foot
334 days
at 5 km/h, no stops
Calories
Depends on your weight more than anything else. Enter it to see an estimate.
That is about 51 times the Camino de Santiago.
How long would it take to walk around the Earth?
The equator is 40,075 km, or 24,901 miles. At a normal walking pace of 5 km/h that is 8,015 hours on foot, which is 334 days if you walked every hour of every day without sleeping, eating or stopping. Nobody does. At a long-distance walker’s day of about 35 km, the kind pilgrims and thru-hikers sustain for months, it is 1,145 days, a little over three years. Seven or eight hours of walking a day is what that assumes, every day, with no rest days, which is not how any real walk goes.
The other problem is water. Most of the equator crosses ocean, so the walks that call themselves “around the world” are stitched together from continents and ferries, and usually take four to eleven years. Nobody has walked the line.
Who has walked around the world?
Since nobody can walk the equator, the records use a different test. Guinness counts a walk around the world as at least 18,000 miles (29,000 km) across four continents, and the World Runners Association asks for 26,232 km (16,300 miles), ocean to ocean on four continents. Wikipedia keeps a list of the people who met one of those standards or claimed to. Among them:
- Dave Kunst, 1970 to 1974, 23,250 km (14,450 miles). The first walk around the world to be independently verified.
- Jean Béliveau, 2000 to 2011, 75,000 km (47,000 miles) in eleven years, the longest continuous world walk. Even that is under twice the equator.
- Tom Turcich, 2015 to 2022, 45,000 km (28,000 miles), with his dog Savannah, credited as the first dog to walk around the world.
- Karl Bushby set off from Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile, on 1 November 1998, to walk home to Hull in England without any motorised transport, a planned 58,000 km (36,000 miles). His route crossed the frozen Bering Strait on foot in 2006, and he reached England in October 2026, 28 years after the start.
How many steps is it?
About 57 million for an adult of average height, 51 million for a tall one and 62 million for a short one. At 10,000 steps a day that is 5,700 days, or 15 and a half years of ordinary walking.
Or walk somewhere real
Nobody is walking the equator, but the same instinct, distance that adds up to a place, is what makes a walk worth repeating. Forty thousand kilometres is about 51 times the Camino de Santiago. reTrek is built for the smaller version: pick a route, Everest Base Camp is free, and your everyday steps carry you along it with a short film waiting at each milestone. Something to look forward to. Progress you can see.
Walk it with a friend and pool your steps, or race them there, and find out which of you skips fewer evenings.
Other distances
Sources: Energy expenditure during level human walking, Ludlow and Weyand, Journal of Applied Physiology, 2016 · Earth, equatorial circumference, NASA Earth Fact Sheet · List of pedestrian circumnavigators, Wikipedia · Karl Bushby, Wikipedia