They walked 100K steps in SF in a day, just because. It almost broke them

“With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill. The trick is to get back down alive.” — Jon Krakauer, “Into Thin Air.”

After 49 ragged miles, 100,000 steps, and nearly 20 hours, friends Peter Dolan, 31, and Lucas Spain, 29, were bloodied and experiencing what amounted to living rigor mortis. By the time their absurd adventure was over, they didn’t have the strength to celebrate. 

“Sunday was one of the worst days of my life,” Spain said of the pair’s successful quest to walk 100,000 steps in one day in San Francisco. 

People have been attempting the 100,000-step challenge for years, and studying its effects, but the endeavor has become a social media phenomenon over the last six months. YouTube videos, Strava maps, and Substacks have gone viral. Dolan and Spain took note.

The two tech workers were no strangers to bizarre endurance challenges. Two years ago, they spent all day bombing KT-22 at Alpine Meadows in Tahoe to get to 50,000 vertical feet of skiing in one day — a feat Dolan would later double at Mount Baker in Washington. Neither claim to be an outstanding athlete, but this earlier this month, they decided to give the 100,000-step challenge a shot.

They set out on a 50,000-step trial in April. The journey nearly bested them, said Spain, who attempted to break in his new hiking boots during the trial — a rookie mistake. 

After fine-tuning the route and footwear, they were still unsure they could survive 100,000 steps in one day, but were ready to take it on — so long as they were willing to sacrifice one weekend of partying. (In an interview with The Standard, the two mentioned several times that one of the most daunting aspects of the challenge was that they would miss out on their normal weekend social scene.)

“The prospect of doing it is actually kind of awful,” Dolan said. “You have to wake up at an ungodly hour, and it’s going to shoot your whole weekend.”

Yet they persisted. They mapped their route to minimize hills and maximize the chance of getting to Dolores Park by 4 p.m. to catch a party their friends were throwing. 

The July 12 journey — fueled by burritos, sandwiches, protein bars, a doughnut bought from a fisherman in Golden Gate Park, and lots of coffee — ended up being a painful yet gratifying experience, leaving both with aches that, almost a week later, had not dissipated. 

In order to fit so many steps into one day, Dolan and Spain knew they’d have to start extremely early. They went to bed July 11 at 7 p.m., listening to the sounds of neighbors revving up for a night of partying. At 1 a.m., Spain, who lives in the Haight, traveled to Dolan’s apartment in Lower Pacific Heights — giving him a 1,500-step edge that would come back to haunt his teammate at the end of the day. 

“I’m biking past people who are still partying — which should have been me,” Spain said. “I get there, and the lights are all off.”

Dolan and his wife eventually woke up, the latter having promised Spain she’d make him pancakes (they never arrived). After one final chance to back out, the two ventured east at 2:30 a.m.

In the predawn dark, they navigated Presidio Avenue, hugging the park as they made their way to the waterfront, traipsing toward the Embarcadero. There, around 3:45 a.m., things started to get creepy when they noticed they were being followed. 

“Every time we would cross the street, he would cross the street with us,” Spain said of the unknown person shadowing them. “It’s just the witching hour, you know?”

Feeling nervous, they soldiered on and eventually lost their stalker a quarter mile up the Embarcadero. 

They arrived at the foot of the Bay Bridge to watch a gleaming sunrise over the Oakland hills. 

The best part of the day, Spain said, was watching San Francisco wake up. They spontaneously ran into friends on Saturday-morning jogs and breakfast outings. 

But the rosy glow of a new day would eventually fade. 

The real pain began to set in around 2:30 p.m. at the southern tip of Sunset Dunes. They wanted to be at the party in the Mission by 4, but their map called for them to backtrack and go around Twin Peaks, which might have taken too long. So the pilgrims decided to travel through West Portal and head diagonally toward the Mission.

“Let’s just split the gap in Twin Peaks,” Dolan said to Spain. “I don’t think there will be a lot of hills.” 

“There were a decent amount of hills,” Dolan recalled.

After an hour and a half of hiking the steep hills that bisect the Mission and the southern terminus of the Outer Sunset, they were cranky. Spain hurled insults, blaming Dolan’s navigational error for the pain in his calves. But then they crested Diamond Heights. The fog cleared. The sun broke through, and they felt a surge of hope. With the warmth on their faces, they made it to the party at Dolores Park.

Dolan and Spain, excited to tell the party-goers of their accomplishment, were met instead with befuddlement and blasé head scratches. 

“100,000 steps is a weird metric that most people don’t really understand,” Spain said. “I tried to explain the goal, but the more I talked about it, the stupider it sounded.”

This added insult to their mounting injuries. At that point, they had walked 75,000 steps (34 miles!), and dime-size blisters had sprouted from Dolan’s ankles. Spain’s iliotibial band syndrome, a painful condition involving the tendon that runs from the hip to the knee, began to creep up on him. 

Would they be able to find the will for the final 25,000 steps?

Darkness fell, literally and figuratively, and revelers came out for the night. Dolan and Spain came to terms with a grave reality: They were going to miss both of their weekend party nights. The streetlights came on, and the two were mocked by their limping shadows.

“Every step was incredibly painful,” Dolan said. “We were limping severely. It was dark, and all of our friends were gone — it was very psychologically damaging.”

With just a few thousand steps to go, they limped, half-mad and bone-tired, around the Panhandle at around 9 p.m. They were near to fainting, and with each step, the land gave nothing and demanded more. Their legs moved like clockwork, divorced from will or reason, as if walking were all that remained to them. 

“My IT bands were locking up. My hamstrings were totally and completely shot with sharp pains,” Spain said. “We had new pains and aches in places we had never had before.”

At 10 p.m. on July 12, their 49-mile odyssey was over. Dolan, who started 1,500 steps after his comrade, still had a bit more to go and paced around Spain’s apartment before collapsing triumphantly onto the couch.

Unable to speak, energetically destitute, and spiritually beggared, they resigned themselves to the strangest and most painful slumber of their lives.

Dr. Nirav Pandya, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon and director of sports medicine at Benioff Children’s Hospital, cautioned anyone wanting to copy such a challenge.

“One of the key things with a lot of these endurance-type events, where someone goes out and does something crazy, is the actual performance can obviously have detriments to the body, like muscle breakdown and joint issues,” he said. “People think, ‘I’m invincible,’ but you’re going to hurt yourself.”

As for Dolan and Spain, they’re riding high on their accomplishment. Dolan even plans to run a half-marathon inside Oracle Park during a Giants game.

“It wasn’t hard in the way that some athletic endeavors are hard; it was just grueling,” Dolan said. “The level of smugness you get from waking up at 2:30 a.m. is truly unparalleled. Seeing people at the Marina Run Club and going, ‘Oh, I’ve actually been up for five hours already.’”

“I never hit a buzzer-beater or a walk-off homerun,” Spain said. “This is the first time I’ve done an athletic feat where other people were shocked that someone did it. I never thought I would have that.”