How I did the distance-based level-up tasks
I’m a relatively new player to Pokemon GO and so I suppose it’s not too surprising that I received some scrutiny regarding the distance-based level-up tasks when posting my progress on the path to level 80 on the Pokemon Go Central London Discord group. It can feel painful when other people accuse you of cheating or claim you aren’t working as hard as them. I’m currently at level 79 with the only remaining task to hit level 80 being GBL battles. As long as I don’t lose too many, I can hit level 80 just after midnight on Wednesday 5 Nov. So now I have some free time to write up this post, which explains how I went about completing the distance tasks, with evidence, with the aim of quashing any claims that my progress has been achieved underhandedly.
Originally when I was planning my levelling path before the update went live I had assumed I would (and was prepared to) walk at least 50km per day for these tasks. For some I appreciate this might seem crazy to some, but it’s definitely doable for me1.
tl;dr
I cycled the vast majority of the distances with my own bike, having my phone off and using adventure sync. Some distance was been gained from walking and buses, especially when doing the “complete X research tasks” requirements.
However, the story is more involved than that and it took me quite a bit of time experimenting to figure it out. Continue reading if you interested.
Disclaimer
I’ve always believed that everyone should be able to play the game the way that they want to play it, without judgment from anyone else, so long as what they are doing is not harming anyone or breaking the game’s ToS. The task says “Explore *X*km”. So in my opinion, any way you can achieve that without breaking the ToS counts as legitimate. That means you don’t need to walk it (though I respect the players that are doing it this way!)
Testing phase
I often cycle locally to raids in my local area when I’m out playing by myself, i.e. not hosting events. So I had the intuition quite early that cycling to achieve the distance required would be quicker and definitely easier than my original intention of walking 50km+/day.
Reaching level 73
On the morning of 22 Oct 2025 I was still level 72 and needed to complete ~25 raids to reach level 73 (I had already done ~5 remote raids just after midnight). I wanted to complete this as quickly as possible so I woke up at 5am, checked campfire for raid egg locations and planned a route, hitting the first raids at 5:45am. My local area isn’t as dense as central London so it took me a while but I was done at 8:30am and was annoyed I had to cycle 7km to complete the raids that wouldn’t count towards my 200km task!
Also a highlight was bumping into one of my local players at around 7:30am on his way to work. He was very supportive of my efforts, at least that’s what I assumed when he said “madlad” after asking what I was doing.
Level 73→74: the first 200 km
There were two main problems I had with cycling:
distance doesn’t always get tracked, especially when you go too fast
I wanted to cycle somewhere safe enough to stop regularly and check on the game
I’ve always known that it doesn’t track the distance if you go too fast when cycling, but I never knew the exact cut-off speed. Apparently that speed is 10.5km/h which I found out when googling the evening before because some very smart person developed this app which also warns you with a notification whenever you are going too fast.
I also had to figure out a place to cycle that was relatively safe. After asking Grok for some suggestions based on my criteria, I decided on regent’s park inner cicle: a 1km road that was a loop, with good lighting and open 24 hours.
200 km day 1 — Wed 22 Oct 2025
After finishing the raids, my plan was to get some of the 250 research tasks out of the way while doing some distance via walking. I dropped my bike off at home and took a train to Stratford, arriving at about 9:15am. I walked for an hour around Stratford doing field research tasks before meeting a friend at Bow. I rented a Santander cycle at a nearby dock in Bow, which was pretty good value at £3.50 for 24h access. I then cycled to Regent’s park through the city, which was a miserable experience and I regret, because it was hard to cycle under 10.5 km/h while trying to stay safe on London roads.
It was a much calmer experience once I arrived at Regent’s park. My general testing procedure involved recording my distance before, doing a couple of laps trying my best to cycle between 9.5 and 10 km/h before stopping and checking the distance recorded. I tested having both the app open and with the app killed using adventure sync.
For me, keeping the app open tracked the distance better since adventure sync was giving between 0.7 and 0.8 km per lap. The added bonus is I had my go plus plus autocatching for me while doing this. Although honestly, cycling at such a low speed feels horrible. In fact, it’s so slow, joggers were overtaking me! After 3 hours I was a bit fed up of how inefficient (in terms of effort required) the Santander bikes are compared to my own bike, which itself is a very cheap second-hand hybrid I got from Facebook Marketplace.
Another annoying feature of the Santander bikes are that you have to return the bikes within 60 minutes if you don’t want to incur additional charges, so I was replacing them every ~55 minutes. When I returned the bike after the 3rd hour was up I realised there was an e-bike in the docking station and had a lightbulb moment.
I tried out the e-bike for the next hour (it was only an additional £1 each time you take it out) and conveniently it also had a speedometer on the bike which I used in addition to the app to help me keep my speed under 10.5 km/h. It was a success. All of the distance was tracked and there was little-to-no physical exertion required. At first it was difficult to keep to a low speed, but I got the hang of it by barely pedalling pretty quickly. Annoyingly I still had to return the e-bikes every hour, which wasn’t a big deal, except when a docking station was full and I had to go to a different one further out. It will admit it did feel a little undeserving to get the distance on an e-bike but honestly the mental endurance required to go slowly for hours is a challenging task in its own right, especially when you read the next paragraph.
So, seems like a perfect solution, right? Not quite! After several hours, my butt was struggling with the extreme discomfort. I’m used to bike saddles but for some reason the saddles on the e-bikes are significantly less comfortable than the manual bikes.
Fortunately, my unbelievably supportive partner, was in central London for work that day and so I called her and asked her to buy me some kind of cushion from Primark that I could use to mitigate the discomfort, as well as some gloves as I’d been stupid and had left mine at home. I walked to meet her halfway, which gave my butt a much needed rest. She managed to find a reasonably large heart-shaped cushion for £3 in the sale and also brought some elastic bands from work.
I used this opportunity to grab a cheeky McDonald’s for dinner too so I could eat while walking on the way back. 2x wrap of the day and I think it was the Fajita spiced one.
With the cushion I could continue cycling, although it was still very uncomfortable, probably because the damage to my butt was already done. Irritatingly it started raining around 8pm. I had a rain coat and so I was initially determined to keep cycling in the rain, but after my jeans and my shoes were completely saturated I was concerned I might get ill and it would affect my progress. At about 8:30pm, soaking wet and cold, I cycled back to Tottenham Court Road and jumped on the Elizabeth Line back to Romford.
On my return tube journey, my mum phoned to scold me for not wishing my sister happy birthday! I felt bad. I had remembered when I woke up at 5am and originally intended to call her while cycling later on in the day, but completely forgot. I called my sister and wished her a happy birthday.
Meanwhile, during this return journey I was thinking about what I could do about the weather situation, especially since I knew tomorrow it was going to be raining for several hours nonstop. I eventually came up with the idea of cycling indoors on a gym bike and hoping adventure sync would accurately pickup the distance. So as soon as I got home just before 10pm, and much to my partner’s dismay, I dried off, changed my clothes and rather impulsively signed up for a 1 month gym membership at my local 24-hour gym before heading there with an umbrella, which barely survived the wind.
When I got to the gym I jumped on an indoor bike and noticed it can tell you the distance you’ve travelled, but I had no idea whether this was genuinely accurate or not. Anyway, I made sure Adventure Sync was switched on and killed the Pokemon Go app and started cycling sessions of what the machine was telling me was 2 km. The first ‘2 km’ tracked in-game as 1.6km, but then the subsequent ‘2 km’ trials I did were all between 1 and 1.2 km unfortunately. I tested cycling a lot faster but that was even worse, so I stuck to about 14 km/h (according to the bike), which seemed to be more consistent. This tracked about 7 km per hour through adventure sync, which is only marginally better than fast walking, but since it was absolutely pouring it down I had no other option.
I left the gym at just after midnight, checked my distance task progress and felt disappointed that I had only managed to achieve 70km on day one. This number might sound impressive, but remember that I had access to the 200 km task since 8:30am, which at this point was ~16 hours ago. That’s an average of ~4.4 km/h which is a casual walking pace.
In hindsight, the reason the progress was so slow was a lot of time was spent testing and experimenting, and often a lot of distance didn’t get tracked, which can be a very disheartening feeling. I learned a lot, and would aim to improve from here.
I went to sleep just before 2am after doing some research and planning what to do and where to go tomorrow during the rain. My research revealed that Canary Wharf had a ~1km long stretch of indoor space with good phone service. So I decided I would start the next day by walking that route back and forth until the rain stopped.
200 km day 2 — Thu 23 Oct 2025
With what I learned from day 1, I was hoping I could aim for the remaining 130 km to complete the task today. In theory if I could cycle on the e-bikes at close to 10 km/h for 13 hours then it was achievable, but definitely ambitious. Unfortunately it was raining in the morning until 3pm, which based on my experience the previous day, meant that doing 130 km was not going to happen.
With it raining, it made sense to try and focus on finishing the field research tasks. I left my house at 6:30am and it was raining too much to take my phone out. I took a few bus routes to eventually end up at Canary Wharf at about 8:30am and thankfully had finished with the research tasks. I grabbed a coffee and croissant from Paul and start walking at a brisk pace weaving between presumably-annoyed commuters.
I ended up only walking in Canary Wharf for about 40 minutes because the rain outside seemed like it wasn’t that substantial. Part of me was hoping the notorious drift that happens at Canary Wharf might help me cheekily get a bit more distance too, but unfortunately that didn’t happen! I walked to Poplar and rented a bike and cycled to Regent’s Park in the light rain, arriving at about 11am.
Once at Regent’s Park inner circle again, I didn’t bother with the manual bikes and only used e-bikes. I was constantly monitoring my progress to see if the 130 km was doable. I can’t remember exactly at what point, but sometime in afternoon, maybe 2 or 3pm-ish I realised it was doable if I cycled pretty much non-stop until midnight. Part of me was thinking this would be possible if I could somehow order food to the park on deliveroo/uber eats. However, even with the cushion, my butt was in agony from the saddle and I felt like I needed to take short breaks for relief every hour or two. For that reason it felt like getting all 130 km on that day wasn’t realistic and I’d push myself too much trying to achieve it.
After I accepted that I couldn’t finish the 200 km task today I could take it relatively easy. As long as I could finish at a reasonable hour the following day, with enough time to send 200+ gifts on the same day I would be fine2. At about 8:30pm I had managed 80km on day 2, totalling 150/200 km and so I decided to stop cycling and head home. This would mean tomorrow would be very easy in comparison, only requiring 50km.
200 km day 3 — Fri 24 Oct 2025
I could afford a better night’s sleep since I only needed 50 km. I left my place later than usual, at 9:45am and decided to do some more testing with the indoor bikes in the gym. When I tested the indoor bike 2 days before, adventure sync was only capturing about 50-60% of the reported distance. I wanted to see if could improve on that so I tried different pairs of shorts, that I thought may hold the phone in my side pocket slightly differently. Unfortunately nothing really changed and I wasn’t prepared to cycle ‘100 km’ in the gym to get the remaining 50 km in the game, so I called it quits after 40 minutes. I went home, took the train to Liverpool Street station and started e-biking to Regent’s Park at 11am. I was done with the 50 km by 3:30pm, so I decided to walk around central London to smash out the 999 great throws and help replenish my gifts faster when sending the first 215 of 500 gifts for the task3.
Level 75→76: the next 300 km
For the 200 km challenge I had managed to get some time off of work, but I wasn’t able to take time off this week, which meant the e-biking strategy in Regent’s Park was going to be difficult to pull off, unless I did it before and after work, but there was just too much travel time between my place and Regent’s (~1 hour 15 minutes one-way).
Unfortunately the Santander bike scheme doesn’t operate as far out as Romford so this week I thought about where I could cycle my own bike locally outside of the hours I had scheduled for work calls. I remembered a park close to me called Hyland’s Park. It’s quite a small park, but has 4 gyms, a showcase stop and more importantly, a former horse trotting 0.75km oval track that is now reasonably well surfaced with concrete. Thankfully, since Havering borough is struggling financially they have stopped locking the parks at night, which means I also have 24-hour access.
Over the weekend a friend also informed me that some players were having success with adventure sync on android, and specifically that with adventure sync it would allow you to track distances travelling at faster than 10 km/h. Since I have a spare android phone, I decided to try testing that out a little bit on Sunday and it seemed to work, but I wanted to test it more thoroughly on Monday.
300 km day 1 — Mon 27 Oct 2025
I got some work done early and at 10am I left my place to cycle around Romford smashing any rocket grunts I could find, trying to travel at a slow enough pace to also capture distance. I think I managed ~25 grunts, and ~25 km of distance in-game before I had to head back for a work call at 2pm.
My last work call finished at 5:30pm, but I had to host Max Monday for Dynamax Woobat. Very few people turned up for that event and we were finished fairly early, so at about 6:30pm I used that opportunity to cycle to Hyland’s Park at a faster pace, this time using my android phone with the app killed and adventure sync on. Once I got to the park I opened the app and was happy to see the full 2 km had been tracked, even though I was cycling at about 18km/h! I started testing further by doing laps of the track on my bike and recording. Sure enough adventure sync was capturing ~95% of the distance, even though I was cycling at speeds between 15 and 20 km/h. A quick reminder, but I had already tested this on my iPhone a week earlier at Regent’s Park and it didn’t work, so I guess this is an android only feature. Either way, this was a huge discovery, essentially the adventure sync eureka moment I needed to be able to progress quickly.
I was at Hyland’s Park doing laps for about 4 hours. I averaged between 18 and 20 km/h. It was a lovely cycling experience because there was basically nobody in the park since it was dark, so it was pretty much my own personal velodrome. I left to head home for dinner at about 10pm and when I checked my distance at home I was on ~100/300 km. I was on track for doing this in distance task in 3 days, which I was really happy about.
I wouldn’t say I’m a particularly strong cyclist, but I find it’s pretty easy to cycle at 15+ km/h for a long time without needing to rest. I imagine experienced cyclists could absolutely destroy these tasks and it wouldn’t surprise me if they could hit over 200 km per day.
300 km day 2 — Tue 28 Oct 2025
Fortunately today I had less work calls so I could spend more time cycling at my new velodrome, Hyland’s Park. I got some work done early and then left my house for a 3-hour cycling session from 12pm—3pm. Unlike the previous night, now there were a lot more people in the park, and they often had children or dogs with them. This slowed me down considerably to ~16 km/h on average and made the experience a bit more frustrating because a few times I had to stop when people let their dogs almost get run over! Then, to top it off, it started to rain fairly heavily. I was a lot more prepared this time though and was wearing cycling shorts instead of jeans. My shoes still got absolutely soaked though, and felt heavy to cycle in!
I returned home at 3pm, had a hot shower and had some food. Afterwards I cycled around Romford to do more Rocket grunts before it was time to host spotlight hour for Sinistea. This was the first spotlight hour that I did by bike, mainly relying on my autocatcher with Ice Burn on, which managed to bag me a shiny!
After spotlight hour I was ready for a new velodrome session, and luckily the weather had dried up a bit. I usually stopped to sync the adventure sync distance every 30 minutes or so, mainly because I was scared of doing a longer session and it not getting tracked. I’ve included example screenshots of these sessions below.
I cycled for almost 5 hours in Hylands, from roughly 7pm—midnight, taking a couple of breaks in between. I then spent another 30-40 minutes blitzing through some rocket grunts in central Romford before calling it a night. I was sitting at ~225/300km meaning I only had to do 75 km tomorrow. However I also had to do ~50 more grunts.
300 km day 3 — Wed 29 Oct 2025
In an ideal world I would want to finish the remaining 75 km and 50 grunts before raid hour, so that I had the time after raid hour to get started on the 100 max battles tasks for the next level up. Unfortunately due to work commitments I couldn’t quite acheve that. I did get 75km by cycling during the day before raid hour, but the grunts would have to wait.
I figured I’d bus grind the grunts to save some energy and rest a bit before the 400 km, however I got a bit unlucky with the number of grunts on my bus routes so it took longer than expected and I finished all 100 grunts at 9:34pm so unfortunately couldn’t get a head start on the rocket grunts.
Level 77→78: the final 400 km
It’s currently 1:30am on Tues 4 Nov and it’s taken a hell of a lot longer to write this up than I expected. I need to go my GBL battles for the day so I’m going to do that shortly and leave this section unwritten.
However, the tl;dr version for now is that I basically continued cycling to grind the kms in Hyland’s Park but took breaks bus grinding to do the research tasks. I also took night buses from midnight until 5am, napping periodically instead of sleeping in my bed at home to get extra distance. Needless to say, at this point my partner is very unhappy.
To be completed… (probably in late November after Nagsaki Wild Area and the global Wild Area as I leave for Japan on Wednesday, shit, that’s tomorrow…)
Footnotes
I do walk a lot, and I walk very fast. I have earned over 100km almost every single week since I’ve been playing this game and it’s not uncommon for me to hit over 50km on days where I’m grinding, e.g. shadow raids. Here’s a screenshot of my third week into the game when I was a complete noob:
This was before I met my local community and I had probably done under 5 raids. You can see after 3 weeks my total distance walked is only 515km.
Note: my account is from 2016, but I played very briefly and only really started playing on 6 Oct 2024.
It didn’t matter at all how fast I finished the 200km, if I couldn’t do it a calendar day faster, since the next level-up tasks included a “send 500 gifts” task which is essentially a 3-day time gate.
215 gifts = 150 from the deluxe pass + 60 saved from the day before + 5 from my buddy