"Many steps taken to cover only a short distance" makes a little more sense to me, if maybe the guy feels like he already knows the outcome, the end point that his friend has to arrive at, but realizes that it is going to take his friend much longer to get there than it really needs to.

The short answer, the end of the journey, is 'It's over.' But the 'long walk' to get there may be literally a long walk, whether to walk off the alcohol or to keep his friend from doing something stupid while drunk, or figuratively a long talk, a lot of discussion and patient listening to his friend vent before the friend is able to decide for himself that it's not worth continuing to be miserable about indefinitely, that eventually it has to be time to pick up the pieces and move on with his life.

If that makes sense in context.

Given that it's not an idiom and the meaning isn't directly obvious even in the original, I don't see any reason not to just translate it fairly literally and let the readers chew on it themselves.