Thirty miles of mathematics.

I have lately become frustrated with the rigidity of pedometers. Really, they are simply one interpretation of the truth. I have invented another interpretation:

When I was in high school, I could easily* run a six**-minute mile. With that in mind, we were hiking this afternoon and I realised, as I was internally planning to brag later, that our children severely slowed down our ability to travel a great distance, primarily due to their ridiculous fascination with nature

(crawdads, fish, moss, slugs, unidentifiable poop, fungus, sticks, caterpillars, snails, leopard slugs, etc.).

Anyway, they kept taking so long to examine plants and smell flowers every 20 feet that we were making almost no discernible progress. Certainly nothing I'd feel comfortable posting to Strava.

So what I decided is to start measuring our hikes using a different metric, which is much more accurate, in a way. It is this:

I have started factoring TIME into the distance equation. Using the baseline of a six-minute mile, I am now adding ONE MILE to the total length of our hike for EVERY six minutes we are out, which is fair considering the energy expended in following children into dangerous off-road streams and gulches.

So today, we were out around three hours. 180 minutes divided by 6 is 30. Nice!

So yeah, we did a little 30-mile family hike today.

And then ate pizza and frozen yogurt, because we earned it.

I am impressed with us. Thirty miles of hardcore.

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*not easily
**seven or eight