I have pondered over the years, ‘are these literal zen masters of running genetically better, or is it something else?’ Clearly, Kenyan marathoners are very gifted athletes, but I think their excellence is more based on the overall simplicity of their lives. Actually, most come from one very small region in a pretty vast country. I have never visited Kenya (yet!) but volumes have been written about the shear excellence of this small country’s long-distance runners.
![the crow 1/4 mile time the crow 1/4 mile time](https://blog.dupontregistry.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Dodge-Demon-Feature.jpg)
Companies keep inventing electronic gadgets and devices that not only tell us where we ran, but what our heart rate was, if it was windy or not and if we stopped to pee in the woods and how long our unplanned nature break took.ĭon’t get me wrong, I think everything has a use, and if electronically tracking our runs further motivates us to get out there, then it’s far better than not running, right? Runners, and I presume other endurance athletes, have become notorious for recording every step and every second as if preserving a historical record of every foot strike we take is somehow important to proving we ran or that we exist. Another way to multiply that is 3 x 1000 x 7 x 100, which is 3 x 7 x 100,000 (one hundred thousand).Time is something we human beings are always trying to capture, control, or even freeze, and we probably always will. That gives us 3,000 miles x 700 cars per mile. The sky’s the limit: If you want your answer in hundreds of thousands, and you’re already multiplying a number (cars) in the hundreds, you can round the other number (miles) to the nearest thousand. The sky’s the limit: If you round off to 700 slightly shorter cars per mile, about how many cars can fit from New York to LA, in hundreds of thousands of cars?īig kids: No, since you could drive just 2,400 miles - less than even the crow. Little kids: If your car is 1 foot longer than our 16-foot guess, how long is your car? Bonus: If you lined up 4 10-foot Smart Cars instead, how far would they stretch?īig kids: If you could drive 100 miles an hour nonstop like a maniac, could you get from New York to LA in just 1 day? Bonus: How many 16-foot cars fit in 1 mile, which is 5,280 feet? (Hint if needed: One way to divide by 16 is to cut in half 4 times in a row!) Wee ones: If you see a blue car, then a red car, then silver, then blue, then red, then silver…what color car comes next?
![the crow 1/4 mile time the crow 1/4 mile time](https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod.mm.com/uploads/2019/10/29/1572379657_screenshot_2019-10-28-grassroots-motorsports-2000-challenge6_mmthumb.png)
As you’ll see here, that’s a lot of gas tanks to fill! Then we figure out how many cars fit in 1 mile, and then multiply to see how many we can fit across the country.
![the crow 1/4 mile time the crow 1/4 mile time](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Laura-Kramer-2/publication/7536183/figure/fig3/AS:669613524254734@1536659713606/Dead-crow-densities-DCD-dead-crows-per-square-mile-and-number-of-cases-of-human-West.png)
![the crow 1/4 mile time the crow 1/4 mile time](https://hdwallpaperim.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/17/59841-The_Crow-Brandon_Lee.jpg)
So the driving distance comes to much more, at 2,789 miles. But cars can’t drive that straight line - they can’t just plow through houses and bushes and telephone poles! Cars have to stay on the road, and roads usually don’t run neatly from one place to another. Turns out the cities are 2,448 miles apart. You could just draw the shortest line from LA to New York - “as the crow flies” - and see how many 16-foot midsize cars would fit. thinking: how many cars could you line up end to end from Los Angeles to New York? Well, there are two answers to this. It doesn’t, of course, but it got our fan Cecilia H. When you’re stuck sitting in traffic, sometimes the line of cars looks like it goes on forever.