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Even though the entire width of the road was covered in brand-new asphalt, there was hardly a pa.s.sing car in sight. On all sides of me were Kamiyama High School students wearing gym clothes. It was almost like the roads that went through the mountainous area behind the high school were expressly built for the sake of the Hos.h.i.+gaya Cup. Ibara was probably going to be coming up soon from the back. Before that happened, I wanted to make sure I clearly remembered all of the events that took place during the new-student recruitment week.
The time between when a cla.s.s started to run and when the next cla.s.s started after them was usually around three minutes. I was in Cla.s.s A and Ibara was in Cla.s.s C, so that meant I had started around six minutes before she did.
For the first kilometer, I had matched my pace with that of those around me. Once I had reached the uphill slope, Satos.h.i.+ caught up with me and I slowed down a little bit. On average, I should have been running at around the pace of a slow jog.
I had once heard that a person’s casual walking speed was roughly 4kmph. Running would normally double that, and so on. In a book that I had once read, if you were to walk at slower than 4mph, you were punished.Unfortunately, the exact conversion from kilometers to miles was hazy at best in my head, so I couldn't use that as a reference. Anyways, let’s just a.s.sume that it was somewhere in-between a stroll and a fast run. 6kmph. Ibara was probably running more earnestly than the average, so I decided on 7kmph. From there, I had to figure out how many kilometers were between me and Ibara, who had started six minutes prior. That meant the answer was…
The answer was…
Multiplications and divisions ran circles inside my head. It wasn’t like I had exceptionally bad grades in math, and the calculations weren’t all that extreme with this one. It’s just that doing all of the math in your head and doing it with paper and a pen required different skills altogether. Add onto that the fact that I was running, and my head just couldn’t function like it usually could. Taking time while I was trying to figure out the answer was unavoidable. As I made excuses one after another, I kneaded the all the distances, times, and speeds into the formula in my head.
Let’s see. In around one minute, one would probably near about 17 meters or so. She would catch up to me at around 4.1km from the start then. That meant that the approximate distance between us was… Well, she probably wasn't that far back anyways.
Even though I didn’t have enough time nor distance in the first place, in order to calculate how much of each I had left, I ended up using more of both in the process. Talk about lacking foresight. I had two possible ways to reclaim the lost time and distance.
The first one was to try running a bit more seriously.
And my second option was to try remembering what happened that day all the more quickly.
That day, if I recall correctly, was just like today. I’m pretty sure it was fairly clear out.
It was certainly colder, however.
Translator's Notes and References[] This is a reference to Stephen King’s The Long Walk.
