Walking

Background

I was wondering how long you can save by walking fast. Lately because of leaving school early or other reasons, my bus that I normally catch had an interval of 20 to 30 minute wait period between each bus. If you add my bad luck to this, the outcome is just missing the bus and having to wait 30 minutes sigh. A thought suddenly popped up in my head - could I walk back home faster than waiting for the bus to come and ride that all the way home?

Walking

Why don’t we first find out the average walking speed of a normal person. Apparently, for an average healthy adult (wheelchair users would be rolling speed), this would be around 5km/h. The Sahara Desert is about 2300km from one side to the other, so if you were to have such a great idea of walking across the Sahara at 5km/h, it would take you 460 hours to do that… 19.2 days of walking. What if you increased that 5km/h to a faster speed?

It turns out the fastest walk speed is 4.6m/s (or 16.56km/h¹) which is more than 3 times the average walk speed. I don’t think any of us are olympic athletes (walkletes??), so let’s say you double the speed from 5km/h to 10km/h. That would half the time it would take for you to walk across the Sahara, to 9.6 days (inverse relationship!), saving you the other 9.6 days to do other stuff.

What you could do with this time

Exercise

• 9.6 days of exercise would make you really buff

Sleep

• 9.6 days of sleep would be a coma?

Read

• 9.6 days of reading would make your brain cells multiply

Go walking elsewhere (You can never get enough)

• 9.6 days of walking… just use it on the Sahara Desert if you want to walk more. Or you could use it at a better place where the view is awesome (of nature because walking in nature is the best).

Practice language speaking test that is creeping ever so close

• 9.6 days of practicing speaking would literally boost your mark by 10 times (but procrastination exists). Unfortunately, 10 times 0 is still 0

Health Benefits

It’s better than playing putt party 24/7.

Comparing Walking to Other Modes of Transport

Car (Over a lifetime)

• 30 km/h²
• 3.2 days to cross the Sahara Desert
• 55.6 days to do one lap around the Earth³

Commercial Airplane (Average)

• ~900 km/h
• 2.56 hours to cross the Sahara Desert
• 1.86 days to do one lap around the Earth

Apollo 10

• ~40,000 km/h (Fastest Humans have Travelled)
• 0.0575 hours (a whopping 3.45 minutes) to cross the Sahara Desert
• 1 hour to do one lap around the Earth

Conclusion

Just use spacecraft such as Apollo 10 to travel everywhere

Please walk fast. Just do it. :)