Child-Sized Marathon

Yesterday, we sent Emile off on an evening bike ride and picked him up around nightfall so he wouldn't have to brave the long uphill ride to our house in the dark.

These days, Larkin and Finn are usually pretty sleepy and ready for bed around 9pm, so we did bedtime snacks and got into sleepwear before the scheduled pick up. We met Emile at the Talent entrance to the bike path around 9:30, Finn talking the whole way about how he was very tired and about to fall asleep.

Josh H. had ridden Emile back to Talent, so the kids were excited to see him and chat him up. When Josh took off, Emile was busy putting the bike rack and his bike on our car. Larkin and Finn started running large circles around Emile and the car (Larkin in her night shirt and sandals, Finn barefoot in his pink horse PJs). After they had gone around 10-15 times, I remarked that I should have been counting to keep track of their progress. They liked that idea.

I sat in the driver's seat with my arm out the window so they could high five me on their way by... I was thinking they might circle another 15-20 times, tops. Meanwhile, Emile finished mounting his bike and got in the passenger's seat. I started throwing out random factoids with each number (well, for each number I could think of one)-- ages of people they know, significant dates, the meaning of life, the universe and everything, etc.

They got all the way up to 100 before they stopped! They were running the whole time, although they had slowed slightly by the end. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation:

Figure our car is about 15 feet long, 4 feet wide. Add some leeway since they were actually looping quite a ways away from the car and figure they were running about 50 feet with each lap. Add in the 10-15 times they had already circled before I started counting, and they ran a total of about 112x50=5600 feet, or just over 1 mile. Not an insignificant piece of exercise at a time they'd normally be sleeping.

I nursed a bruised and tingling high-five hand all the way home, and Larkin and Finn slept very soundly last night.