I ran in a 3.1 mile race yesterday. My time was 32 minutes 10 seconds. You're right. That isn't very fast. I used to be fast. In fact, my goal now isn't to have my all-time best, but to beat my all-time best doubled time. If I ran a four minute mile at some point in my life, my goal now would be run a mile in 8 minutes. That keeps my interest up and helps me to believe I'm still competitive.A question any runner might ask is, "What was my pace?" By pace a runner would want to know how many minutes per mile was he or she running.
This type of problem would be easier if there were a hundred seconds in a minute. In this case 32.10 divided by 3.1 would give me my pace. Alas, it isn't like that. I believe it was the Greeks that messed things up for us, favoring the number 60 rather than 10 or 100 or some convenient number like that. So if I'm going to divide, I have to take a little more care in doing so. I didn't run 32.10 minutes. I ran 32 10/60 minutes.
Here are my steps:
- 10/60 = .1666...
- My time for the race was therefore 32.1666...
- My division is 32.1666 / 3.1 = 10.376 minutes per mile
My blazing pace was 10 minutes 23 seconds per mile.
This is a good application in itself. It is also a trigonometry application. Those pesky Greeks used the number 60 for dividing up angles as well as dividing up time. As in, 30.73 degrees is how many degrees and minutes, or even, how many degrees, minutes, and seconds? Or perhaps you have degrees, minutes and seconds and you just want the angle measure strictly in degrees.
By the same method as the above problem, 30.73 degrees = 30 degrees, 43.8 minutes = 30 degrees, 43 minutes, 48 seconds.
If the Greeks had decided that each degree is made up of 100 minutes, it is a much easier problem - 30.73 degrees = 30 degrees, 73 minutes.
