Time Dilation
. . . and other tips for running and hiking
“Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines”
Time - Pink Floyd
Middle age is when our language about time changes from hopeful expectation to desperate lament. Most of my Gen. X peers sound almost exactly like those epic and devastating (and awesome) rock ballads we grew up on.
“It goes so fast,” everyone says.
“You blink and they are all grown up!”
“Enjoy it now, because they’ll be gone soon!”
There is wisdom in this, but no peace. The thing we start to feel is that time is the enemy and is taking your children and families away. And, of course, at this weird half-century age, we are working our hardest, raising and sending our children off to be independent, managing our aging parents, and all we want is more time with our kids, our families, and our friends of three decades who live far off in other states and countries. Time passes too quickly and we don’t get enough of it.
But many of us forget that time is relative.
Einstein taught us that time is relative to the speed of light, but time is relative to running speeds as well.
The faster you go, the less time you have.
At first thought this may seem counter-intuitive. One line of reasoning suggests that if you run faster, you have conserved time somehow, perhaps made more time for other things. Fast equals efficient. Fast equals more time to own, but this reasoning is flawed. The reality is - the slower you go, the more time you experience. This years’ Boilermaker is a great example of this.
I am proud to report that 2025 was my slowest 15k yet! I took almost two hours to complete the distance that I normally run in an hour and twenty minutes. Many might think I was slow because it was miserably hot and humid - the worst I’ve felt in thirteen years of running this race. But this years’ run was my ABSOLUTE favorite Boilermaker because I ran it with my 14 year old daughter, Gwen. She’d never run this distance before, but wanted to challenge herself, so both of us decided to toss expectations of competitive times into the humidity and just complete the course. We walked a quarter mile up the golf course hill at mile three, stopped at seventeen of the twenty water stations, talked the whole way, encouraged other runners, and listened to the performers and musicians as we ran. The only time we ran fast was at the end, down the chute and across the classic finish line. We gripped our finisher medals and walked to the post-race party to find our family and friends.
Boilermaker 2025!
I asked her how it was. “Horrible!” she said with her usual sarcastic smirk, “but I got my medal!” I toasted hers with mine.
We didn’t create time, but by reducing our expectations of speed and NOT thinking about our time, I now have a beautiful and expansive memory of running with my daughter in her first 15k.
Currently she’s on the cross-country team in high school running 5k’s quicker than I could ever hope to at my age. I continue running my slow and steady half-marathons farther than she’s attempted yet. Maybe one day we’ll run another race together. If we do, I hope to run even slower.
Even at Newtonian velocities, time is relative, but not with respect to position and the speed of light. Time is relative with respect to age.
We all remember days, months, and summers stretching out eternally when we were younger. Now, even as a teacher, my summers zip by in a series of short weeks and days. The maths of this make sense. At 10 years old, a summer was 2.5% of my life. At 50 one summer is 0.5% of my life. Time feels at least 5 times faster to me now because of my perspective at half a century.
I cannot change this mathematical relationship, but I can use this idea to adjust my perception of any given day. If the number of many years of existence makes the years seem faster, it follows that the numbers of activities one participates in during an individual day might make time seem to go by faster. When I have a busy day, I might feel like I am efficient, or getting things done, but these are always the fastest-feeling days.
The faster I go, the busier I am, the less time I feel like I have.
This is why I like hiking so much!
This summer my oldest daughter, Dalia, asked if I would hike some real peaks with her. I think I probably shouted, “YES!!” before she even finished her sentence. She said that she felt like she needed to be out in nature; immerse herself in real wilderness.
“Which mountains do you want to climb?” I asked her. “The Castkills? The Adirondacks?”
“All of them,” she replied
We decided, due to proximity, that we’d start with the Catskills. Each week, Dalia and I headed out into our local mountains and we ended up hiking seven total, five of which towered above 3,500 feet - high for the Catskills. We climbed Indian Head, Twin, Sugarloaf, Plateau, and Hunter; all peaks in the same range that were traversed by one of the most difficult trails in New York State - Devil’s Path.
For me, hiking is very different from running. Running five miles might take me between 40 and 50 minutes. I can schedule a run in between other events. Five miles of hiking up a mountain can take anywhere from two-and-a-half to five hours. Add in time to pack and prep, time to drive to the trailhead, as well as time for water breaks and lunch at the top and a hike becomes a single full-day event. I can’t participate in any other activity. This means that the more I hike, the less busy I become, and time, in turn, stretches out.
When I was Dalia’s age, I climbed mountains as if they were themselves competitions. I hiked fast, imagining my boots wearing the rock down, “bagging” peaks, and rushing to the next challenge. I loved the beauty of the epic views, but needed to move on after a few minutes.
When Dalia and I first started this summer, I hiked too fast. Maybe it was my longer stride or my runner subconscious, but it was most likely the memory of my younger self - the hidden and false belief that I needed to get to the top quickly - that made me rush ahead.
But Dalia’s hiking style was almost exactly the opposite of mine at her age. “Hiking with me is like walking with a toddler that’s good at conversation,” she joked as we clambered with our feet and hands up a stupidly steep section of Devil’s Path.
She stopped to inspect and photograph every amphibian, every mushroom, every precarious rock formation, every blossom hidden amongst the tangled roots of ancient alpine trees. She retrained me to hike slowly.
Devil’s Path has incredible beauty, even though it may, as Dalia put it, encourage one to sell their own soul to get over it. But it was not our purpose to conquer the devil. Even the top of the mountain was NOT the main point of our hike, though it was the figurative and literal pinnacle of the activity. The real goal for both of us was to slow down time.
Dalia was a few weeks away from leaving home and living at Keuka College in the Finger Lakes, hours away. This was a massive, exciting, appropriate, and low-key-terrifying change for our entire family.
We talked about college some. But talking only eases some anxiety. Too much talking amplifies it. Delighting in a beautiful fungus growing in the dark and sunny Catskill woods on the slope of a giant pile of rocks slows the incessant race into the future and anchors a person to the mountain, stretching time itself.
Descending a mountain may be hard on muscles and joints, but one of the best feelings on your way down is when you start to look forward to getting to your car, or arriving home and taking a hot shower. Though it is not the most epic part of the experience, this is the point where time has slowed the most. Feet and legs aching, here you can almost hold onto time and stretch it out like taffy. We didn’t avoid the feeling. We leaned into it and kept our steady slow pace, even as comfort was just a mile away.
Though I miss her now, Dalia and I did not miss a moment this summer. We listened to a red breasted nuthatch sing on Indian Head, sat in bluestone thrones on Twin Mountain, and admired the landscape of the northern Catskills from Hunter’s fire tower as the Wings of Time buffeted us. We went at our own speed, the speed of the day, of the summer sun. An hour was an hour, no more, no less. We never said, “Where did the time go?” We ate it intentionally along with our backpack-warm peanut butter and jam sandwiches.
Running and hiking with my girls was the most lovely gift of this past summer. And I learned the sweet way that the slower I go, the longer it lasts.