To Ease the Passing of Time

One of my students told me that story. He and his best buddy had a contest. Both of them wanted to lose weight. They decided that they would achieve their goal by biking. They biked almost every day, even in the Canadian winter, to go to work or to the store if what they needed wasn’t too big to carry. The winner of the contest was not going to be the one who would lose the most weight but the one who would cover the greatest number of kilometers in one year on his bike. Each of them had the same application to monitor the number of kilometers they were doing. They were pretty close to each other one week before New Year’s Day. They agreed on one thing. None of them was going to ride his bike on New Year’s Eve. They were going to rest or celebrate with their families. They would meet the next day to determine who would be the winner.

My student, his name was Jonathon, decided to give himself a better chance to win. Even if it was very cold on that night, he dressed very warmly, jumped on his bike, and hit the bicycle path that he normally took to go to work. He had ridden a couple of kilometers without meeting anyone when he saw another cyclist coming the other way. You guessed it. It was his friend who had decided to do the same thing. They laughed at the situation, went to my friend’s place, and opened a bottle of champagne. While they were drunk, they decided to erase the data on their bike’s applications without comparing them. They never knew who the winner was. All they knew was that they were good friends, and that they both had achieved their goal of losing weight.