On October 10, the FM Half Marathon will start and finish next to the New Main of the Fargo Public Library (see details here). That led a few of us FPL staffers to wonder what it would take to read a half marathon, which would be 13.1 miles of type.

The calculations work out to something like this:

A half marathon is 830,016 linear inches. A standard paperback has 4 inches of type per line and 38 lines of type per page. For a hardcover adult title, it was 4.5 inches of type per line and 37 lines per page. So the range of pages to read a half marathon would be from 4,985.1 pages for hardcover books to 5,460.6 pages for paperbacks. Yes, the amount of white space at chapter breaks could vary widely, and most people don’t read exclusively paperbacks or hardcovers. So let’s round it off to 5300 pages.

Are you up to the challenge? Can you go the distance and read a half marathon by October 10?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 10:18 am and is filed under Fun, Reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.