I was thinking tonight on my way home from work about just how much I have driven to get to training since I moved to New Jersey about 12 years ago. I began training at the [url=http://www.bnyd.com]Bujinkan New York Dojo[/url] soon after I relocated. I settled in April, so I guess I probably began training there on a regular basis in June or so. After I got home late tonight (didn’t go to class – in part due to the fact that I needed a haircut, in part due to the high gas prices and part laziness) I was kind of adding the miles up in my head. Here’s what I came up with:
[list]
[*] average 50 miles to/from training from wherever I was living at the time
[*] average of 40 BNYD classes each year
[*] 6 additional trips to NY each year
[*] 200 additional miles each year for travel to other training events
[*] all multiplied by 10 years
[*] 2 years of monthly seminars in NY
[/list]
This comes out to about 52,000 miles over the past 12 years.

I would say that this is a conservative estimate. Although there was a period of 20 months or so that I did not train in NY on a weekly basis, I was attending a lot of seminars in this period and going to the BNYD for monthly seminars.

What’s more amazing than the number of miles I’ve driven is the amount of time to make all those trips. At .5 miles each minute (an average of 30mph), this comes out to about 70 days of driving!