Hiking Through Life

Rubik’s Cube

So there I was… sitting in an airport restaurant in DIA passing time. I was passing time because Jennifer and Emily Kate flew out to Washington State in the evening and my flight back to DC was in the morning… so I had a lot of time on my hands. Anyway… I was sitting there in the restaurant when two people came in and sat down at the table across from mine… a mother and her teenage son. I didn’t even really look at them until I saw the boy, who had his back to me, got out a rubik’s cube and started messing with it. I took note of this because I enjoy playing with a rubik’s cube from time to time. In fact Jennifer would tell you that I mess with way to much. I couldn’t help but notice that he was solving and then scrambling the thing so fast that it looked as though he was doing it several times a minute. I asked him how he learned to solve it so fast and he said he read about it online. He said he was 14 and had been doing it for about a year. His mom proceeded to tell me that he was headed to Stanford in a couple weeks to compete in the Rubik’s Cube National Championships. His personal best on the 3x3x3 cube was 13.01 seconds. 13.01 SECONDS!! I’ve been toying with the rubik’s cube for like 7 or 8 years (not consistently) but my best time is only 2 minutes. He then got out his 4x4x4, 5x5x5 and his tetrahedron and said he’ll be competing with those as well. It was definitively cool watching someone solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 15 seconds.