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 3×3x3 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 4×4x4, 5×5x5 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.