Adoontourious wanted to run the shore-to-shore marathon next month, a 26-mile race from one side of the island, where he lived, to the other. He decided to work up the 26 miles by running five days a week for the next five weeks. Each day he’d run one mile longer than he did the day before, except for the first day of each week, when he’d run the same number of miles he ran on the last day of the previous week. He wanted his last two practice runs to be 26 and 27 miles long.
How many miles would he have to run on his first practice run?
Answer
Adoontourious will have to run 7 miles on his first run in order to run 27 miles on his last run.
Since he will run the same amount of miles on the first day of each week as on the last day of the previous week, and he will run one more mile than the previous day on the other four days of each week, then he will add four miles to the length of his daily practice run by the end of each week. In five weeks, he will have added 20 miles to his daily run. So, he will have to start at seven miles to reach his goal (27-20=7).
