Which numbers belong on the print

Six are offered. Almost every good print uses three.

The three that almost always work

Distance. The size of the thing. It is the number anyone reads first and the only one that needs no context.

Elevation. What made it hard, if anything did. On a flat route it is worth leaving off rather than printing a small number that says the day was easy.

Date. The one that does the most work over time and gets chosen least.

A route without a date is a shape. A route with one is a specific Tuesday, and in ten years the date is the part you cannot reconstruct. Everything else is recoverable from the file; the feeling of that particular morning is attached to when.

The ones to think about

Elapsed time suits a long day where the stops were part of it. Moving time suits a race. They are rarely both interesting.

Average speed or pace is the one that ages worst. It is the most comparative number on the sheet — it invites a judgement, from you and from anyone else in the room, and the judgement changes as you do. A pace you were proud of at thirty is a number you have feelings about at forty. The print will outlast both.

There is one exception: a race where the pace *was* the achievement. Then it is the point.

Coordinates are a design element more than information. They read as precise and say very little, and on a route that starts near home they say slightly more than you might want.

Why three

A wide sheet with two numbers under a title looks unfinished. With four it starts to read as a dashboard, and a dashboard is a different kind of object — one that invites comparison rather than recollection.

Three sits under a headline as a line of type rather than as a table.

The labels are yours, the values are not

You can call elevation whatever you call it. What you cannot do is type the number.

That is not a missing feature. The moment a distance can be typed, the print stops being evidence and becomes a poster with a claim on it — and the entire premise here is that the line and the numbers both came out of a file that recorded something real.