In Stephen King’s novel The Long Walk, contestants must maintain a minimum speed of four miles per hour.
The competition involves 100 boys walking continuously along a route under the supervision of soldiers. A contestant receives warnings for slowing below the required pace; accumulating three warnings leads to elimination, which in the novel means death by gunfire.
The fixed speed makes the contest a test of endurance rather than an ordinary race. Walkers must balance fatigue, injury, weather, conversation, and the psychological pressure of seeing other contestants removed from the competition.
King wrote The Long Walk under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and the novel was first published in 1979. It is set in a dystopian United States and is often grouped with King’s early Bachman books, alongside novels such as Rage, Roadwork, and The Running Man.