Naismith’s Rule is a guide to find out the distance and height that can be covered in a certain time. As we were cycling we had to adapt the Rule for Scouts with rucksacks which is 3 km per hour hiking plus 300m per hour ascending. Our Naismith’s Rule was 15 km per hour plus 1000m per hour. This turned out to be slightly too much and should have been around 13 km per hour and 900m per hour. Naismith’s Rule is very useful when planning a route, as it calculates realistic times for an expedition. Naismith’s Rule does not apply for down hills.

We used this chart to work it out:

Example