[USMA:29737] Re: Swim a mile

[MightyChimp]

My response to the swim posting: I'd be more curious on how they accomplish this competition. Your own words state the pool is Olympic sized, which means its exact length is 25 m. A mile is somewhere between 1609 and 1610 m. Swim events always go full laps from one end of the pool to the other. A 100 m event consists of 4 laps (forward, back, forward, back) of 25 m each to make up the 100 m. If the event is 64 laps in a 25 m pool, that doesn't quite equal a mile. It only comes to 1600 m (16 x 25 = 1600). On the other hand, they may decide to have a 60 lap competition, which would make it a 1500 m event, which is sometimes called a metric-mile. Is this what they intend to do? Just because someone uses the term mile, there is no guarantee it will be exactly as the name implies. I am dying to know how they intend to do it. Could you find out and post it?     ----- Original Message ----- From: MightyChimp To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Monday, 2004-05-10 17:50 Subject: [USMA:29721] Swim a mile   Euric, I call on your superior advice yet again (sorry about this). My local health authority is doing a "Swim a mile" competition. I need to contact them to tell them that "The UK is a metric country" and inform them that "only old people know imperial". I should tell them to change the competition so that it says the well used, often quoted and correcly pronounced "kilometre" instead of the redundant "mile" that no-one uses. What I fear is that with so many kids and young people getting involved they might all start using "mile" in their day to day speach. The swimming pool itself is definetly metric because its "olympic length" and so any enthusiast could come along and use a tape measure down its length to measure its in nice round �m. And maybe go for a swim too. However I was horrified to see the depth expressed on shiny new signs in feet and inches (with metric underneath, smaller). Considering "The UK is a metric country" why do they think that kids will know their height in ft/in? Of course they don't! That's about as likely as an Australian surfer measuring his surfboard in inches! We need to prevent this small outbreak of imperial measures, so I'd like your advice on how to do this.