On 2008/12/07, at 9:13 AM, Mark Bollinger wrote:
I am new to this list, but I thought you might find this
interesting. This is from my local YMCA in North Carolina.
Mark
Making the Flip
The Finley indoor pool is making a flip from yards to meters.
Through the end of December swimmers will swim the length of the
pool on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday (yards) and
the width of the pool on Tuesday and Thursday (meters).
The switch allows the YMCA to accommodate all members.
“Swim team, tri athletes and some lap swimmers measure their
distance in meters rather than yards,” says Finley Aquatics
Director, Carla Martin. “By switching up the pool, we can meet this
demand on certain days of the week.”
The Finley indoor pool measures 25 yards long (locker room end to
starting blocks) and 25 meters across (life guard area to family
programs wing interior window). Lap swimmers who swim 36 laps will
either travel 1.02 miles long or 1.118 miles wide.
The flip also provides swim lesson participants with a more
comfortable depth, the water fitness classes with a bit more room
and consistent measurements for the YMCA’s association-wide swim
team. The Aquatics department hopes this change will benefit
everyone in the long run.
Please note the flip days change in January. The January through May
schedule is as follows:
Yards: Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday
Meters: Wednesday and Thursday
Dear Mark,
Many thanks for sharing this story.
Is there no end to human ingenuity and creativity?
At first, I found this story to be so profoundly funny that I almost
literally rolled on the floor laughing, but then I thought that it
must be one of those urban legends that soon travel around the world
as an internet joke. However, I confirmed that it was real when I
checked the web page at: http://www.ymcatriangle.org/A.E._Finley_YMCA/A85CEF6B108D4475914A3D055E47C0CC.aspx
By the way, thinking back a bit into the history of this pool, I
wonder how the design engineer got approval for a pool design that was
metric in one direction and that used old pre-metric measures in the
other direction. There must have been some 'fun' approval meetings!
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the
modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they
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Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST,
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