I read your Sunday, Nov. 21, article about the Davis Turkey Trot
footrace. I am confused about the distance of the shorter race. If the
organizers did their job correctly, the race was 5 kilometers (km)
long. Can't we leave it at that? You wrote that the course was a "3.1
mile" course, but that is not correct because the distances are
different. And to really screw things up, there is a photo caption that
refers to "a 5000-yard" race! As any educated person knows, 5 km is
5000 meters, which is an entirely different distance than 5000 yards,
and no one uses yards to measure distances of this length at all in any
case.
Please, when you write about running events, just leave it as a "5 K" or
"10K", and quit referring to the obsolete English mile distances.
Everyone interested in running knows how long the metric distances are.
When I have measured road distances for a local running club, I use a
bicycle with a cyclometer set for metric (which is the default setting),
calibrate it against a 400 m running track, and measure the road
distance in meters. This is standard practice, although some like to
use GPS devices. In any case, miles are no longer an issue, so let's
forget them, please.
HARRY WYETH
Grass Valley
