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My heart goes out to those feckless NASA engineers who botched the Mars Orbiter mission
after failing to convert English measures to metric values, thus causing the spacecraft to
smash into the planet instead of reaching a safe orbit. Anyone who has ever scarfed down a
pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey and then attempted to translate fat grams into
fat pounds on the bathroom scale knows that the metric system is not the easiest thing to
get a handle on. It’s like driving on the left side of the road when you go to
England.
The metric–English tug of war especially affects athletes.
International track and field events are, for the most part, measured in metric units.
Maybe that’s why American athletes perform so poorly in international track and field
events. We were trained on high school tracks to run the 440, half-mile, and mile, not the
400 meter, 800 meter or 1500 meter run.
The 26.2 mile marathon has resisted this shift to all things metric. This distance pays
homage to the Greek soldier who died after running 24 or so miles carrying a message from
the battlefield. Why the extra distance? Historians differ as to the reasons, but we do
know that during the 1908 Olympiad in London, organizers wanted the race to finish in
front of Queen Alexandra’s viewing perch. The distance has remained fixed ever since.
Aside from the marathon, the most popular mass participatory running events in this country
are 3.1 and 6.2 mile-long races—better known, respectively, as the 5K or 10K. It’s
as if American runners have a split personality: the unmetric marathon and metric 5K and
10K.
I measure my running and cycling mileage in good old Yankee miles. But measuring in
kilometers could provide me the extra bonus of higher distance numbers. Think about it:
“Hey, I went on a 100 kilometer bike ride on Saturday,” Or, “Hey. I went on
a 62 mile ride on Sunday.” Which sentence represents a greater accomplishment?
But I have been weaned on miles ever since I first ran around the high school track, and
graduated to running through my neighborhood.
And although I drive a Suzuki SUV, I always check the mph—not kph—on its speedometer.
Old habits are hard to break. (Plus, the four-cylinder engine never goes beyond 60 mph
anyway, and the SUV was once rated by Consumer Reports as the vehicle most likely to tip
over on a curve.)
Whether you stick with meters or yards, there can often be confusion in other ways.
At the local gym, I used to swim laps in a pool that I had assumed to be 25 yards long. My
times seemed surprisingly fast, so I thought that my swimming was improving—until one
day I asked one of the health club attendants how long the pool was. “Oh, it’s 22
yards.”
I was crestfallen. I was cheating three yards per lap. For 72 laps, or what is 40 yards
over a mile, I’d been swimming only 1584 yards instead of 1800 yards. The difference
was 216 yards, or close to ten lap lengths.
When cyclometers first became popular in the early 80s, I got one mounted on my front
handlebar. But I spent more time looking at the digital readout than observing the
scenery. When its battery died I removed it from my bike. I told friends that I never did
like knowing how slow I was biking. (It did come in handy when I once wanted to see how
fast I could go—50 miles per hour on an empty downhill stretch in the Berkeley
Hills—a speed I don’t recommend unless you have a death wish and enjoy watching
your front wheel shimmy in front of you.)
My favorite way to measure cycling distance is a technique I used during the summer I biked
solo across the United States. My highlight was after the day in the saddle. Every evening,
after eating dinner, I took out a piece of string and a AAA map of the state I was riding
through. With the string placed on the map, I measured how far I had traveled that day.
That summer I bicycled over 2,800 miles. That piece of string covered a lot of ground.
To this day, I still employ the map and string method on long rides. It’s an
old-fashioned way of celebrating miles with a
smile.
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