Jamie was sitting with another swim mom and the three of us got into a conversation about how long a mile was in the pool. It’s a subject that I’ve seen errorenously discussed on the web, so I’m going to give my spiel about how long a mile is for swimmers.
Many swimmers mistakenly call the 1,650 yard event “the mile” but that is an incorrect label. Let’s do the math: a mile is 5,280 feet. There are three feet to one yard. So to find out how many yards are in a mile, we divide 5,280 by 3. The result of that is 1760. So one mile is 1,760 yards, not 1,650.
So you are probably thinking, how did the number 1,650 get the reputation as being a mile. Most of us swim in 25 yard long pools, but for pools that are 25 meters or 50 meters long, that measurement doesn’t work well. Once again let’s do the math. A quick check on Google says that one yard is 0.914 meters, so a meter is a little bit longer than a yard. Taking that number, and multiplying it by 1,760, we discover that a mile is 1,608.64 meters. If you are swimming in a 50 meter pool, you would round up (since we don’t swim partial laps) to 1,650 meters. Hence the number 1,650.
So share the word: a mile is roughly 1,800 yards or 1,650 meters.
As for my workout, I got in that magical 2,500 yards. Part of the youth club team wasn’t using the pool as they were at the Junior Olympic event today, so I swam on the other side of the pool and had the lane to myself the whole day. These self-coached workouts have allowed me to get some distance in on stroke(specifically breaststroke and backstroke) and with strengthening my kick with a lot of kick sets. As I discussed yesterday, I am also concentrating on getting my butterfly stronger so that I can do the longer IM events and make my 100 IM times quicker. This swim brings my Go The Distance total to 72.56 miles for the year.
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