1500 meters is 1640.415 yards. No doubt a rounding up the metric distance.
I almost can’t believe that I’m the guy pulling up a freaking Cecil Adams column, but here: A brief discussion of English measurements. Turns out there were legitimate reasons the mile is weird. Sounds like an iffy choice for a footrace distance, but the British were always influential on the world stage and there’s no turning back now.
Dang, it looks like I’m going to have to learn more about Josh Kerr (which won’t be easy as none of my cable channels are covering Diamond League this year). Everything I’d seen of him prior to the Paris Olympics painted him as the Connor McGregor of track; big mouth, intimidating presence, always falters when the pressure’s on. And then Cole Hocker pantsed him in the 1500, and that was all she wrote. (I also vaguely remember him bombing in Grand Slam Track, although in fairness that was due to an injury.) So '26 rolls around, and all of a sudden he’s resurgent and blowing doors off left and right and he absolutely shines in…the Prefontaine Classic? I think that was the one. And now, a world record. After boasting about how he was going to set it (which is usually the kiss of death in any sport). Sometimes I ask “How did this guy get so good?”, but in this instance the question has to be “How does someone this good throw in that many clunkers?” I never had to ask this about Tiger Woods!
Every unit anyone anywhere has ever used has some legitimate reason for it. Often, there’s some application for which, if you wanted a unit just for that application, it really would be the best unit. The difficulty only comes when you want to be able to use the same unit in different contexts. And real-world contexts always end up overlapping somewhere.
The women’s record is 4 minutes 6.32 seconds, so they’re not far off.
Just days after Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile record for men, Diane Leather broke the 5-minute mile record for women, and just a short distance away.
What is weird about it? Now, the ancient stadion was not precisely calibrated, so maybe an old-school mile was closer to 1500m than 1600m, but somewhere in that range. Or do you mean the choice of a middle-distance race in the first place, as opposed to the stadium (let’s say 200m), diaulos (400m), and dolichos (5k) like they had in the old Olympics?
It is a distance that is run fairly frequently across most of the track world. Both the 1500 and mile records stood for a long time. The 1500 record was set in 1998, 28 years ago, also by Hicham El Guerrouj.
I assume this is a long time for a record to stand. Any speculation as to why?
I know there was a women’s record that stood for a really long time, but I think that was generally believed to be because the (GDR?) athlete who sit it was pumped up by drugs that were subsequently banned.
I assume this is not the case for the 1500
And mile records because 27-28 years ago we had drug testing that was reasonably effective.
You must be thinking of Marita Koch’s 400m record of 47.60 s that has been standing since 1985. Yes, she was a GDR athlete and most probably drugged.
English measurements do have their uses, and I’d argue that for a few applications they’re actually better. For height, for example, I find it much easier to wrap my head around something like “five eight” or “six four” than a three-digit number. When dealing with international competitions, however, I think it’s important to set clear, uniform standards and stick to them. So 200m is the maximum sprint distance based on the limitations of the human body, 400m is the “fast but not sprinting” distance, 1500m is the “fairly quick” distance, etc. 5,280 feet doesn’t really correspond to anything in the human world, and the fact that early efforts came close to a nice, even figure that became a tantalizing target probably did as much to entrench the distance as anything.
Just to show that some of us Canadians, who are supposed to be officially metric, I’ll offer this:
1 mile = 8 furlongs or 1760 yards or 5280 feet
1 furlong = 220 yards, or 660 feet
1 yard = 3 feet or 36 inches
1 foot = 12 inches
1 fathom = 6 feet
1 chain = 66 feet
I grew up in a pre-metric Canada, and I’m kind of glad that I know all that.
Fascinating article on what went into the shoes (and suit) for this record.
TLDR: Brooks built Kerr a pair of shoes specifically for this race, taking into account myriad variables including “…the expected temperature in London, the target cadence, and the pace he has to hold from the first step.” The shoes were optimized for the exact pace he needed to break the record.
Wow, you mean that there are actually two of us who know all of that?
(my bolding)
This part about optimizing for temperature means that, hypothetically, Brooks could’ve supplied Kerr with several pairs of virtually-identical shoes – but each optimized for a narrow range of temperatures. “These shoes are for 27.00 through 28.99 C … and these are for for 29.00 - 30.99 C … wait, we have a few more pairs like this …”
What I find fascinating is that someone holds the half-mile (or other weird distance) world record, but likely doesn’t know it.
I do not even pretend to be a classicist on TV, but an ancient mile was a thousand paces, or something like 5000 feet or 4800 feet (themselves not precisely calibrated), not exactly 5,280.
If it is not recorded, it is hardly a world record, is it? In modern racing, that’s 800m.
Does it say what combination of fabrics that suit is actually made of?
Three of us and you guys forgot the “link”, 7.92" I have a giant folding wooden caliper that spans 10 links. Today the link is only used for sausage.
You forgot the punchline:
1 acre = 1 furlong by 1 chain
I’d also list them in ascending order:
12 inches = 1 foot
3 feet = 1 yard
22 yards = 1 chain
10 chains = 1 furlong
8 furlongs = 1 mile
(The fathom is a measure of depth, not length, so shouldn’t be mixed with length units.)
There’s also of course furlongs/fortnight, a made up silly unit that is (was?) used in one of a student’s first computer programming assignment.
Indeed, I looked it up, and, according to the Royal Navy, anyway, a cable is 1/10 of a nautical mile (recall that miles are measured differently at sea), and that cable is divided into 101 fathoms (or is it 100 on some cables? The point here is, it does not matter.). That makes a fathom “about six feet”.
I prefer 1 acre = 99 inch-miles.