How long is metric mile

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Today Aug. The 1, meters has been part of the Olympic program since , reflecting the French origins of the modern Olympic movement and its founder, Pierre de Coubertin. But the mile, just meters longer, is a far superior experience for athletes and spectators. While the 1, meters takes three-and-three-quarter laps of a standard meter track, the mile is run in just a shade more than four laps.

The symmetry of the four laps makes the mile easy to follow, and is particularly useful when watching elite runners capable of challenging the four-minute mile. Cheering athletes against the clock, knowing each lap has to be run in under a minute, is one of the great spectacles in track, a sport that has far too few of them.

Thanks to Roger Bannister, who famously broke the four-minute mile in , the mile has transcended sport and moved into metaphor. The four-minute mile is an almost universally recognized benchmark, even if the world record, set in by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco, is now an impossibly fast Meanwhile, only die-hard track fans could tell you the time of a world-class 1, The mile makes more sense for the runners, too.

I was a mediocre high school miler, who progressed into an even more mediocre collegiate 1,meter runner. In the mile, I always knew where I stood in relation to the rest of the race, and how far I had come and had yet to go. But the 1, was always disorienting. Was I gauging my laps from the start of the race? Or from the finish?

When I had completed two laps, the natural halfway point, I was more than halfway done, which meant the final lap came up on me faster than I felt it should. Complicating it all is the problem of splits. In distance races, the key to the race is your pace. In the mile, keeping track of your pace is simple—after every lap, a coach would read out quarter-mile splits. In the 1,, depending on where the coach is standing, you may have to calculate your pace after and meters.

Rather than hang up his spikes as adulthood set in, Pete never stopped running, and is nationally competitive in over races. He finished fourth in a masters exhibition 1, held at the US Olympic trials, and the official results illustrate the peculiar nature of the 1,, with splits at , , and 1, meters. Pete, who works in finance, says that after years of racing, he still struggles with the 1, splits.

The mile is easy to explain to non-track people, he says.