2007-06-11-NCAA

I encourage everyone to contact the NCAA via pmr@ncaa.org and encourage them to keep metric measures.

Here's the letter I wrote to them:

I was recently disturbed to read that the NCAA is contemplating using a mile instead of 1,500m.

While John Doe average fan might be able to picture a mile, he's also used to picturing metric due to national and international events (especially the Olympic Games). This may make it better for the very small set of the public who refuse to learn metric (and probably aren't interested in athletics enough to pay attention to the Olympic Games), but it's going to have a negative impact on those of us who compete as we won't be able to make useful comparisons to things that actually matter. For example, both national and international records are completely in metric and all Olympic distances are given exclusively in metric. As it's all in metric, I can compare my times to national and international times (and if I'm going overseas for a meet, I can compare my times to those who I might run against without having to get out a calculator). There's also a whole set of average speed calculations I can't do any more (without some annoying calculations) for things like the loss in average speed between the 1,500m and the 5km races.

There may be some ready made history (although it's exclusively US history which is fine for those of us who are a bit older, but fails on many other points) in the mile, but it's less interesting to compare against history than against people I might actually compete against. There's also the large corpus of built up knowledge around metric, especially in the younger generation who only know their 1,500m distance and will now have to re-evaluate themselves at the 1,609m (1 mile) distance. We've done metric long enough that people have a feel for it (it took a while, but they now have it), especially at the standard distances. Please don't cause confusion by going back.

I strongly suggest that we continue to use metric (preferably metric exclusively) for all our events as it's better for those competing.

Regards,
Paul Armstrong

Mountain View,
CA