I had a couple of things occur this week that reminded me of the number of people that have a very set routine, their daily actions are the same, and get a little upset if this routine is altered. There is a saying that if you want to change something you have to, “think outside the box.” In other words, venture out and try something different.
I started thinking about why runners enter 5K races and the large majority do not know what a kilometer distance is. They enter a 5K and say, “It is a little over three miles.” It is actually 3.1068560 miles in distance. When you measure a course for race certification you must list each of the kilometer landmarks. Each kilometer must be 3280.84 feet in length, or .62137119 miles. The point of this data on kilometers is that if the race director only put down markers for the kilometers in a race, I seriously doubt most of the runners would be able to determine their pace. As a race measurer, for certification, the paper work has to be in kilometers if you are trying to certify a 5K race distance. But, for the race director the course also needs to be measured in miles (one mile equals 1.609344 kilometers). I have seen very few races even bother with putting out both the kilometer landmarks and the mile markers.
This measurement in kilometers started with U.S. runners competing in international races that use the metric system. In order to qualify to enter a meet a time in kilometers must be used. It didn’t take long before all races, both high school and university, began to have race distances measured in kilometers, or meters (100-meter dash versus the old 100-yard dash).
