one lap is a 400 meter race right?
2 laps is a 800 meter race right?
4 laps is a 1600 meters.....so why is it 100 meters short?
If I said to you let's race four laps....and your response was ok but let's shorten it by 100 meters....I would say for what? ....so can someone please explain the logic of running 4 laps 100 meters short?
we'll do whatever we want, gosh
idiots
high schoolers
1) Tracks weren't always 400m.
2) If you use kilometers rather than miles to record distance, doesn't it make more sense to run 1.5 km (1500m) rather than 1.6 km, yet alone 1.6093333?
if they where not 400 meters what where they?....if you have a one lap race and two lap race...then it still seems to me you run four lap race.......
Idontknow wrote:
if they where not 400 meters what where they?....if you have a one lap race and two lap race...then it still seems to me you run four lap race.......
500 meter tracks.
3 laps. 1500 meters.
gosh.
then why would they change the 500 to the 400 and the 1000 to 800 but not 1500 to 1600....i dont get it....
they still run 1000 meter races.
you don't get much.
Ok wise guys - I have been running for 30 plus years and have never had a sensible answer to this question. Traditionally tracks were not 500m, they were 440 yards, 1/4 miles. Yes, I know there were some tracks of different lengths, but the standard track was 440 yards.
So, why when we switched to metric racing was the "Metric Mile" set at 1500m and not 1600, far more accurate in correlation to the 100/200/400/800 distances converting from 100/220/440/880.
Has anyone got an answer?
There was a switch from running 1 mile, 2 miles, 3 miles and 6 miles to 1.5k, 3k, 5k and 10k. You can argue 1500/1600 either way depending on whether you double 800 or half 3k.
The Olympic distances have mostly been metric the whole time (for the modern Olympics of course), with both 800 and 1500 being there since the beginning. It's probably that for "normal" people, ie people that don't count in laps, 1500 is more of a round number that 1600 (you could ask the same kind of question and wonder why people still run miles?).
I read on here at some point taht tracks in France/maybe rest of Europe? were 500m at the time when the Olympics was being restarted. So i guess thats where it came from.
hsrunners wrote:
1) Tracks weren't always 400m.
2) If you use kilometers rather than miles to record distance, doesn't it make more sense to run 1.5 km (1500m) rather than 1.6 km, yet alone 1.6093333?
1.609344 exactly.
And the reason we race 1500m: try getting a 1600m split during a mile race!
UH.
The 1500 is the metric mile. There are other countries besides the United States morons.
by that logic, they should have changed the 1500 to the 1200.
why couldn't 1600m be the "metric mile"?
we still run 800m not 1000m and 400m not 500m - so why not 1600m?
it really does come from old french velodromes with 500 meter tracks.
So what's the answer?
500 meter tracks makes sense until we see the 400 and 800.
Maybe the metric folks hated the English folk and refused to do a 1600, seeing as it was within 9 meters of their precious mile, so the 1500 was born. Hmmm...
That's as good an answer as any other moronic post yet.
Anybody got a track history book?
I was thinking about this the other day. Maybe since the 15 is kind of a big-deal event, they wanted people to run it as fast as possible, so it both starts and ends on straightaways?
Everything used to be the mile, for whatever reason historically that distance became the Blue ribbon event (today it's switched to the 100m) of track and field, mostly because of the romanticism of the 4 minute barrier. It made the mile very popular. Why do we run the 1500 m then?
"A metric mile is a distance of 1,500 meters. This distance is used when it is desirable to approximate the statute mile, yet also desirable to use a convenient round number in SI or metric units." - Wikipedia.org
Why approximate?
"In 1976 the International Amateur Athletic Federation decided to only reconise metric distances for world records. Yet an exception was made for the mile." -wikipedia.org
So historically it's always been the mile, the IAAF just wanted to round everything off to metric measurements and since the mile had been such a popular distance/event they wanted to find a metric equivelant (since most of the T&F world lives in the metric system it also helps the casual watcher), thus the explosion of the 1500m and why it is run today.
So far the most sensible answer is that it allows you to begin on a straightaway.