Clicks

ORN: 6.5 km in 41:29.

I'm switching. According to Wikipedia, repository of all human knowledge, the Mile was standardized at 5,280 feet during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. You know, because it is 320 rods. Makes sense right? Or if you prefer, it's eight furlongs. In fact, if you want to read the crazy history of miles, furlongs, feet, chains, yards, acres, rods, and other asinine [analog] units of measure, be my guest. I'm through trying to do stupid conversions of feet to yards, and miles to feet, and how many football fields long it is to the liquor store.

Peer inside my head, and these are the things that you find.

Enter the blindingly radiant rationality that is The Meter, or if you are one of them foreigners, The Metre. As any preschooler could tell you, a meter is the distance that light travels in 1/299,792,458ths of a second. Any retard with a stopwatch can see that. OK, so that is only slightly less arbitrary as a system of measurement than the area a team of British oxen can plow in a day or the length of one of the King's body parts.

No, the beauty of the metric system is not in its arbitrary origins. All systems of measurement are arbitrary. This chunk of rock over here is a pound, this woman's left breast is a C-cup, and my headache right now is an 11. The beauty of the metric system is in how easy the math is. Behold the lovely powers of ten. It's math you can do when you are running!

If you are running 10 km, and you know that if you have 6 km to go, you have six thousand meters [more or less six thousand more strides if you are of a certain height.] If you are running six miles, you have to do hard-ass math to figure out whether you have 21,120 feet or 7,040 yards to go. The decimals lend themselves to easy conversion to percentages leading to such easy thoughts flashing through your head as "Ah, I am 84% finished" rather than "Am I 2/3rds finished or 3/4ths?"

Anyway, I fell in love with the metric system in grade school when school exposed us to it as our society [during the Carter Administration] had the opportunity to convert, but instead chose to stick with the medieval Imperial system. The revolution may have went our way in some ways, but we are stuck with their friggin' dumb-ass units of measure.

On the other hand, it's easy and pleasant to go to a bar and order a pint of Guinness. It's something else altogether to order 568 ml of Guinness. Doesn't roll off the tongue so well.

But my point, and I do have one, is that I am going to try using kilometers as much as I can from now on.

This has nothing to do with me wanting to hear that cute female voice on my Nike+ more often.