If you are not a swimmer, you may not be aware of the fact that swimmers in the US swim for 1650 yards and call it a mile. If you are a swimmer in the US, you may not be aware of the fact that what you are calling a mile, is not actually a mile. In fact, it’s 110 yards short of a mile.

Finding an explanation for this was not easy. The most “thorough” answer I could find seems to be this blog post, but reading and re-reading it, there is information missing that makes it almost impossible to decipher. So, combining information gleaned from this post with other information found through Internet research (there’s not a lot out there on this subject), I have put together the following summary. If you are reading this, and you see something I have written that you know to be inaccurate, PLEASE TELL ME IN THE COMMENTS SECTION.

Summary explanation:

–> “Long course” pools in the US used to be 55 yards, which made swimming a “mile” and “half mile” easy and convenient. So, for a long time, the official mile distance in the United States was 1760 yards (16 long course laps), which is accurate.

–> International distance “long course” meets, including the Olympics, are swum in a 50 meter pool (1 foot shorter than 55 yards). For the sake of our Olympic athletes, the US changed its “long course” pools to 50 meters, but kept our short course pools at 25 yards (schools and community centers couldn’t afford to remodel their pools). I haven’t found an explanation for why our short course pools were ever built as 25 yards to begin with.

–> 1500 meters (1.5k) is the standard international race length (1640 yards), and Americans commonly (though inaccurately) refer to this distance as “the mile.”

–> To keep our athletes (who are often training in 25 yard pools) international-competition ready, the United States came up with a new event, the 1650 yard freestyle, which is very close to the international 1500 meter (1640 yards). Since we called the 1500 meter swim “the mile,” the name stuck to the 1650 yard swim, even though it is 110 yards shy of an actual mile.

Got it?

Of course, my favorite comment on an internet forum:

“Since you are in the water, you should swim a nautical mile anyway which is about 2000 yards or 80 lengths.”

[Further research uncovers this interesting information: The nautical mile is measured as one minute of arc of latitude along any meridian. This is convenient for the navigators of boats—and planes—as ocean charts are often based on the Mercador projection, whose scale varies from the equator to 80° north or south latitude. But, of course, measuring miles by degrees of latitude is also imperfect, as the earth is not exactly spherical, and the nautical mile is longer as you get closer to the poles. For that reason, international committees agree on a set distance for the nautical mile as 1,852 meters.]