UKH

Prompted by the very good "Hill running nav" thread that I don't want to derail.

Despite using metric units at school and at work all my life, I default to miles for distance and feet for altitude.

On an OS map the contours are in metres, so I have no problem setting the watch to metres for elevation when running (but afterwards the total ascent has to be recorded in feet).

OS grid is in km. I do pace counting in double steps per 100m, I look at a map and think "take left fork in 250m". (Although if it's more than a km I'm either dividing by 8 and multiplying by five or dividing by 10 and multiplying by 6).

Trail and fell running nav would be so much easier if I switched to km, but I dread the thought of not knowing how many miles I've done, or the incomprehensible idea of pace being in "min/km". Thats just...wrong.

Anyone else with this irrational phobia?

No because I am a rational individual living in the 21st century.

Seriously, just do it, you'll get used to it in no time and then you can taunt any luddite friends who still use miles.

I think it is an age thing. I suspect I'm younger than you and older than Dave. I can switch quite happily between metric and imperial.

I grew up on in the continent, so miles and yards only appeared in my life just before I turned twenty. 
I have little problem (no bragging!) concerting some meters to miles. 1 mile is 1600-odd meters. Then 250 meters is going to be roughly 1/6th of a mile. Hence 0.16 mi. 
OS grid is 1km, which is 0.62 mi. Knowing that helps too. But then I’ve been a customer to both systems for too long and I’m obsessed with numbers! 

If only UK could have some system for weight. Ounces, pounds, stones, kilograms, etc are just so confusing to me, still. It’s not just different conversions, but also knowing which one to use when - which is more of understanding the culture. 

I am wholly metric in life, where I have control of it or unless working in a niche area where an arcane unit makes sense, except for my running, where I think in miles, feet and min/mile.

I recently decided to change this and switched my Strava settings to km and kg but found it most unsettling. Especially the min/km part! I confess to having switched back. A bit like when I turned off likes and dislikes on here.

However, I will try again. It won't be long before I get an idea of paces that are good, mediocre and terrible.

Do you ever come across a situation where you need to use imperial weights though?

Steak?

I'm sort of the opposite, school was only metric (I started primary in 1978!), my dad had a few OS inch to a mile maps, but I've only seriously used 1:50k or 1:25k so think of hill distances mainly in kms. Then I lived in Finland for a long time, so road signs were all kms and the car computer told me litres per 100 kms for fuel. I found coming back to the UK I don't really have any idea on miles per gallon and when the GPS tells me "turn left in 300 yards" I have to think "so 200 mtrs-ish"! But I got more seriously into cycling when I was Finland, and road bikers just use metric because, well, only weirdos don't so I think because of cycling I really find it hard to get out of thinking of speed and distance in metric.

Half a pound of tuppenny rice......

I still use pints rather than litres and miles for driving distances but mostly metric for everything else. 

I seem to remember hearing rumours at university (not that I would know anything about that sort of thing...) that people bought certain smoke-able substances in small fractions of ounces! Not sure if the kids have converted to metric on those matters yet. Offduty might be able to fill us in.

Rarely, which is why it’s confusing. Steaks, burgers and weight of a human are the typical ones. When talking to someone about, let’s say, rucksack weight, I’m not sure whether to use kilos or pounds. I typically say it in kilos, wait for reaction and then double that for pounds if needed. 
 

Also, I always forget whether a stone is 6kg or 16kg. If someone says they weigh 20 stones, I have to look at them and think whether he/she is 120kg or 320kg. Makes it obvious then! 

Imperial units are remarkably persistent, given that I was being taught metric units at school in the 70s and yet, if I ask a class of students how they think of their weight or height, most of them will claim to use imperial units, or pagan units as I call them. Even I don't do that.

In cooking, I would be metric all the way(*mostly, see below)  if it weren't for American recipes where they go by volume rather than weight. How big is a cup, anyway? Rather than learn a whole new set of conversion factors, I just bought a set of containers measured in cup sizes, and hope there isn't an American/British difference thing going on.

Sometimes I wish some recipes weren't quite so rigidly metric. How much  is 15g of garlic? It is quicker if I am told in cloves. I know a small one for a big one, so know if my dish will likely be more or less garlicy.

Yeah fair. Never at those and discuss human weights in kg in my (under 30) circle so never come across them - thanks for sharing things that should have been obvious to me!

Miles for driving - don't know how that passed me by - but again I suspect because my sat nav works in km...

I converted to km for my running and cycling about 2 years ago. I'm still getting used to it. It's remarkable how challenging it had been to go from min/mile to min/km to get a real idea of when I'm  Going well and when I'm not. Silly when I used to run, 10ks must often in races, so poaching by v that should be easy. 

I've slowed, so 5'15" min/km is high zone 2, while I can do about 20'40“ 5k. I struggle with other paces, so I go by HR most often. 

Orienteering race lengths are always given in km, so I grew up thinking in this way, or in multiples of a 400m track.

Pace-wise I think min/km work at least as well as miles. For example a 4:30 per k pace works out at 45 minutes for 10km, or 95 minutes for a half marathon.

Plus you go further in km!

Km is better for running metrics anyway, pace is more granular so you get a bit more detail vs miles, likewise for laps (on 10k run you'll get 10 data points rather than 6 and a bit).

I started running at 5km and 10km events so it made sense to pace in min/km and think about km splits. I have stuck with it ever since. I also think in km when hill walking because as you say it makes much more sense given grid and contour spacing on UK maps.

I also enjoy conversations with US colleagues who think that my paltry 5:15-ish pace is amazing because they assume min/mile!

I do tend to think in miles when driving though because all the UK road signs are still in miles and the speedo measures mph.

That's true of distance, but height gain in meters is not as impressive as when measured in feet.

I find it odd when Americans measure things in ounces. A 32oz drink is ~1liter. Or 'cups' when cooking. It might be homely, if your gran is teaching you how to bake. Having a published recipe, using cups rather than oz's or grams is just silly. I'd go to the pub and drink two pints after a run, but I would feel odd ordering a liter of beer.

I'm with you, Ridge. Although my school years were pre-metric (how many Pennyweights in a Drachm?, sort of thing) I'm fine with mg/g/kg or ml/l or celsius. But, it's miles all the way for running. My damn treadmill only knows km, so I have to convert for Garmin Connect or Strava. Kph is just <i>wrong</i>

I cant do it.

In Germany we ran in min/km. We never ran slower than 4min/km

I just know what a 7 min mile is, I don't know my paces in min/km

The US is a pain with fluid volumes because anything which comes from the gallon is different as a US gallon is different. So a US Pint is smaller than a UK Pint.

Of course, in the US it is easy to buy measuring cup sets. I don't know that the size is necessarily standard, but they are at least proportional within a set.  For most things I don't know that this is any better or worse than weighing and measuring. The one exception that always annoys me is butter - squashing butter into a cup to measure it and then scraping it all out again is really annoying. Melting it makes a bit more sense, but there are difficulties with that too - do you melt excess to ensure you can measure it accurately?

The OS is doing it’s best to convert me and I’ve set my watch to metric ...but I’m still mentally converting 250m of ascent so I know how much it ‘really’ is. Pace wise I was always mins/mile on road, sadly gravitating to same metric figure as I run hills/trails and get older 😀

I quite enjoy doing conversions in my head while on the move. 

I'm happy to work in km, but always want my "final answer" in miles.

I think of heights of British hills in feet but in metres in the Alps or Greater Ranges.  Obviously use feet in the US but can always convert to metres for comparison with alpine heights.

Celsius in winter (since freezing level is crucial and easier at zero) but fahrenheit in summer (obviously!)

I switched to metric for cycling and running about a decade ago, and never regretted it.

However, as a hangover from my imperial days, 32.2km/h still holds some irrational significance for me, as do 80 and 160km rides.

You don't, you order a Formidable.

A Cup is about 240ml. Doesn't help with converting weights, but at least makes liquids a bit easier to reckon.

You could try what my mum taught me, which is to add butter to a measuring jug with water in - volume displaced = volume of butter. But I still find that tedious. Usually recipes seem to give butter quantities in tablespoons, so I think it's usually easiest to divide that by half and multiply by 30 (1tbsp = 15ml ≈ 15g) for the approximate weight in grams.

Doesn't help when amounts are given in sticks, mind.

Well, I switched the watch to km and km/min, and ended up faceplanting the tarmac when the dog took my legs out from under me.

Either the gods are telling me something or the hound is stricly imperial measurements only...

But the course "length" in km is probably the number of miles you'll actually do 😁

As a teenager many years ago, I nerdily poured over maps of the Lake District. Since I'm a numerate sort of person, the heights in ft stuck in my memory - I still know lots of the summit heights. Having the heights in m totally fouls me up - I know what they are roughly but I don't remember any of them.

But I do know one or 2 in m (as well) in N Wales.

And I do know the conversions (without having to look them up)...

1000ft = 304.8m exactly

1000m = 3,280.8ft approx

1 mile = 1.609344km exactly

Oh you sad, sad man 😁

I have a cup set anyway.  I had just never compared it with anyone else's cup set!

Ha, yes!

I remember doing my maths O Level in the last year they used imperial units. I was really fed up, as metric maths is so much simpler.

In the lab I'm entirely metric. No problem with visualising 100ml, a litre etc.  At home in the kitchen I'm entirely imperial. Cold weather is Celsius, hot weather is Fahrenheit.....

Funny, I would just always assume everyone works in metric on hills etc as maps are metric!

Imperial is so illogical. How many feet or yards in a mile? Both a silly number. So if you run 3.3 miles, it's 3 miles and how many feet/ yards? Metric is just so simple that even I can do the maths!

I guess most of these things are just habit, and if you used imperial when you started running then you are probably more likely to carry on doing so. I give all measurements in metric and only convert if I really have to.

Glad it's not just me then!

Nope, that's my other foible!

I'm fully metric unless it's to do with driven distance - then it's miles. 

Got to be Celsius. KMs for walking, running and cycling. Liquid in litres. 

Except.... My own weight. Scales are in stone and lbs. 

The only good thing is the missing Rees-mogg he being the imperial fanatic he cannot stand using metre for distancing and has no far the distances are!

...and for a Welsh 3000er or a Munro-er it is useful to know that 3000ft = 3000 x 12 x 25.4  / 1000 = 914.4 m

It would be annoying to ride that far and still be 900m short of 100 miles!

Even when I do 10 and 5k I calculate my pace in minute miles.  I know a 35 min 10k is ~5.35min/mile.  It would be easier just to think of it as 3.30/k but I just can’t think like that.

Not sad at at all. I have found, as a scientist, that it really pays to know at the common conversion factors in one's head and also the values of the physical constants.

I'm sure he'll fathom it out.

My Garmin watch is metric throughout, my bike Edge 800 is Imperial but with 5k splits, my power meter is in American units but Watts are universal anyway. I have got used to mins/km, and the same number in Metric for training nowadays used to be marathon pace in Imperial. I quite like doing the conversions in my head to pass the time whilst running, on the bike everybody else always wants to know how many miles we have done, or average Imperial speed. None of them seems to understand what a Watt is, or why it is interesting...

I record all my distances in miles and all my assents in meters.  The conversion are not exactly hard to do.  Just stick with what you like using.

The fibonacci sequence is actually really helpful for this. The golden ratio about is 1.6 which is roughly what the conversation from km to miles I. If your run distance is a fibonacci number in one unit it will be a fibonacci number in another.

If you don't know it you add the 2 previous numbers to get the next number as below. 

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and so on

Most runners would do 3 miles or round the block until they got to 4

This is the most amazing solution! I do all my running in km but yesterday was running along a cycle path with lots of signs giving miles to various destinations. It took long enough to convert in my head that I could convince myself I had already covered half a km, very upsetting to then pass the next sign and see it give the same distance to go as the previous sign.

Of course the easiest imperial to metric conversion is 1 mile = 4 laps of an athletics track.

4laps plus 10m.

Oh, neat trick! The Fibonacci estimates of kilometres (from miles) versus accurate kilometres has a correlation coefficient of about 0.995 and the errors settle down to about 0.5%. The only snag is that the Fibonacci numbers are awkwardly spaced and not that easy to determine in one's head. Do you have any other tricks to use the F series easily for arbitrary integers?

Otherwise, I think it might just be easier to multiple miles by 1.6 (or 8 over 5), which can be easily done in the head by multiplying by 8 and then by 2, and then dividing by 10, e.g. 12 miles times 8 = 96, times 2 = 192, divide by 10 = 19.2 km (cf accurate conversion = 19.31.. km)

I have never understood why they picked 1500m as the competitive distance!

Average man is 11 stone or 70kg. 

Map reading and running is always km. There’s no need to use miles until you’ve finished and/or want to know how far you have run. In which case 0.6x is close enough. Just learn your 6x table. 
 

Running race distances are different though. 
 

My first 10k trail race threw me. I thought I was doing pretty well when I passed the 3 mile marker but couldn’t understand why I was so quick but so far away from the finish at the 5mile marker. Until I realised the markers were in km. 

European marathons are so much easier to pace in km as you’re doing 8x 5km plus 2km on the end. You can still use min/mi but you’re aiming to hit the 5k marks at particular times. 
 

 Fortunately there's a data field you can download from Garmin iQ where you can display miles, so I can go metric for the nav stuff but still see distance covered in proper units 😉.

I do like the Fibonacci solution though

I find that conversion easier if multiply by 6 and divide by 10:

e.g. 12 miles times 6 and divided by 10 = 7.2, then add it to the original distance in miles, 7.2 + 12 = 19.2. 

Depends how your head works I suppose.

There are Fibonacci-esque sequences that follow the same recursive rule and also settle down to the same ratio between successive values  but which have different beginnings.

For example the Lucas sequence starts 2, 1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 18, 29.....

or for another series of integers try, for example: 2, 2, 4, 6, 10, 16, 26, 42, 68, 110.....

Probably more useful as a conversion tool for ultra runners or cyclists!

Please lets have some accuracy - 4 laps plus 9m 344mm 😁

Km to miles - halve the number then add a quarter (of the half) to get 5/8ths. 20k = 10 + 2.5 = 12.5 miles.

Running down the canal, the gazetteer uses miles and furlongs for distances, with a granularity of 1/4 furlong. 1/4 furlong is nicely 50 metres plus 1 foot...

Yes, that's another neat way to do it!

I don't have any other tricks, I just saw it online. It is a bit annoying that it only works for those lengths but at least for them it works. 

Sort yourself out a pace band. Doesn’t need to be fancy. I generally run at some set speeds about 20seconds per mile difference. Fill in the blanks. 
 

10:00/mi - 6:15/km

9:00/mi - 5:40/km

8:00/mi - 5:00/km

7:00/mi - 4:20/km

or if it’s just distance then write down 1-10 for km and 0.6 to 6 for the miles. Gives you a pretty simple lookup guide. 

You think you have it bad, at school in the late 70s we were thought metric, at college we were thought metric. On my first job I gave a measurement of pipe in metric and was told to measure it again in real money. Right up to the mid 90s all the tolerances at work were measured in thousandth of an inch. 

Machines now though are mostly hundreds of a millimeter, tell me something is 10 thou and I can visualise it, tell me its 25 hundreds of a millimeter it means nothing to me.

When measuring up for say a bed plate at work I might measure 36 and 5/16ths by 400mm. That's because through force if habit I always default to imperial but when I remember I swap to metric. 

Screwed pipe fittings are still imperial, 1/8, 1/4, 3/8, 1/2, 3/4, 1, 11/4 and so on and pipe is the same but the more modern plastic and aluminium stuff is 20mm, 25mm, 32mm etc and you need to get a imperial bsp to the size you are using to connect it to whatever you are connecting it to. 

Just put in some new 20mm MDPE water pipe to fit taps to the greenhouse, garage, shed and outside work bench.  Of course the existing pipe is 1/2” BSP. Biggest problem was getting washers for the imperial taps to go into the wall plate. 

'I ordered 1/2”BSP washers'

'They are'

'No, they're too small'

'The holes are 1/2” in diameter'

'1/2” BSP is actually 3/4” in diameter'

'Eh??'

Thinking more about those generalised (G) Fibonacci series, where the recursion rule is as for the  (F) Fibonacci series but where we can have any two starting values a and b, it turns out that any G term can be expressed as a linear combination of two F terms: G_n=aF_n-1+bF_n, and that the ratio between successive terms in any G series does indeed settle down to the golden ratio.

So you can use this Fibonacci (F or G) rule to convert, roughly between km and miles and back again for any distance, but you need to know or be willing to find the series that includes the distance to or from which you need to convert. 

Some here have said they like doing conversion maths in their head on the move. I do too. Finding the right generalised Fibonacci series for your particular distance would be another fun mental exercise, but not as useful as simply remembering a set of conversions, I suspect.

Robin Knott's page on all things Fibonacci is very interesting for the number theory hobbyist:

http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fib.html

Thanks for your interesting reply and for the link.

which oddly always had km grids.

I've always learnt hiking in km, so when I started tracking my running I went for min/km. This on top of running a few European races, has left me with the opposite phobia!

That saying, I had a pleasant surprise running GNR without a watch, when I realised that the markers were in miles, not km and I was running much faster than I thought!