Really silly inquiry regarding the barrier in a 50m pool.

Let us consider a swimmer doing the 100 freestyle in a pool that is exactly 25 yards. For purposes of simplifying the math, let us say he or she does a time of exactly 50.00 seconds. At this rate of speed, the swimmer is traveling at 2 yards per second, or 72 inches per second. Let us now consider that the swim takes place in a bulkhead pool that, for whatever reason (poor design, overly tight lane lines, deteriorating pins) is a quarter inch short. The swimmer now benefits from swimming instead of 100 yards, 99 yards and 35 inches. Assuming he or she holds the same rate of speed as before, they will benefit by 1/72 seconds, or .013888 seconds. Instead of a 50.00, their time will be 49.98611112. Leaving aside that any 49 seems a lot faster than any 50 (and any food item priced at $2.99 seems a lot cheaper than one priced at $3.00), the difference in times really is close to negligible. Timing systems can go to the thousandth of a second but such times are not factored in to settle ties because of the inherent inaccuracy when you get to such tiny slivers of time. (I know, I know, even nanoseconds matter--but we aren't talking Fermi Lab here.) Put me down in the camp that considers the USMS measurement requirements ludicrous, especially since "hand timing" is still legal, and it's virtually certain that there is much, much more room for error in hand timing than there is from pools that are an inch or so off absolute kosher length status. Until USMS decides to only count times with electronic timing systems, I say forget about the minutiae of pool measurement differences. Any pool that is minutely under (or over, for that matter) length was no doubt built so long ago that there are likely to be all sorts of design features that slow down performance well beyond what putative benefit swimming an inch short per 100 provides. But stop watches don't round up so 49.986 is 49.98. If you swam in the legal pool at 49.99, you got beat by .01 by someone who swam 50.00.

Let us consider a swimmer doing the 100 freestyle in a pool that is exactly 25 yards. For purposes of simplifying the math, let us say he or she does a time of exactly 50.00 seconds. At this rate of speed, the swimmer is traveling at 2 yards per second, or 72 inches per second. Let us now consider that the swim takes place in a bulkhead pool that, for whatever reason (poor design, overly tight lane lines, deteriorating pins) is a quarter inch short. The swimmer now benefits from swimming instead of 100 yards, 99 yards and 35 inches. Assuming he or she holds the same rate of speed as before, they will benefit by 1/72 seconds, or .013888 seconds. Instead of a 50.00, their time will be 49.98611112. Leaving aside that any 49 seems a lot faster than any 50 (and any food item priced at $2.99 seems a lot cheaper than one priced at $3.00), the difference in times really is close to negligible. Timing systems can go to the thousandth of a second but such times are not factored in to settle ties because of the inherent inaccuracy when you get to such tiny slivers of time. (I know, I know, even nanoseconds matter--but we aren't talking Fermi Lab here.) Put me down in the camp that considers the USMS measurement requirements ludicrous, especially since "hand timing" is still legal, and it's virtually certain that there is much, much more room for error in hand timing than there is from pools that are an inch or so off absolute kosher length status. Until USMS decides to only count times with electronic timing systems, I say forget about the minutiae of pool measurement differences. Any pool that is minutely under (or over, for that matter) length was no doubt built so long ago that there are likely to be all sorts of design features that slow down performance well beyond what putative benefit swimming an inch short per 100 provides. But stop watches don't round up so 49.986 is 49.98. If you swam in the legal pool at 49.99, you got beat by .01 by someone who swam 50.00.