Swim Time Converter

You swam a 100 free in a 25 yard pool and now you want to know what that means in a 50 metre Olympic pool. Those are different distances and different turn counts, so the raw clock lies. Pick your stroke, event and the course you swam, type the time, and the calculator returns the equivalent in the other two formats.

The three course formats

Pools come in three official lengths. SCY is short course yards, a 25 yard pool common in the United States. SCM is short course metres, a 25 metre pool. LCM is long course metres, the 50 metre pool used at the Olympics and most national championships.

The gap matters for two reasons. A yard is shorter than a metre, so a 100 yard swim covers less water than a 100 metre swim. And a short course pool gives you more walls, and every push off a wall is faster than open swimming. A long course time will always read slower than the same effort in a short pool.

How the conversion works

The calculator multiplies your time by a published factor for your stroke and event. These are the USMS and FINA conversion factors used to seed entries and check national qualifying times. A 100 freestyle carries a SCY to LCM factor of 1.11, so a flat 1:00.0 in yards converts to about 1:06.6 in a long course pool.

Read the output as a planning target, not a guarantee. Your real long course swim depends on your start, your turns and how fast the pool sits. Treat the converted number as the time to aim for, then race and compare.

Putting it to work

Use it to set realistic interval targets when you move pools mid season, or to gauge where a meet result puts you against a standard set in a different course. Pair it with the swim pace calculator to break a converted time down per 100, and the CSS calculator to anchor your threshold sets.

If the swim is one leg of a longer day, the first triathlon training plan guide shows how to fit it around the bike and the run.