Imperial and metric measurements can be very difficult to work out when we’re trying to visualize how long, tall, or wide something is.
When it comes to things like Olympic events, they’re almost always given in metric measurements.
100 meters is not easy to conceptualize when it comes to working out how far something is, so it’s important that we look at the comparison and its imperial equivalents.
That’s why we’ve decided to write this helpful guide for you to be able to better understand how far 100 meters is and what this is the same, or similar to.
Read on to learn more.
Imperial Equivalent
Let’s start by looking at how far 100 meters is in other measurements. It is equal to 328 feet long or 109.36 yards.
If we stay with the metric system, it is 1/10 the distance of a kilometer.
Comparisons For Reference
Now let’s take a look at some other lengths of things for comparison.
This should help you to conceptualize how far 100 meters is a little bit easier.
NFL Football Field
Football is one of the most popular sports in the United States, and you’ll likely be familiar with how long a football field is, even if you’re not a massive fan of the sport.
A football field is 109.73 meters which is 360 feet in length.
Whilst this isn’t exactly 100 meters, it’s a little over and can give you a general idea of how long 100 meters is.
In fact, you could even do this for the width of a football field. A football field’s width is 48.76 meters or 160 feet, so it’s nearly half of 100 meters.
Therefore, if you want to visualize 100 meters in this way, consider 2 football fields in width and you’re nearly there.
Basketball Courts
Another popular sport in the United States is basketball.
Once again, even if you’re not the biggest fan of the sport, you can likely visualize how long a basketball court is.
NBA courts have lengths set to 94 feet with widths of 50 feet. This works out to the equivalent of 28.65 feet in length and 15.24 meters in width.
So, you’d need to multiply the length by 3 and a half to get nearly 100 meters (equates to 100.27 meters in total).
In other words, 100 meters is slightly over 3.5 NBA basketball court lengths.
Bowling Lanes
Remaining in the world of popular American sports, you can probably picture how long a bowling lane is.
Measuring the bowling lane from the foul line directly to the center of the pins – it works out at exactly 60 feet in length.
This equates to 18.28 meters long, so you’d need to multiply this by 5 and a half to get somewhere near the length of 100 meters.
So, 18.28 multiplied by 5.5 equates to 100.54 meters.
Again, it’s slightly over – but you can likely conceptualize what 5 and a half bowling lanes look like in terms of length.
Airport Runway
The majority of us have probably either flown on a plane before or at least seen an airport runway – whether that be on television (see also our article on TV dimensions), in movies, or in person.
Airport runways are almost 50 meters long.
They’re never exactly the same length with variables like commercial flights, geographical requirements, and more.
However, if we take 50 meters as a guideline – we’ll need to multiply this by 2 to get a visual comparison of how long 100 meters is.
From an imperial measurement, that’s about 300-400 feet (see also ‘How Long Is 50 Feet?‘), depending on the specific runway!
The Empire State Building
The Empire State Building is perhaps the most iconic and famous building in the United States and indeed, around the world.
We can think to ourselves how far that is vertically, so let’s take a comparison look at 100 meters.
The Empire State Building is actually 443 meters tall, so if you divide this by a quarter, you’ve got roughly the length of 100 meters.
How Long Does Walking 100 Meters Take?
It would be impossible to provide you with an exact figure for how long walking 100 meters would take because of the variables to include.
You’d have to consider:
- Your height
- Your weight
- Your stride length
- Your average speed
- The location of this 100 meters
- The general parameters
Having said that though, we can give you a rough estimate.
The average person walks at around 3 miles per hour, so every minute – we’re walking about 0.05 miles.
100 meters in miles is 0.062 so 100 meters should take the average person 1.24 minutes to walk 100 meters if they’re traveling at the average speed of 3 miles per hour.
Of course, though, everybody is different and this is simply a rough estimate using the math!
How Long Does Running 100 Meters Take?
100 meters isn’t actually too far when we’re talking about distance and as a result, 100 meters is the shortest sprinting event in athletics – which we can see at the Olympics.
The record for the 100-meter running event was set in 2009 by the Jamaican Olympic legend Usain Bolt.
He managed to finish the race in 9.58 seconds.
Non-athletic people are estimated to be able to finish a 100m race in around 14 seconds if they are running at an average speed of 15 miles per hour.
As we can see here, 100 meters is definitely not a huge distance, but the comparisons often can make it seem as if it is!
The Bottom Line
100 meters is not massive when we’re talking about how far it is, but it can be complicated to picture when we’re used to thinking of measurements in feet (see also ‘How Long Is 100 Feet?‘) and inches.
We hope this guide has helped you with this!
What Size Is It started because of that passion, but I have also chosen to write about other size, weight, and value related topics that have interested me.
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