← What a Time Standard Means · Lesson 1 of 4
A base plus steps
Motivational time standards give six letters, B to AAAA. For 10 & under girls in the 50 freestyle, short-course yards, the 2024–2028 table reads 39.79, 35.99, 32.09, 30.89, 29.59 and 28.29 seconds.
Those numbers are not picked one by one. Each letter sits a fixed number of steps above one base time: B ten steps out, BB seven, A four, AA three, AAA two, AAAA one. The gaps between letters look uneven only because the step counts are.
The B cut is ten steps from the base and the AAAA cut is one. If one step is about 1.28 seconds, roughly how far apart are the B and AAAA cuts?
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