A clock built for glancing rather than reading

Four pools surveyed, four pace clocks, and only one still keeping all four hands honest: the rest have lost a minute hand to rust, a sweep hand to a dead battery, or both, and swim teams now count the final strokes by feel. The design has barely changed since the 1960s: a face divided into five-second increments around the rim, a large sweep second hand in red or black, and on some models a slower minute hand for interval sets that run long. Coaches read it at a glance from the water, timing a push off the wall against whichever hand is moving, which means the clock must be legible from twenty-five meters away, while treading water, and slightly out of breath. Battery models have replaced most of the windup mechanisms that used to require a Monday-morning key from the head coach's desk drawer, though at least one of the four surveyed still runs on its original spring mechanism and gains roughly ninety seconds a week, a drift the coaching staff has learned to subtract without checking a watch. The face itself, mounted flush to the pool wall eight feet up, takes the worst of the humidity: numerals fade first, the twelve and the six going pale before the rest, since they get read most often and touched most often by the pole used to reset a stuck hand. Municipal budgets replace a broken clock reluctantly, usually only after a meet official refuses to run intervals off a phone timer taped to the blocks instead.

R. Quist