Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

I can fluctuate by up to .6 seconds in the 45 and 55m in training.  There are many reasons to make me believe that our timing system is accurate and also consistent and last year I also fluctuated by up to 1 second on all-weather and 2 seconds on cinder off of my eventual 100m PB during the outdoor season.  Do you guys ever have athletes that have this problem to this extent and if so what do you do?  Or do you not because getting rid of this problem is mainly a function of race experience and by the time your athletes get to you they have a lot of it?

I think 0.6 seconds in the short dashes and 1 second in the 100m could potentially be explained by inconsistent race distribution, different running surfaces, and / or daily fluctuations in physical readiness. I can't however think of any way to explain away a 2 second deviation from a 100m PB unless all of the above factors combine in such a way to create the huge discrepancy. Even this seems like a huge stretch though.

Thanks for the reply Mike.

Well by the end of the season last year I figured that our cinder surface was so bad that there was a .8 difference between that and all-weather, but the 2 second difference was just one day and I'm not sure exactly what happened.

Disregarding this one instance, if you had an athlete in this situation what would you do Mike?  Or would you need to be watching them to check for inconsistent race distribution?  By daily fluctuations in physical readiness do you mean not planning properly to be fresh for training/meets?  Because I meant that within a single training session I can sometimes see a difference of up to .6 in short speed work.

Originally posted by pete
......if you had an athlete in this situation what would you do Mike?  Or would you need to be watching them to check for inconsistent race distribution?

I don't think I could answer without seeing the person run because the variability seems so great that something must be really out of whack on the slow runs and I'm really not sure what it could be.

By daily fluctuations in physical readiness do you mean not planning properly to be fresh for training/meets?  Because I meant that within a single training session I can sometimes see a difference of up to .6 in short speed work.

I was actually referring to being properly rested between sessions but it could also help (to a lesser extent) to explain intra-session variability.

Thanks Mike.  It looks like my family we'll be getting a digital camera soon so I'll hopefully be able to post on the internet.