Can you time the splits between each hurdle, not just the whole race?
A finish time tells you the result. The splits between hurdles tell you where the race was actually won or lost.
A finish time answers one question: how fast was the race. It does not answer the more useful one, which is where in the race the time went. Two hurdlers can run the same race and lose half a second in completely different places, one in the drive to the first hurdle and one in the back half, and a single finish time cannot tell them apart.
Where the splits come from
StatLap's Workout page has a laps mode built for exactly this: no rest between intervals, one tap each time the athlete crosses a mark. Set the marks at each hurdle instead of at a fixed distance and the laps become hurdle-to-hurdle splits, timed on a phone at the side of the track, sent straight to the athlete's training log once the set is done.
What the splits actually show
- Whether the time lost is concentrated at one hurdle, which usually points to a technical fault at that specific barrier rather than general fitness.
- Whether splits get steadily longer across the race, which looks like fatigue but can also be a pacing problem from going out too hard.
- Whether the first split, start to hurdle one, is where most of the race is actually decided.
None of this needs to be precise to the hundredth to be useful. A coach who can see that one gap between hurdles is consistently the slowest split, every single session, has something specific to work on instead of a general sense that the race felt slow.
A phone timing hurdle-to-hurdle splits tells you where the time went. It does not tell you why a split was slow. A late trail leg, a short lead leg, or ten metres of fatigue can all produce the same number. For that you still need to watch the clip, which is what the Film Room's hurdles setting is for.
Time your next meet with the phones you already have
Timing, the Film Room and the speed gates are free forever, with no account. A Club plan, $71 a month, puts your meets on your own results page, and one plan covers every phone.
Related
Why does your hurdler take a different number of strides between each hurdle?
The step count between hurdles is a symptom, not the problem, and Film Room's overstride number usually moves before the pattern actually breaks.
Read →Why does my sprinter run a different split on every rep of the same workout?
A spread of times across a set of reps is usually more useful than the fastest time in it, and logging the whole set is how you find out which.
Read →Why your hurdler slows down after the last hurdle
The run-in to the line gets almost no practice time, and in a race decided by hundredths that is where a lot of it goes.
Read →Try it: Hurdle technique analysis from video: trunk dip, lead leg, hip rise