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Where does your sprinter actually hit top speed?

Most young athletes reach it somewhere between 20 and 30 metres, and they can only hold it for about eight steps, which changes where you should be testing.

Ask a coach where their sprinter is fastest and most will say somewhere around 40 or 50 metres, because that is where a 100 looks fastest from the side. For most high school athletes it is a good deal earlier than that.

The shape of a sprint

A sprint is not a gradual build to a peak at the line. The athlete accelerates hard, reaches a maximum, holds it briefly, and then decelerates for the rest of the race. The winner of a 100 is usually the person who slowed down least.

Most young athletes reach maximum velocity somewhere between 20 and 30 metres. Elite senior sprinters get there later, around 50 to 60, because they can keep accelerating for longer, which is itself one of the things that makes them elite. And once anybody is at their maximum, they can hold it for roughly eight to ten steps before it starts to fall away.

Why this changes your testing

If maximum velocity only lasts eight steps, a measured zone has to be short enough to sit inside it and placed where those steps actually happen. Two common mistakes follow from ignoring that.

• A fly zone placed too late. Set the measured segment from 40 to 70 metres for an athlete who peaked at 25, and you have measured their deceleration, not their top speed.
• A measured zone that is too long. Time somebody over 40 metres and the number is an average across acceleration, peak and decay: a real number, but not maximum velocity.
• An acceleration zone that is too short. Give a sprinter 10 metres of run-up and they enter the timed zone still accelerating, so the test reports a speed they were about to beat.

Finding it, with two gates

StatLap's speed gates measure one segment per run, which sounds like a limitation and is a workable method if you accept what it makes you do: test the same athlete over several short segments across a session rather than trying to capture everything in one sprint.

Set the gates 10 metres apart. Run it with the gate pair covering 10 to 20 metres, then 20 to 30, then 30 to 40, resting properly between each. The segment with the highest speed in metres per second is where that athlete is fastest, and it is usually earlier than anybody guessed. Three or four runs will find it, and you only need to do this once or twice a season.

Be honest with yourself about fatigue in this method. Each run has to be fresh or the later segments will read slow for reasons that have nothing to do with where peak speed sits. If you cannot give full recovery between runs, spread it across two sessions and compare within the same session only.

What you do with the answer

If an athlete peaks at 20 metres and then holds on for 80, their limiter is not top speed, it is how long they can keep accelerating and how slowly they decay. If they are still accelerating at 40, they have acceleration in hand and their maximum is the thing to raise. The training you would prescribe for those two athletes is not the same, and until you have measured, you are picking one at random.

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