Why don't my sprinter's practice times match their meet times?
Practice reps and meet races are started differently, timed differently and run under different pressure, so comparing them directly invents a slump that was never there.
A sprinter runs 12.4 for 100 metres in a Tuesday practice and 12.9 at Saturday's meet, and a parent wants to know what went wrong. Usually nothing did. The two numbers were never measuring the same thing, and comparing them directly is comparing a rep to a race.
The start alone accounts for a chunk of it
A practice rep is usually started on a coach's command or a rolling count, not a gun. Reacting to "go" that you can half-anticipate is different from reacting to a starting signal you cannot predict, in a race where a false start ends your day. Add nerves, and the same athlete's reaction on Saturday can run a tenth or two slower than the same athlete relaxed on a Tuesday, before a single stride has happened.
Everything after the start differs too
- Practice is often run in trainers on a worn lane; a meet is run in spikes on a resurfaced one.
- A meet rep comes after a warm-up, a call room, a wait, and however many other races that athlete has already run that day.
- Wind, temperature and a full stadium of adrenaline do not show up on a Tuesday.
- A practice time is one rep off fresh legs; a meet time is the one that mattered, run under a different kind of pressure entirely.
What is actually worth comparing
The comparison that means something is the same method against itself over time. StatLap's Workout page times reps and laps on the phone that is already at practice and sends each session straight to the athlete's training log, so a coach can build a week-by-week baseline using one consistent phone-based clock. Meet times, whether hand-timed or run on a certified system, are a different measurement taken a different way, and stacking them on the same chart as practice reps without saying so is how a program convinces itself an athlete has slowed down when nothing has changed but the clock.
A phone can tell a coach that this week's rep was three tenths slower than last week's. It cannot tell you whether that came from wind, a slow reaction, or real fatigue, and separating those is still a coaching judgment that a stopwatch, or a phone, does not make for you.
Time your next meet with the phones you already have
Timing, the Film Room and the speed gates are free forever. Publishing results to your own page starts at $59 a month.
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