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Why your athlete runs a good 100 and a bad 200

A 200 is not two 100s, and the two usual culprits are the bend and the last sixty metres.

The same athlete wins the 100 and finishes fourth in the 200 at the same meet, and the assumption is that they are unfit. Sometimes. More often the 200 is asking for two things the 100 never tested.

Nobody runs a 200 at 100 pace

A sprint is an acceleration, a brief maximum and then a long decay. Most young athletes reach their top speed somewhere between 20 and 30 metres and can hold it for about eight steps. In a 100, the race is over before the decay has cost very much. In a 200, the athlete spends the last hundred and forty metres slowing down, and the finishing order is decided by who slows down least.

That makes the 200 a different event with the same stride in it. An athlete built entirely out of acceleration wins short races and gets passed in long ones by people they are faster than.

The bend

For the first half of the race the athlete is not only sprinting, they are turning. That means leaning in from the ankles rather than folding at the waist, a shorter inside arm, an outside arm that crosses further than it would on the straight, and a line run close to the inside of the lane without drifting onto it. Done well, they come off the bend carrying speed. Done badly, they come off it having fought the track for a hundred metres and then have to start racing.

A surprising number of good 100 runners have simply never practised a bend. Their curve is a straight-line sprint with a steering correction on every stride, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.

Tightening up

The classic 200 fault is trying harder at 140 metres. The shoulders climb, the jaw sets, the arms shorten, stride frequency goes up and stride length goes down, and the athlete decelerates faster while feeling like they are working harder than ever. Shouting relax at somebody has never once produced relaxation. Running repetitions deliberately at something under full effort, and learning what that feels like at speed, sometimes does.

Working out which one it is

• Split the race. If the first 100 of their 200 is well over a second slower than their open 100, the bend and the early pace are where it went.
• If the first half is about right and the second half collapses, it is speed endurance and form under fatigue, which is a training answer rather than a technical one.
• Watch the last 40 metres on video with the sound off. Shortening arms and rising shoulders are visible from the fence once you are looking for them.

What the app is useful for here

Two things, both modest. The speed line on a sprint clip reports the fastest 0.4 second window and the average across the clip, so filming the same athlete on the back straight and then again over the closing stages gives you two numbers for the same race rather than an opinion about it. And the sprint setting reports trunk lean against the 0 to 20 degree range, elbow angle against the roughly 90 degree norm, overstride and knee fold, which are exactly the things that drift when somebody tightens up.

It does not split a race for you, does not know which lane anybody is in, and reads a bend worse than a straight, because a camera set square to the track sees an athlete running across it and then away from it. For the curve, the honest method is still to stand at the exit of it and watch.

• Where does your sprinter actually hit top speed?
• Acceleration or top speed: which is your athlete missing?

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