A flying thirty tells you more than any timed trial

Full race efforts drain an athlete and blur two separate qualities that need to be tracked apart.

Time trials are the comfort food of sprint coaching. Everybody understands them, they feel like racing, and they produce a number you can write on a whiteboard. They are also a poor way to learn anything, and I would run far fewer of them.

A hundred metre trial gives you one figure that mixes reaction, acceleration, maximum velocity and how well the athlete holds shape when tired. If the number improves, which of those improved? You do not know. If it gets worse, you do not know which one broke either, and you have just spent one of the limited maximal efforts an athlete's hamstrings will tolerate in a month to find out very little.

A flying thirty separates the questions. Run in over about thirty metres, hit the timing zone at speed, measure the thirty. What comes back is a clean look at top speed with the start removed. Do it twice, take the better run, and you have a metric that responds to training within weeks and does not need the athlete to be race sharp to mean something. Pair it with a standing thirty for the acceleration half and you can watch the two qualities move independently, which they routinely do.

That independence is the whole point. I have coached athletes whose acceleration improved all winter while top speed sat still, and the hundred metre time barely moved. Had we only been running trials we would have concluded the winter failed. It did not fail. It succeeded at one thing and left the other alone, which is exactly the information you need in February and exactly the information a trial hides.

The pushback is about specificity. Racing is racing, and athletes need to practise the whole thing, nerves included. Fair, and there is a place for a full effort every few weeks in season. But the whole thing is what competitions are for, and the competitions are already on the calendar.

Also, and this is not a minor point, flying runs are gentler on the athlete. They build into speed rather than tearing into it from stationary, which is the load pattern most often blamed for the hamstring injuries that end seasons in April.

Fewer trials. More information. Fewer athletes sitting in the physio room in May.