Losing Speed Every Race

Well, you’re a strange case. A 2.94 flying 30 matches up with an 11.04 100M. And your jump numbers indicate that you’d have great initial acceleration, but for some reason, they just don’t add up. Do you have trouble transitioning from acceleration to upright sprinting?

Regarding your weight, I know where you’re coming from. I’m 6’ tall and have weighed as much as 210 (straight out of bed). I’ve also seen how the weight affects my times.

At 198 I’ve been able to hit 7.23 for 60M and 9.20 for 80M. And at 208-210 I’ve been able to hit 7.23 for 60M and 9.44 for 80M. All times are from 3-pt and from video. So as you can see, the weight does impact top speed. I’m currently coming down from 210 and was at 205 this morning. You probably would do well to try and lose weight too.

As for how to do it, don’t go starving yourself, just eat sensibly. Check your weight every morning and try to bring it down one pound per week. If you pig out one day, eat less the next. It’s working for me so far.

What is the goal and purpose behind it? You worked hard to build muscle, now you want to lose it?? What if you did run 10.50, what then?

Thanks for the advice.

I may have trouble transitioning I never thought of it like that. The flying 30s were at the olympic training center so I think the times are legit. However they may have been wind aided. The wind was blowing EXTREMELY strong that day however it was also really cold (strange for San Diego…). However there was a guy who has hit 2.88 for flying thirtys before hitting 3.0s so I figured the cold outweighed the wind and I counted my times…

The transitioning is a good question. It may well be the problem. Also, my flying 30 is with a jog runup so maybe its slower in a real race. I think part of it is I have yet to put together a good race in a meet this year. I’ve been fiddling with different block starts and often times they are terrible… I have had races though where I start decently then out accelerate people to 30m then start to get passed around 40 and then pass them again by 70 or 80… Probably funny to watch…

Interesting that 10 pounds didn’t hurt your 60m time at all! Were you stronger when you had those 10 extra pounds, because otherwise you would think the 60 would go down at least a bit…

Also, you think diet is the only way to go for losing weight? Eating well is a challenge for me but I guess I should get the discipline to do it. I was hoping to change other things to also help weight loss, like substituting some lifts with isometrics and cutting some out completely, or even taking a month or two off from lifting. I was also thinking of adding longer tempo sessions to try and burn more calories… Of course I won’t be running miles to lose weight, but would doing longer tempo make sense? From looking at the races do you see bad transitioning?

Thanks!

Juggler -

As I don’t lift competitively my main goal is to run fast. If I lost the weight and ran 10.50 then after that I would try and see what I should do to run 10.40!

I did work hard to build muscle but that was never the goal. I worked hard to get stronger at oly lifting and muscle happened naturally. Strength certainly helps sprinting but having too much non-functional muscle can’t be helpful… I figure if your goal is speed then muscle is sorta an unfortunate side effect. Muscle doesn’t help, strength does. If I could somehow increase strength wihtout hypertrophy that would be best, however the benefit of added strength outweighs so side effect of a reasonable amount of hypertrophy in the short sprints…