I had a really unique opportunity last weekend to race against some of the fastest athletes in the world at a low-key local meet. This was by far the best competition I’ve ever faced, and it helped pull me along to a big PR!

This was basically a home meet: Atlanta Track Club hosted this meet at the same track I practice on. It was a bit strange to see all the equipment and people out on the normally empty track. The meet was a little chilly, especially for the Southeast: about 55 degrees and with swirling winds.

I was originally slated to run in the masters section, but the meet director generously fit me into the elite section. It was a real trip checking in when the loudspeakers called the “professional” runners!

This meet only contested the 100m and 400m, so I ran just the 100m. There were two rounds that every athlete ran in—the prelims were randomly assigned and the finals were seeded by prelim time.

My time running track for Carnegie Mellon was a series of missed opportunities from injury. This week, I came back to CMU to run at its annual home meet. A lot has changed since I was here last, but the track team is still the same; I enjoyed catching up with my old coaches.

Meet conditions were… typical for Pittsburgh in March, with temperatures in the mid-thirties, snow flurries, and a nasty headwind that peaked at -6.6m/s. I ran the 100 and 200.

I ran the last “indoor” meet of my season outdoors at the second Berkeley All-Comers meet of 2022. There’s a special place in my heart for Edwards Stadium—I’ve run there many times, from Junior Olympic meets as a 12-year-old to state qualifiers in high school.

This meet was my first in California since February 2020—I saw a lot of familiar faces from 2019 and 2020. I didn’t expect the camaraderie of unattached athletes before I got back into the track scene, but it’s come to be one of the more important factors keeping me in the sport.

I didn’t expect much going into this meet: with a rolling schedule, I knew it’d be hard to time my warmup routine, and the track at Edwards Stadium is notoriously slow. My goals were just to have a strong drive phase and transition in the 60 and to get some speed endurance work in the 200.

There’s a growing consensus within the sprinting world that 200- and 400-meter sprinters have an advantange in the outer lanes. Famously, Wayde van Niekerk ran his world record 400m out of lane 8, and Karsten Warholm is known for preferring lane 7.

Surprisingly for such a data-driven culture, there’s almost nothing in the current literature to back this up. So, using data from Diamond League results from 2015-2021, I estimated the effect of lane assignment on elite male sprinters in the 200m, and found that the advantage per lane was about 0.018 seconds—meaning that outdoor 200m sprinters in lane 9 have an advantage of 0.14s over those in lane 1.

I made the trek out to Nashville last weekend for the Vanderbilt Invitational. Although Atlanta doesn’t have any indoor tracks, it’s nice that it’s within a couple hours driving of quite a few.

Because I only got in to Tennessee on Friday morning, I decided to focus on the 60m (and skip the 200m which was held Friday night). Like last week, I trained normally throughout the week. My goal was to get a bit more race experience and see if my PR effort from last week was repeatable.