ReacTime™ in the High School

Training With ReacTime™ By: Sotirios Pintzopoulos

My experience with the ReacTime™ starting block system has been great. Throughout the indoor season I used the equipment almost daily up to my trip to New York City for the National Scholastic Championships, sponsored by New Balance. The more I worked with the equipment the greater improvement I saw in my starting performance.

At first I used the equipment along with the rest of the sprinters on my team to see how fast we could get our reaction times. During this time we saw that going sub 0.2 seconds was the ideal time for the boys. I have not done enough research on girls performances to give an ideal time for their reactions. We ran with two ReacTime™ units going and a few extra regular blocks and had some 20m races in the gymnasium so that the results would be better under such conditions. Most of our runners were able to ReacTime™ just under 0.2 sec or close to it, while a few went lower closer to 0.15-0.18 sec.

The week prior to The National Championships, Coach Davis and I spent a few days obtaining results with the ReacTime™ unit. As I was the only sprinter with competitions left, we worked alone on this project which gave us the opportunity to attach a laptop computer to the unit to look at the graphs resulting from my starts.

We spent this time adjusting the distance between by lead and trail leg from 9-11 inches, and the distance from the lead pad to the starting line from 16-20 inches. After compiling research for a few days, we were able to see a difference in performance with the settings. I was able to find out at what settings I had my best performances. As a result, we discovered that my settings were best with the lead pad being placed 18½ inches behind the starting line and my legs being 10 inches apart.

Throughout this training I was able to get ReacTime™s well under 0.2 sec consecutively during the whole workout. At one point I hit around 0.13 sec four times in a row - which were the fastest reactions obtained by anyone on my team. When dealing with the relative power output of the starter I found that I could not find an exact ideal number to reach. Along with that, I found that the farther apart your legs were, the more relative power registered, which I feel was a result of the extra needed push of my trail leg.

A negative part of obtaining higher power was that my reaction times were slower - being around 0.21 sec. When I obtained a relative power of 8000 my reaction was too slow, my relative power performing while using my optimum settings was usually around 6000, (but this number will vary depending on the strength of the athlete using the unit). I also found that the distance between your hand placement and the stating line was based on how comfortable the sprinter felt.

By connecting the unit to the computer running the ReacTime™ software, I was able to observe my reactions on a graph, by doing this I could see the difference between the drive off both legs. At the start of the season, Giles Norton, Director of Corporate Communication at Finishlynx raised the question, “is it better to have one single push out of the blocks or two?" We referred to this as having one hump or two (based on the graph observed on the computer).

When the team first started using the unit we saw that nearly everyone had two humps on their graphs, even myself. During my weeklong training with the unit I saw that I got very close to getting one hump and nearly obtained it once, but never quite achieved a perfect one.

Working with this unit this whole time has been great - the only suggestion I have dealing with this specific unit is that you should make it possible to bring up ALL the graphs obtained during training, loading them up on one screen so that a median can be viewed.  I had lots of fun working with the whole system and it has been very interesting as well. I would like to see more equipment, so that I could try it all out. I am very willing to try any equipment that may improve my sprinting.

If you are wondering how my work with the unit has improved my performances in races, I will tell you that it has - greatly. From last year’s indoor season I improved my personal best in the 50y from 5.9sec to 5.4sec and in the 55m from 7.21sec to 6.67sec. As a sophomore I barely qualified for the State Championships, and only a year later, I was competing at the Nationals. Also at my first outdoor meet of the year I ran 11.2sec in the 100m much better than my personal best of 11.6sec, and just yesterday I ran an 11.03sec in bad conditions.

I feel my personal best in the 100m will go even farther down, well under 11. These improvements may also be on account of my weight training and working harder in practice runs, but I feel that my work with the ReacTime™ unit has also played an important role.

NOTE: Sotirios ran 10.84 at a meet in Andover, Ma on 5-13-00