Using A Wind Gauge To Improve Your Sprint Feedback

There’s another advantage to using a wind gauge that’s not often talked about: accurate feedback to athletes. We want to help them improve. We want to celebrate their great races and help them figure out their bad ones. Without wind readings, it can be hard to put the sprint performances into perspective.

Did you know that there is a chart that can help you factor the wind readings into their performances so that you can accurately compare performances with varying levels of wind assistance or hindrance? Check this out. It’s an excerpt from the Track & Field News publication The Big Gold Book.

Check out this example of a hypothetical HS male sprinter’s season in the 100:

Meet	Time
Dual #1	11.54
Dual #2	11.28
Invite #1	11.02
Dual #3	10.91
Conference	11.36
Regional	11.02
State heat	11.25
State semi	10.97
State final	11.18

At first glance, a pretty frustrating season. The fastest time came in a relatively meaningless dual meet. The athlete spent all season chasing that PR and failed to match it in the big meets. Tapered and peaked for the state finals, he still couldn’t run his best, and when it was all on the line, couldn’t even run as fast as his semi. Hypothetical, yes, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen seasons like this, with the young high school athlete and their coaches being very disappointed.

But let’s look at the wind readings and the adjustments (again, all hypothetical, but also realistic).

Meet	Time	Wind (mps)	Adjusted time
Dual #1	11.54	1.6	11.62+
Dual #2	11.28	3.2	11.43+
Invite #1	11.02	3.6	11.18+
Dual #3	10.91	7.2	11.22+
Conference	11.36	-3.9	11.12+
Regional	11.02	2.0	11.12+
State heat	11.25	2.2	11.36+
State semi	10.97	5.6	11.22+
State final	11.18	-4.5	10.90+

Suddenly the season looks a lot different! The kid didn’t actually peak at that insignificant dual meet. And just as you had trained him to, he ran solid races at both conference and regional. What he had thought were very different performances at those meets—11.36 and 11.02—were both worth 11.12 once the wind was factored in. And instead of him thinking that he crushed his semi at the state meet and bombed the final, once the wind is factored in, it is plain that it was the opposite way around. He nailed his final performance into a headwind.

(By the way, these are not unrealistic wind readings. Some of the stadiums that we regularly run our state finals in feature unpredictable swirling winds, with headwinds in one race and tailwinds in the next.)

There’s only one way to give your athletes accurate feedback like this: making sure wind readings are part of the official results.

Again, it’s not hard or expensive.

Here are 2 of the forms I've used for student wind gauge readers:

Version 1 (includes basic directions for beginners)

Version 2 (used at the state finals)

Did you read Part I: Why The Heck Does High School Track Resist Wind Gauges?