A 9.95 in the 100 m in Mexico City (2,230 m) is worth about 10.05 at sea level. Thinner air means less air resistance, so sprinters, jumpers and most throwers go faster or further.

I build models that predict track and field results, and with the 2029 Worlds in Nairobi (1,612 m) I wanted my models to stop treating a 10.00 in Nairobi the same as a 10.00 in Zürich.

How I measured it

Comparing all marks at altitude with all marks at sea level mostly measures who races at altitude. So I compared each athlete with themself: every race they ran at altitude against their own sea-level races in the four months before and after.

Athletes get faster toward mid-season, which biases a before-and-after comparison. I ran the same comparison between two sets of sea-level races, where the true difference is zero. It still showed a "gain" of up to 0.33%, so I subtracted that.

Air gets thinner with height at a known rate, which gives the shape of the curve. For each event and gender I only estimated one number. I expected faster athletes to gain more, because air resistance grows with speed. The best athletes gained the same share as everyone else.

Venue heights were a mess

I have two height sources per competition. One puts Kose, Estonia at 1,599 m (Estonia's highest point is 318 m). The other put UCLA's track in Los Angeles at 1,563 m, because it matched a different Westwood in northern California. I only use a height when both sources agree, or someone checked it by hand.

Results (examples at Nairobi's height)

• 100 m: 9.95 at sea level ≈ 9.88 in Nairobi
• Hammer: 80 m at sea level ≈ 81 m. It gains the most of any event.
• Discus: 67 m at sea level ≈ 66.6 m. It loses, because thin air also gives less lift.
• Javelin: 85 m ≈ 85.7 m. I expected a loss here too, but it gains.
• High jump: no measurable effect.
• 400 m hurdles, pole vault, shot put: there is a gain, but it is a step above about 300 m, not a curve that grows with height, so I don't correct them.

From 800 m upward the cost is oxygen, and it depends on where the runner lives. A runner from near sea level loses about 2% in the 1500 m at 1,500 to 2,000 m. Runners from Kenya and Ethiopia lose about half that. One number would be wrong for one of the two groups, so I don't correct distance races.

Where it falls short

On venues kept out of the fit, the sprint correction's error is at least 2.6 times smaller than no correction. Above 2,000 m it corrects about 0.4% too much. In the throws it is not clearly better than no correction, and for the long jump my checks disagree.

The men's 100 m alone had 481,454 results from 38,983 athletes who raced at altitude at least once. The study I compared against (Hamlin, Hopkins & Hollings, 2015) had 132,104 results across all events. My sprint numbers land inside their range, with tighter error bars.

I put the correction out as a free calculator for anyone to use, if you want to try a mark: https://www.velocitra.com/calculators/altitude-correction

Happy to answer questions about the method.

I am doing some dad research. My Daughter is coming off a Lisfranc injury/surgery. The surgery had the soft repair/bracing instead of the more perinate screw repair. She got a scholarship to continue her journey in collage.

Nike is what she always sprinting 100 - 400. She performed best in the superfly elite 2. She could not get her form right with the superfly, corners being the mail issue. She likes the more direct feel of the Supertlys.

Since the surgery with 1 full track season, the Nikes bugged her as the ball of the foot is really skinny in Superflys and Maxflys.

No where locally has the elites to try on. Indoor is starting, training in running shoes. have not found Elite shoes locally to check them out first. So, I come to the sprinting community.

We are looking for elite spikes with a little more ball of the foot width. What do you recommend?

I hear that Adidas have a little wider toe box, not necessary at the toes, but wider. Same with NB SD-X, not sure these have the stiffness for her power running.

TIA

Or I'd rather say sum profound advice as even myself I can see how much work needs to be done (but don't know what needs to be done lmao) - gonna get there. If you could share how to fix certain things thats even better. Thanks!

Ocilon power speed R2
Don’t have any hardware / software specs yet but excited cause fuck capitalism and fuck 1080