The round up to tenth + .24 conversion should only be utilized for seeding purposes related to automatic times for lane draws. No one should use that formula for PRs, school records, etc. since hand timers vary in their reaction times. When I was in college, my high school coach asked me to "work the finish line" at a district championship meet. I was a nineteen year-old with a stopwatch joining eleven others stacked on a flimsy narrow riser perched in an awkward position picking a lane and clicking a watch stem. When the timers met and compared results with place pickers, the adjustments were eye opening. Results were all over the place. In one hurdles race the third place timer's watch was so inaccurate the clerk threw it out and guesstimated a time. Considering the venue the original 9.94 is questionable.
Obviously hand timing is useless today, but, we did see that with that 9.94? race.
9,9 was a legit world record ran by a number of sprinters back in the day. All of those capable of a 9.9 were also capable of sub 10.10. And nobody was rounding off anything.
The question was what does 9.94? convert to, well looking back on the history it sure looks more like 10.05 than 10.24.
No its not. 0.24 is a colloquial add-on that is only used within certain track and field circles.There is nothing scientific nor mathematical about it. It's good ole boy math. The rules of math and measurement are taught at almost every public high school in the country. You live in Baltimore but you certainly didn't go to school there.
Additionally its impossible to hand time down to the hundredth of a second anyway.
Not to give you grief Rojo, but you went to two of the best high schools, and universities, in the world. Be proud of that. There are 10s of thousands of deserving Asian kids who will never have that opportunity due to your alma mater's racist admission policies.
What a rambling way to not say anything meaningful.
Ya 0.24 is generally accepted, but some people might only be off by 0.12, it's a range of how quick your reflexes are to push the button. Remember when Devon Allen was DQd for being too quick with his reaction of like 0.10 seconds? That's about the extreme limit, someone who's drunk might be a full second on their reaction time. But most people are right around that 0.2 mark. There's not a perfect conversion because it varies person to person how quick you can push the button when you see the smoke.
No its not. 0.24 is a colloquial add-on that is only used within certain track and field circles.There is nothing scientific nor mathematical about it. It's good ole boy math. The rules of math and measurement are taught at almost every public high school in the country. You live in Baltimore but you certainly didn't go to school there.
Additionally its impossible to hand time down to the hundredth of a second anyway.
Not to give you grief Rojo, but you went to two of the best high schools, and universities, in the world. Be proud of that. There are 10s of thousands of deserving Asian kids who will never have that opportunity due to your alma mater's racist admission policies.
What a rambling way to not say anything meaningful.
Ya 0.24 is generally accepted, but some people might only be off by 0.12, it's a range of how quick your reflexes are to push the button. Remember when Devon Allen was DQd for being too quick with his reaction of like 0.10 seconds? That's about the extreme limit, someone who's drunk might be a full second on their reaction time. But most people are right around that 0.2 mark. There's not a perfect conversion because it varies person to person how quick you can push the button when you see the smoke.
even beyond reaction time, it varies a lot by position and when you go to click stop. A really good, experienced timer could probably get good times even if they don't have a great reaction at smoke. if you're consistent you might learn that you come up with a closer time by clicking STOP based on when their front foot crosses, or torso, or even back foot. As one guy in the thread already noted. As his reaction time slowed, he adjusted by changing his stop click to the back foot, and that got him right around .3 off compared to Auto time.
but there are a lot of timers who aren't consistent, analytical, thoughtful, etc. that is to say, they aren't good.
All right. A few observations from an old timer who actually lived and raced through the analogue timing era.
It is useless to try to hand time to the one-hundredth of a second even with a digital device. The accuracy (or inaccuracy) is not in the watch, but in the timer. The watch is always going to measure the elapsed time between when it is started and when it is stopped. What it can’t do is start and stop the watch with total accuracy.
In the old days we had stop watches with a 10-second sweep (10 seconds to do the complete circuit on the watch face). But these were more expensive than the 30-second sweep watches. So many school districts, and even some colleges, went with the 30-second sweep. And far less accurate timing, obviously.
We were often told to start and stop the watch with the forefinger, not the thumb, as the finger was thought to be more sensitive and therefore more accurate. Don’t know how true this is.
Of course timers started their watches when they saw the smoke from the starter’s pistol, not when they heard the shot report.
This was doubly important when timing the 220 (yes, pre-metric) out of a shute – the timers were 200 meters from the start. Sound travels at 1100 feet per second. If timers waited for the shot, they were already .6 of a second fast on the final time.
Until the mid-1930’s stopwatches, and therefore official times, were graduated in fifths of a second, rather than 10ths. So the 100 yard dash might have been run in 9 and 2/5th seconds, making for even less precision, and was partly responsible for having four men hold the US 100 yard record simultaneously.
Curious thing: the Olympics actually had and recorded FAT 12 years (three Olympiads) before it replaced hand timing as the official times results. This did not happen until 1976, Montreal.