Someone just directed me to this old thread, that I didn't know existed.
Teenage troll! Classic. If only.
Getting to the issue of lifting for sprints, especially close to a race, it can be great, depending on how you do it. Yes we used to do things like max bench 5 days out, as d suggested--but it was a real max workout, I'm talking a steep pyramid to 1-rep max, with the 1 rep repeated. You would feel it a bit the next day, then a lot the second day after, then it would diminish. By the time 4 or 5 days went by, you were pumped.
You get that feeling of being "ready to go"--sprint, fight, whatever. There are 2 types of somatosensory responses that I personally experienced at different times: 1) the feeling of brute power, and 2)kind of an intra-muscular "itching" sensation. The first was better over the indoor distance, and the second seemed better outdoors. With super-heavy weights you tend to get the first one, the brute power feeling.
As d said, heavy weights can be a developmental aid, because you just can't do enough sprint training cleanly to get the stimulus you need. Why not? Because fatigue creeps up on you, and you don't even notice, no matter how fresh you think you feel--and when you fatigue your form goes to hell, even if you are only doing drills or plyos. Weights, OTOH, are very controlled and much less likely to lead to injury if done properly--even 1-rep absolute max, even explosively.
d was also correct in saying that things change as you get faster. Of course clean athletes can take very little from the experience of users like Powell and Bolt, because that changes everything. The fact that they didn't do huge weights would mean little to a clean athlete, and in reality, they did do some decent weights, especially Powell. The key is rise time, and relaxation time. As you get much faster, you realize that relaxation is what it's all about. Sure there is the drive from the blocks and in acceleration, but guys who know how to feel the relaxation will achieve better results long term because relaxation prevents injury, thus enabling more consistent training.
And I'm not talking just catastrophic injury like a ham tear, I'm talking about things like ankle niggles, achilles problems, bursitis, etc. Those things can, and do, regularly hold back sprinters from training, and contrary to what many believe, training is actually important.
Even if you are in theory physically capable of running a particular time, you actually have to try to do it, in order to be able to actually do it. You learn HOW to do it, and that is the point of a lot of training--not necessarily increasing your basic physiologic capability like force production, but in learning how to deploy it properly to produce a better time. There are stronger athletes (powerlifters), and there are quicker athletes (table tennis), but after all the 100m is a specific event that requires a blend of things, like weightlifting. Weightlifters aren't necessarily the strongest out there, because they have to also be quick and there is a ton of form required.
So yes things change as you get faster, and super-heavy weight training won't prevent the kinds of niggles that often dog sprinters, but it will, early on, provide good developmental stimulus. Later on it can be used to "wake up" or "activate" muscles, even on race day. As you go through training, you will understand that your body has cycles, and your body "learns" how to do particular workouts, and you will feel differently at different points of different workouts. IMO an overlooked idea is to approach race day like a normal workout day, with a timed section included--that is, you pick a specific workout during which you tend to feel great at a certain point, and you mimic that workout on race day so that you are performing at your peak. Such a workout can include weights on race day, even very close in time to the race itself.
The other poster was absolutely correct about nobody at York doing 300 overdistance. Nobody. Whether that is good depends on the particular athlete in question.
Anyway, nice to be back, in a way. Hey Flo'da, whatever happened to your quest to break 12 seconds? Or was it 11?