I’m often asked by non-athletes what my mile time is when I tell them I’m a sprinter. Although there’s no true comparison, I’ve typically used World Athletic’s scoring tables to get a relatively close mark. For example, my 100m PR of 10.71 and a mile time of 4:08.41 are both worth 974 points. I’ve used this calculator based off of the 2017 tables for a long time, but the calculator hasn’t been updated with the 2022 data.

So, naturally, I built my own. Check it out if you haven’t already; the remainder of this post will dive into my methodology for parsing the World Athletics PDFs and fitting a curve to each category/gender/event tuple.

There’s a growing consensus within the sprinting world that 200- and 400-meter sprinters have an advantange in the outer lanes. Famously, Wayde van Niekerk ran his world record 400m out of lane 8, and Karsten Warholm is known for preferring lane 7.

Surprisingly for such a data-driven culture, there’s almost nothing in the current literature to back this up. So, using data from Diamond League results from 2015-2021, I estimated the effect of lane assignment on elite male sprinters in the 200m, and found that the advantage per lane was about 0.018 seconds—meaning that outdoor 200m sprinters in lane 9 have an advantage of 0.14s over those in lane 1.

Now that it’s 2022, I’ve scored my 2021 predictions. To get slightly bigger samples, I inverted the prediction and predicted probability of <50% predictions—e.g. “Democrats win both Georgia seats: 25%” became “Democrats do not win both Georgia seats: 75%” for scoring purposes.

November was… busy. December will be too.

Goal Tracking

• 🟡 Get 1% faster.
• 🔴 50% less discretionary spending. I spent about twice as much this month as my average in 2020—between holiday flights, a trip to New York, and Black Friday, I blew my spending record for the year out of the water.
• 🟡 One hour of solitary free time a day.
• 🟡 Twice-weekly live conversations with friends.

I’ll be taking a break from weekly posts for a little while!