A championship is three races and most athletes trained for one

Heats, semi-finals and a final in four days is a recovery event, and the athlete with the best single race often loses it.

An athlete arrives at a national championship in the form of their life, wins the heat comfortably, wins the semi-final comfortably, and finishes fifth in the final feeling as though someone swapped their legs overnight. The performance analysis afterwards discusses tactics. It should be discussing Tuesday.

Rounds are their own event and almost nobody trains for them.

The physiological problem is layered. A hard heat depletes muscle glycogen and produces mechanical damage that does not fully resolve in twenty four hours, particularly in the hamstrings and calves. Sleep in a hotel with an evening race and a late finish is worse than sleep at home. Appetite is suppressed by nerves and by heat. Each round is run at a level of arousal that costs something on its own, before a stride is taken. Stack three of those and the athlete arriving at the final is not the athlete who arrived at the meeting.

You can see it in how the stride changes. Contact time lengthens, the action gets flatter, and the athlete produces the same effort for less speed, which they experience as the race feeling heavy rather than fast. That is fatigue expressed mechanically, and it appears in the last sixty metres of the final where it costs the most.

So the winning skill is qualifying cheaply. Running the heat at the minimum required, controlling the semi, and being willing to finish third in a semi-final when third qualifies, which requires a nerve that most athletes do not have and that most coaches never explicitly train. It also requires knowing the rules well enough to count what a fastest loser spot is worth on that day.

The training answer is to simulate it. Two efforts in a day, or three quality sessions in four days, occasionally, in the specific period, so the body has met the pattern before it meets it at a championship. This is unfashionable because it interferes with the pursuit of a single best session.

I would take the athlete who can run three good races over the one who can run one great one, and if that means going into the championship a fraction undercooked on top-end speed, so be it.

The season is not decided by your fastest day. It is decided by your third-fastest day, run on tired legs, in a final.