The starter's rhythm is part of your race and nobody trains it

Sprinters rehearse the push out of the blocks for years, then meet a starter whose timing they have never once practised against.

Watch a warm-up track before a championship semi-final. Athletes drill the same five metres over and over, out of blocks set to the millimetre, on a clap from a coach who gives the command at a comfortable, predictable pace. Then they walk to the call room and hand themselves over to a stranger with a pistol who holds the set position for two full seconds because that is how he has done it for twenty years.

Nobody trains for that stranger. That is the gap.

The set position is an isometric hold under load, and the load is real. You are stacked over your hands with the hips high, the shins loaded, the shoulders slightly ahead of the wrists, and the whole arrangement is stable only for about a second and a half before something starts to sag. Hold it longer and the athlete either creeps, which is a foul in spirit if not always on the sensor, or relaxes a fraction so the first push comes out of a softer joint angle than the one rehearsed. Neither of those is a strength problem. It is a rehearsal problem.

I would rather see a sprint group practise with a deliberately erratic starter than add another set of resisted sled pushes. Vary the hold. Half a second one rep, two and a half the next, and make the athletes hold their shape without knowing which is coming. The physical adaptation is minor. The behavioural one is not, because most creeping and most late reactions come from athletes who have built a private internal clock and are being punished when the clock is wrong.

There is an injury argument buried here too, and it gets ignored because block starts look brief and harmless. A sagging set position shifts the first stride into a more open hip angle with the hamstring already lengthened, and that is precisely the position where sprinters tear. The tear does not happen because the athlete pushed too hard. It happens because the position drifted while they waited.

None of this shows up in the meet report. The report says reaction time, and reaction time gets read as an attribute the athlete either has or lacks, which is a lazy reading of a number that mostly measures how well the last two seconds went.

Train the waiting. It is half the start.