I ran this past weekend in Knoxville at UT’s Tennessee Challenge. There were fewer competitors than I had expected, but I still had a good field with me in my events.

My pre-meet routine was disrupted this time around: first of all, I had a poor week of sleep leading up to the week. Second, Knoxville is a bit far from where I’m staying, so I slept in a hotel and wasn’t able to eat my normal raceday breakfast (4 scrambled eggs and a piece or two of toast). And I drove around campus for a half hour looking for visitor parking. I did end up at the meet in good spirits though.

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.

Since I’m in Tennessee for a couple of weeks with Emily’s parents, I competed this weekend in the 100m and 200m at Sewanee’s Mountain Laurel Invitational, a small D3 meet just a half hour drive away.

This meet came in the middle of a training cycle, so I came into it without strong expectations—I was focusing on getting my raceday tactics right and getting a really good start off the turn in the 200.

The weather was beautiful—my first warm meet of the year—but marred by a nasty headwind that approached -3m/s at times.

I had a really unique opportunity last weekend to race against some of the fastest athletes in the world at a low-key local meet. This was by far the best competition I’ve ever faced, and it helped pull me along to a big PR!

This was basically a home meet: Atlanta Track Club hosted this meet at the same track I practice on. It was a bit strange to see all the equipment and people out on the normally empty track. The meet was a little chilly, especially for the Southeast: about 55 degrees and with swirling winds.

I was originally slated to run in the masters section, but the meet director generously fit me into the elite section. It was a real trip checking in when the loudspeakers called the “professional” runners!

This meet only contested the 100m and 400m, so I ran just the 100m. There were two rounds that every athlete ran in—the prelims were randomly assigned and the finals were seeded by prelim time.

My time running track for Carnegie Mellon was a series of missed opportunities from injury. This week, I came back to CMU to run at its annual home meet. A lot has changed since I was here last, but the track team is still the same; I enjoyed catching up with my old coaches.

Meet conditions were… typical for Pittsburgh in March, with temperatures in the mid-thirties, snow flurries, and a nasty headwind that peaked at -6.6m/s. I ran the 100 and 200.