Running Equipment
Choosing the Best Running Timing Equipment
Accurate Timing of Runs
It is hugely useful to be able to time runs accurately. For most runners the use of a stopwatch is good enough - but sometimes, particularly for sprinters you want to be able to time things a little more accurately than this - taking out the manual element of a human starting and stopping the watch.
To be able to do this you need some kind of electronic timing mechanism, such as is used for timing big races. These are, unfortunately, very expensive - costing in the region of £10,000.
Also, with these systems you will have photo-finish facility, not something you are all that likely to want to use much in training.
However, at Momentum Sports, we invested recently in a timing gate system which works off radio waves to "talk" to the watches that do the timing. The disadvantage of these systems in the past was that you had to break a laser beam and setting up the system was often as time consuming as the sessions themselves.