Relay Race Track Perimeter

Transcript

Relay Race Track Perimeter A relay is a team race. In a 4 × 100m relay, a team of four runners takes turns passing a baton. Each person runs 100 meters, totaling 400 meters (one full lap). Crucially, teams must stay in their assigned lanes the entire time Notice how the track is divided into separate lanes. Everyone gets their own path. Imagine running around a circular park. If your friend runs on the grass on the inside, and you run on the sidewalk on the outside, who runs further? You do! The outside path makes a much wider circle. Total Distance: Look at Lane 4 (pink) versus Lane 1 (red). The curves for Lane 4 are clearly much wider. If we line everyone up on the exact same starting line, what happens? Because the outer lanes are longer, those runners have to run further to reach the finish line. That makes the race completely unfair The Stagger Solution To fix this and make the race perfectly fair, we push the starting blocks for the outer lanes forward. We give them a 'head start' that perfectly cancels out the extra distance they have to run around the curves.