Hand time or FAT: why your 11.2 is probably an 11.54

August 8, 2026 · 7 min read

There is a specific kind of heartbreak in running the fastest race of your life, seeing a number on a coach's stopwatch, and later finding out that number does not count for much.

It is not that anyone is calling you a liar. It is that a human thumb and an electronic beam are measuring two different things, and everyone who reads results for a living knows the difference.

What the two actually are

Fully automatic timing, almost always written FAT, starts on the gun and stops when your torso crosses the line, using a camera that shoots hundreds of frames per second. No person is involved in either end of the measurement. It reports to the hundredth: 11.54.

Hand timing is somebody at the finish line with a stopwatch. They start it when they see the smoke or hear the gun, and stop it when they think you crossed. It usually gets reported to the tenth: 11.3.

Both are real measurements of a real race. Only one of them is comparable across meets.

The conversion, exactly

Under the National Federation of State High School Associations rules, the conversion is two steps and people routinely get the first one wrong.

1. Round the hand time up to the next tenth.
2. Add 0.24 seconds.

So a hand-timed 11.21 does not become 11.45. It rounds up to 11.30 first, then becomes 11.54. Under NFHS the same 0.24 applies to every race distance, which surprises people who have seen other systems use a smaller number for longer races.

Work through a few and the pattern is uncomfortable:

• Hand 11.0 becomes FAT 11.24
• Hand 11.2 becomes FAT 11.44
• Hand 12.5 becomes FAT 12.74

That is roughly a quarter of a second, every time, and in the 100m a quarter of a second is an enormous amount of ground.

Why hand times are always fast, never slow

The gap is not random error that averages out. It is systematic, and it comes almost entirely from the start.

At the finish, a timer is watching for a moment they can see coming. They anticipate it, and human anticipation is quite good. At the start, they are reacting to a stimulus, and human reaction to a visual or audio cue costs somewhere around two tenths of a second.

So the watch starts late and stops roughly on time. Late start plus honest finish equals a short time. Every single race, in the same direction. That is why a fixed conversion works at all: it is correcting a bias, not noise.

What a college coach does with a hand time

They convert it, and then they treat the result with suspicion anyway.

This is worth understanding rather than resenting. A coach reading a recruiting email has no way to audit the meet, the timer, or whether the number was rounded generously by someone who wanted you to have a good day. The conversion gives them a defensible floor, not a measurement. So a converted hand time gets you looked at. It rarely gets you an offer on its own.

The practical consequence: before your recruiting year, get yourself into meets that run FAT. Invitationals, championship meets and most larger club meets do. A single FAT mark is worth more to a coach than a season of stopwatch PRs, because it is the one they can put next to another athlete's.

The mistake that actually costs people

Do not send a coach a hand time presented as if it were FAT.

It is tempting. Nobody is checking, the difference is a rounding error in your head, and 11.2 reads so much better than 11.44. Coaches find out anyway, because eventually you run a timed meet and the numbers do not line up. At that point the problem is no longer your time.

The version that works is boring and effective: state the mark, state the timing, state the meet. "11.2 hand, converts to 11.44, Region 4 dual, 12 April" tells a coach you understand the sport. It is a more impressive email than a bare 11.2.

Which events this applies to

Timing method matters for anything measured in time, so every running event from the 55m to the 3200m and beyond. It does not apply to the throws, the jumps or the vault, where a tape measure is a tape measure.

Note that this is a completely separate question from wind legality, which applies only to the 100m, 200m, both short hurdles, long jump and triple jump. A mark can be perfectly wind-legal and still hand timed. The two labels answer different questions and a coach wants both.

What we do about it

On TrackReels the timing method is a required field on every running mark, sitting next to the time, the date and the wind. There is no way to post a time without saying how it was taken, and hand times are labelled as hand times everywhere they appear.

That is deliberate, and it occasionally annoys people. The alternative is a rankings list where a stopwatch 11.2 sits above a camera-timed 11.30, which is not a ranking of anything.

If your only marks are hand timed right now, post them anyway. Label them honestly, keep training, and replace them the moment you get on a FAT track.