You’re basically saying the difference between a good day and a great day is the length of a blink, so yeah, I’ll write a story about a sprinter who spends half a second debating whether to stretch his toes and the other half… well, let’s leave that part to the readers who love a good cliffhanger.

In the world of sprinting the only thing that matters is the instant the foot leaves the block. Our hero, Ivan, lines up, eyes the starting line, and in his mind does a quick spreadsheet: if his toe flexes 0.01 seconds later, the force curve dips 3 % at 200 ms, and if it flexes 0.02 seconds earlier, the curve spikes 5 % at 150 ms. He knows the margin for error is 0.02 seconds, so he sets his own timer—his heart, his reflexes, the tiny muscle memory that can only be measured in microseconds. The crowd counts, the gun fires, the tape drops. The result? Ivan crosses in 9.78 seconds, shaving the world record by 0.01 seconds, all because he decided to flex his toes just in time. The data didn’t lie; the story was just a math equation with a dash of nerves.

Sure, I’ll add that the tibialis anterior’s pre‑load can turn a 0.01‑second gain into a 0.02‑second loss, like a silent saboteur; it’s the kind of tiny tweak that turns a record‑breaking story into a cautionary tale.