Hurdle Spacing Calculator

Hurdle races are unusual in track because the spacing between obstacles is fixed by rule, not chosen by the athlete — so the real design problem is fitting your stride pattern into a distance that doesn't change. This calculator starts from the official World Athletics geometry for four events (110mH men, 100mH women, and 400mH men and women), each with its own hurdle count, distance to the first hurdle, spacing between hurdles, run-in distance, and hurdle height, taken directly from World Athletics' Competition and Technical Rules (Rule 22) and baked in as a lookup table. Given your target finish time, it derives the average speed you'd need to hold, then divides the fixed inter-hurdle distance by your chosen (or event-standard) step count to get the exact stride length you'd need to hit each hurdle on the correct leg — this is the calculator's core purpose.

Sprint hurdles conventionally use a fixed 3-step pattern between hurdles (keeping the same lead leg every time), while 400m hurdles use a longer count that typically grows across the race as fatigue shortens stride, which is why the tool lets you separately override steps-to-first and steps-between. It also reports whether your chosen step count keeps the same lead leg throughout (odd counts do, even counts force a leg swap) and estimates total race strides, per-hurdle clearance time (assumed at a fixed 0.33 s for sprint hurdles, 0.38 s for 400mH, since clearance technique varies less than running speed does), and a rough velocity profile across the race that accounts for early acceleration and, in the 400m events, late-race fatigue. Treat clearance times and phase velocities as reasonable approximations, not measured splits — your actual stride pattern is the one number here you should verify against real training data.