Working out an average run time based on five attempts

Speaker 1: Hello Luke, you all right?

Speaker 2: Yeah, you all right Justin?

Speaker 1: I've been assigned to be your coach because I heard you need help with your training.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I need help with my 50 metre running time.

I need to beat my last time of 8.3 seconds, and to the Athletic Club, I need to get below 8 seconds.

Speaker 1: The way I usually do this is to get my clients to run 5 lots of 50 metres and then try to work out the average.

It might be good to calculate your rate of improvement too.

Speaker 2: Yeah, sounds good.

Speaker 1: How'd I do, Justin?

Speaker 2: I'm just in the process of working it out. Let me add up all the times.

(TO AUDIENCE) All the race times added together give a total of 39 seconds exactly.

I divide 39 into 5, the amount of runs that were taken, to give an average.

(TO OTHER PEOPLE) Which is 7.8. Well done, Luke, you made it!

Speaker 1: Great, thank you.

Speaker 1: I know that you said that your last time was 8.3.

Let's see how much you've improved.

Your score was 8.3, now I'll have to minus that by 7.8, which is 0.5.

You've improved by half a second, Luke, that's amazing.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 1: Now, I'm gonna have to divide 0.5 by the original time, to see how much you've improved. That comes up to a 0.0602.

Now to find the percentage I'm gonna have to multiply it by 100.

The calculator says it's 6.02, which is rounded to 6.

So that's 6%, Luke, you've improved by 6%, but if you improve by another 6%, that's a whole second.

Speaker 2: That's great.

Speaker 1: But let's work on 3% increments. That's the equivalent of a quarter of a second.

Speaker 2: Okay, sounds great, thank you.