The Lightspeed track spike is designed to help elite indoor sprinters maintain their maximum speed around turns and to keep their feet light and comfortable. I was inspired to create an indoor sprint spike from my own experience as a collegiate runner. While competing and sprinting full speed around indoor tracks, I could feel my foot coming out from under my spike plate. I took this opportunity to research and design the first indoor track spike. From my research, I've found that sprinters lateral ground reaction force increases around 700 Newtons on indoor track turns compared to running straight. Ground reaction time increase by around .01 ms for every step on the curve. The combination of this and other factors decreases the absolute speed of sprinters from 9.83 ms to 9.37 ms. My design challenge was to create an indoor track spike that maximized support from lateral forces on the curve but also kept the track spike extremely lightweight. I found that by using a generative design I could create stronger support and made the design more efficient.
