If you go forward and spam shift you'll notice that your stamina instadepletes. It's safe to say that when you initially press shift to run, your character burns a burst of stamina to start running. If you keep the shift pressed, it's like you never stopped running so you never get to trigger the burst, even if you stop and start moving again. A technique that you could use to optimize stamina managment is to never let go the shift key and resting your character by walking sideways (if you strafe while pressing shift you walk, walking doesn't consume stamina and technically you never stopped running).

Lesser the stamina, slower you go, so having a good stamina managment is key to get the best times. I realized this while using "cl_showpos 1", it shows your current speed and you can get a better sense of stamina by tracking the values.

Is changing "sv_preround_freezetime" allowed? I'm trying to get a better time on nmo_cleopas which has a lot of RNG involved, so restarting like 10 times before taking a run is a thing in this map.

In cleopas having the microphone spawning in your house is a must, the problem with this is that when you spawn you don't have the angle to see if the microphone spawned with you or not, the round needs to start so you can flick your camera to get the microphone, since you can't see it. The default timer for the preround freezetime is 5 seconds, this is the problem, the microphone spawns there 1 out of 6 times~ and you don't know if it spawned with you. So you have to wait 5 seconds, microphone not there, restart, wait 5 seconds, microphone not there, respawn... It takes forever. Also, you need for the dynamite to spawn near you, so the chances of restarting are a lot higher.

I remember being not able to get out of the first section of the run for like 20 minutes because bad RNG with the microphone and the dynamite not having a good spawn, and it was 20 minutes with "sv_preround_freezetime 1" on, i can't say how much time would've taken with "sv_preround_freezetime 5" (the first section of cleopas ends at the 30 second mark into the run).

If the initial angle of vision could let me see if the microphone spawned or not it would not be such a big deal since I can just spam restart until I see the microphone and then I start the run, but this is not the case, trying to get a perfect RNG with this setting on default would take forever because of the unlikelihood of planets being aligned for you to get a good spawn on: microphone, dynamite, lever, battery, gas can, ladder and zombies, and also having to blindly wait 5 seconds to see if your microphone spawned in your room. So, my question, is changing "sv_preround_freezetime" allowed?