Smallest loop you've run

My high school had a 100 yard indoor track above a basketball court. In the winter I would do progression runs on that track, getting down to around 5 minute pace on that thing.

I know a guy who once woke up on a Sunday morning (his regular 2 hour long run day) to find it had snowed a bunch over night. He drove around town until he found a spot that had been cleared enough to run. It was the parking lot of a grocery store. The loop was 30 seconds. He did the full 2 hour long run. That's 240 loops. He was angry and mentally exhausted afterwards, but he got his long run in.

Treadmill is like a 3 meter loop. I’ve run on indoor tracks that are only big enough to circle an basketball court. Outside, probably the smallest is a hotel parking lot that got cleared before the streets when it snowed a couple feet and I was basically stranded on a work trip.

When I was 12 my dad borrowed a meter wheel so we could accurately measure some running loops near our house. I rolled that thing inside the house and discovered we had a 20m loop around the main floor. I got excited and ran a mile.

I stayed at a cottage off a (2 lane) highway so I wasn't going to run on the shoulder at night. I ended up doing a loop in the yard that took about 1 minute, so that was probably about 228 meters.

I also did loops on a 160m indoor track but tthat was a race

Ran the perimeter of ~5 tennis courts for an easy run once. Probably a 250-meter square.

On a cruise last summer, I ran on the outside track which I think was about 200m. Call me soft, but I realized after the first few minutes that this wasn't going to work for me for the whole 10 days. So each day I did hybrid workouts where I'd first run a few miles on the treadmill followed by a a couple of miles on the outside track.

I've done this too except you can do a lap of our cellar so I went around rather than out and back. I can think of many other examples. There was a guy who won many Dipseas decades ago, Jack Kirk maybe(?) who was in jail for a while and did five mile runs back and forth in his cell. Benji Durden told me that in his prime he had a loop that took him three minutes to run and he did a lot of his runs, as long as three hours, on it. Today he has a loop that takes six minutes to run. Bill Rodgers did a lot of winter runs on an indoor track that I think was 16 laps to the mile. Ron Hill would run around airport terminals when he was travelling. There was a guy called Lionel Ortega, a 2:14 guy in the 70s who did well over 100 miles a week with nearly all his runs on the track. Orville Atkins used to post here a lot. He did all except his weekend long runs on a 600 yard path around a school. There was a guy in China who ran a marathon in his living room during the Covid lock down. And there was this thread here a little while ago:

I don't want to sound ignorant but do big cruise ships have designated walk/run areas? They're big enough to get in some halfway decent runs but I imagine there would be a lot of people standing around in the way.

Usually the track is the designated walk/run area, but it's not particularly pleasant on some ships. For example the ship I was on, the track had one section where you had to go through a gate with a door, followed by a sharp 90 degree turn just to continue.

I suppose you could be creative though. For example, if you start early enough you could jog up and down the stairs which could be as many as 14 or 15 floors. There's also long hallways, but it probably would not work very well if other people are up and about.

Running in place in front of a mirror in hostel room.

I like running when traveling for business. Sometimes the treadmill is unavoidable, but I generally try to get out of the hotel. If I can't find a local path or anything, I've had good luck of just doing loops around local soccer/baseball fields. I've also done runs around the parking lots of corporate parks early morning or late night. I'll scope things out before traveling and try to book hotels near corporate parks if no better option. Never done any smaller loops (like 20 m in a basement). Those seem like a really good way to get hurt.

I once ran 120 laps around a pseudo-"track" on the roof of a hotel in Detroit that was claimed to be 12 laps to the mile. It was February, the roads were icy, and the only time I had to run was in the darkness of early morning, and I did not want to risk going out on the roads in the middle of downtown Detroit.

It was not as bad as I expected, but not an experience I'd want to repeat regularly.

On a maybe 70 yard indoor track above a basketball court. Also wind sprints going back and forth touching each line on a basketball court. And running in place on a treadmill... Duh.

This is a fun thread. Let's hear more.

On the flight deck of the USS Inchon during Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Not sure how far around it was...had to leap over tie down chains and chocks holding helicopters in place. God forbid you fall - the "non-skid" surface would tear you up. Good memories!

During the snowpocalypse here in Texas I had covid, and was too sick to run outside. So I ran a mile in my living room to keep my running streak alive, did this multiple days in a row.

Easy - treadmill. Loops of 0.0mi

Elementary school gym for the 12 minute run; they said it was 36 laps to the mile.