I just found out the local high school outdoor track is 378 meters...WTF?

You talking about Swarthmore's track?

The Waterboy wrote:

The New Rochelle High School outdoor track is 375 meters

I've ran some meets there. It's 350m.

Approx 375 meters on OLD tracks are common in Sweden, it dates back to a combination of them originally being built for motorcycle racing on ice ovals and/or primitive speedway track and then having been converted to running tracks during the period when Gunder Hägg & Co dominated the 1500 meters (4 x 375 = 1500 = Both the starting line and the finish line could be in front of the Grand Stand). Since then some have been push out and some have been cut into by the Soccer clubs managing the grass field on the inside, pulling their weight behind their wants and leaving old tracks with all sorts of varying lenghts, hence the "approx" in the first sentence.

Now with Google Maps not being that exact and the possibility of changes since original build I'm guessing your AMERICAN track was 400 YARDS at some point (approx 366 meters is 400 YARDS) with MILE races starting and finishing in front of the Grand Stand.

Do you live in Warwick Valley? Everyone in NYS knows that Track is short.

Peter Andersson wrote:

Now with Google Maps not being that exact

No, it's pretty freaking exact man. Google pays some rather smart engineers a rather decent sum of money to make it exact.

Go measure any legit track with a decent amount of care and you'll get 400 +/- 1 m. For example, I just now measured the Arcadia track to be 399.69 m. And the majority of the error is in the placement of the measurement points, not the scaling of the imagery.

Washed Upp wrote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_mVzJ5M6Vg

That video made me burst into laughter. It's even funnier because the runners appear to be pretty serious runners.

Funny! I've seen the track in person, haven't tried it out, but have heard of the track records run on it. I didn't know that there was video of a race there until now.

The runners in the video are all good athletes. The two bigger guys have podiumed on the SuperTour (the US cross country skiing circuit) this winter, the 4th place guy won the most important running race in Alaska (Mt. Marathon) last year, and the last place guy was the 1st or 2nd American at the Boston Marathon some years ago.

I just measured my local track (UK) using GM - 400.4m. This track is SHORT.

Ask the school board of that district. They have the measurments......let us know how far it is and you will also see how much your GPS watch is off by (if you measured with the watch).

My friend ran the Boston Marathin with his $200.00 GPS watch and it came out to 26.55 miles. Its a relatively straight course so these watches are off.

Get a measuring wheel and measure it properly

I have measured with Google Earth many tracks that I know to be accurate (IAAF Certified or supervised the surveying) and the Google Earth measurement is always accurate within +/- 1-2 meters.

I measured this track (Google Earth) at 376 meters (curb/white line measurement).

:|} wrote:

The Waterboy wrote:

The New Rochelle High School outdoor track is 375 meters

I've ran some meets there. It's 350m.

__

Does everyone know it is 350m? Are all the starts measured out so they are correct? weird.

Man, lots of guys aged 60+ on this thread. "You can trust the internets with the GPS!! You gotta wheel it!!" Go hang out with your grandchildren.

60+ here

What makes you think the wheel is accurate?

No one is saying that Google Earth is accurate enough to measure tracks or roads. but I have found with care, it will get you in a range of 10 yards/mile on the roads and within 2 meters on a track....which is good enough to determine "gross" errors. I would never use it for the actual measurement - we have other toys for that.

fyi- this 60+ old man knows a little bit about this stuff.

1) look up who they contracted to build the track... see if they offer a 378m track...

2) Get a measuring wheel....

3) If you're really that cheap (which if you're going to workout at killians you might be) as to borrow the XC/Track wheel and measure it

4) Ask the track/XC is this track short?

5) Stop using GPS to try and accurately measure and object...

6) realize your wife is lying to you, you are that fast.

Man, all this talk about wheels, GPS and "other tracks" -- look at the satellite image! It's off because it's CLEARLY shortened and asymmetric on the south end. A shorter track could have been built and been symmetric by scaling all the dimensions, as is done elsewhere, but that's not what they did here. Nobody would purposely build a track with those dimensions at those angles -- it was a one-off for some very particular reason, like underground utilities or something.

It is unusual.

The question is, do the kids at the school and meets know this and stagger the starts? The painted staggered start lines do not suggest it. And that would be to the detriment of the kids training and racing on the track.

OP, can you follow up on that?

2 questions:

1. Do people using the track know that it's short?

2. What's the historical reason for it?

most of the high school tracks in NYC are less than 400 meters.

That New Rochelle High track set up is pretty sweet. Given that they didn't have the space for a full 400, it seems like a creative way to get kids a track they can work out on and host a small meet. While the odd laps are probably annoying, it's probably nice to have a completely separate straightaway for hurdlers, stretching, ballistics, etc.

SciencishInquisition wrote:...The question is, do the kids at the school and meets know this and stagger the starts? The painted staggered start lines do not suggest it...

The location of the finish line on this track, to me suggests some awareness by the builder/painter of what race distances need to be. The finish looks to be in the upper right, and the line is after the turn starts. Never seen that on a track before.

However, using the first set of lane marking triangles below what I think is the finish line doesn't seem to make sense for a 400m start line. Lane 3 is about 22m from what I think is the finish line. If you guys measured lane 1 at 378m for a full loop then lane 1's triangle should be 22m before the finish line.

And I don't see anything for an 800m start line.

The 100m line looks accurate, it appears to be a solid line across the track. The lane 4 triangle is right on that 100m start line (there is another fainter line across the track about 10m below that, 110m hurdles?).

I hope everyone does realize that running around a track with a GPS receiver in motion triangulating purposely misleading/inaccurate data is not the same thing as how distances are measured using data from photo satellites at a fixed orbit around earth.

There seems to be a few people who haven't thought it all the way through here.