What is the strangest track you know of?

That Seattle Pacific track has to be the strangest outdoor track around. Do they actually run meets there?

U of O just put in a 400m square track, but of course they won't be running races on it as it is primarily just a warmup track for Hayward Field.

Texas Tech in Lubbock Texas....

Indoor Track... can't remember the distance of the track when I ran there back in 99 but it was a complete circle....

no straight aways...

it was interesting to say the least..

We ran once at the KS State fairgrounds rodeo arena, in Hutchinson, KS. They laid out an oval in the dirt and we ran laps around the arena. I don't remember how many laps/mile it was. If you've ever been to an indoor rodeo then you know how dusty it can become and it's not just dirt on the floor. Thank you Hutchinson CC for hosting the meet.

when was that in hutch?? who did you run for????

Not Laura B wrote:

The track at Centenniel Middle School in Boulder is on a slight grade. There is easily a .5 sec difference between the uphill 200 and downhill 200.

Thats nothing compared to the old BHS track before they leveled it. Go run a workout there and when you get to the west curve look at the fence on top of the concrete wall on the outside. There are still gates from when that end of the track was about 5 feet higher than it is now, and the east end was even raised a bit. The thing was probably 7 feet different from end to end and the downhill side had the wind at your back as it comes out of Boulder canyon. Definetly the craziest track I ever ran on, but I dont think it compares to these 90 degree tunnelled trapezoid tracks with trees in the middle.

jsquire wrote:

t16runner wrote:

the Ohio state track of the early to middle 1900's... it had 200 meter straight-aways that went out of the stadium... now that would be fun, a straight 200 meter dash.

Running the 220y on the straight was the norm in the US until the 1950s. I've never seen it, but they say the video of Tommie Smith's 19.5 is amazing.

Back in the '50s and earlier, the used to run the 440y at OSU around just one turn. It helps. A high school kid ran 46.6 way back in '58 that way.

Straight 200/220s were around through the 60s, they were faster but really boring to run, you really miss the turn. The hook shaped 440s were fairly common upto the 50s

Boulder High was, might still be, uphill heading west, a "speed bump" on the southwest turn, then slightly downhill heading east. Fairmont High in West Virginia has a track that was square, nothing like running down the straight then pivoting 90 degrees to make the turn, a real momentum breaker.

My old high school track in Huntington , NY ( north shore of LI ) was about 40 yards longer than 440 yards. It also had about a 25 yard straight stretch in the middle of the far turn. All this dirt of course. New school built in 1959 about 2 miles away ended all that.

One of our bif Suffolk County rivals, Riverhead, had a HALF MILE track... it used to be a horse racing track. It too was dirt.

Finally attention wineturtle: you're a bit off on Otis Hill. He did not run in the 1968 Oly Trials at Echo Summit. But I well remember when he was the best quarter miler in the East at White Plains HS, and some kid named Larry James was his teammate there, and more a hurdler than a quarter miler.

Check out Stadium High School's track on the Tacoma waterfront, where they filmed "10 Things I Hate About You." It's fat on one end, skinny on the other.

The old indoor track under the football bleachers at Carleton College.

I don't know how long it is to the mile, but it's a 3-lane track with straights that run pretty much the length of the bleachers and very steeply banked curves that are only about 10 meters long. The curves are banked like a bike track. Somewhere I read that the nickname for the track was the "paper clip".

I figured that it was a practice set-up for the long Minnesota winters, but a coaching friend of mine remembers running meets on that track.

And the name of the that place in Fairmont was East-West Stadium. The old joke was that because of the square track they should have called it East-North-West-South Stadium. Back in the 80's there was only one school in that conference that ran on a 400 meter oval track. Everything else was, well, everything else.

THE TUNNEL wrote:

University of Rochester's 207m indoor track which is almost a square has these insignificant banks and half of the track is in a tunnel which sports a warmup increase of 20 degrees over the rest of the track. The people who run best on the track are the ones that know how to slide out into lane 2 before the bank, it takes practice.

Yesss! Beware the tunnel! I hate that track, but since it it was, until recently, the only indoor track in Rochester and I am curently going to school about 5 miles away from there, we run there a lot. Just last weekend, in fact.

Apparently, that particular track has a clone somewhere down South, Georgia I think?

A right turn on a track? I did not believe but now I am a believer.

I too just used Google Earth to look at the track at Seattle Pacific University. WTH?

Very strange.

Former Bearcat wrote:

Texas Tech in Lubbock Texas....

Indoor Track... can't remember the distance of the track when I ran there back in 99 but it was a complete circle....

no straight aways...

it was interesting to say the least..

236 meters, we have a meet there next month....

Here's a Google Map of that track.

On that track, it didn't come out correctly. You have to hit Satellite.

Carleton College in Northfield, MN has a very strange track from the 40s and 50s I believe. It was built under their football bleachers. It's two 70m straightaways with 20-30m turns. Banked the whole way around and especially steep at the turns. It's 3 lanes, and you have to run about 6:00 pace or faster to not fall inwards. If you're over 6 feet tall, you can't run in lane one or you'll hit your head on the beams coming out of the ceiling.

As of May 2009, Marshall's track is torn up and it looks like they may be putting in a full 400m track. I've been in LA 10 years and have never seen a basketball court on the infield. When was that? There was a football field though. Also, I'm pretty sure it was 352 yards or 5 laps to a mile.

No Joke wrote:

John Marshall High in Los Angeles. If memory servers it is a 357 yard square oval with a basketball court on the infield.

Widener Indoor - in the 80s it had 4 turns (like a dining hall tray), and it was not an even number of laps to the mile. They just built it to fit the facility. Actually maximally efficeint use of space if you think about it.

Baltimore Armory - like cemenet, covered in wood. And dusty. So you had to wipe your feet before you started, and coudln't overstride.