What's the most unusual INDOOR track you've seen

RENO !!!! that track rocks !!!! it is soooo old school WOOD banked and they hold Cattle shows there in the off season. But it is the onlt indoor track i ever ran on in high school I love that track

re: haverford, remember the smell of the dirt???and how you'd come home and all of your gear was brown??

The old indoor track at Drake that is the staging area before the relays, they also use it as a high jump area during bad weather.

I ahve seen numerous unusual tracks but the most unusual thing I have seen at a track, no joke about this, was a high scholl runner, probably a kid 16-17 years old doing it doggy style behind a plie of mats with a woman who had to be older than 10. I could not have sex for a full week after seeing it I was so distraught.

my typing mistake I meant a woman older than 70 (seventy). Yes, sick indeed.

My second nomination would have to be the old 160 yd board track at Manley FieldHouse at Syracuse University.....back when the floor of the fieldhouse was (oiled down) dirt and the infield of the track had a huge set of bleachers set up for fans to watch the SU basketball games on the court set outside the home stretch of the track. Unless you were standing on the top row of the bleachers all you go to see was half of each lap of every race....by the time the invitational meets were half over the place was a dust bowl!!! I can still smell the place!

Carnivore 69 wrote:

The St. Christopher's High School track in Richmond. ... Because the races are in the dead of winter, your lean for the tape takes you out into ice and snow just inches past the finish line.

yeah, must be a Virginia thing - I ran most of my indoor track races at either Heritage High or Lynchburg College, both in Lynchburg, and at both facilities the sprinters had to run out a big garage door.

At LC, the sprints had to be run diagonally across the (more or less square) field house and the runners in the far right lanes had to execute a 45 degree turn to avoid running into the wall and get out the door on the lefthand wall of the building. LC's track was a big circle... they didn't even pretend to put in straights. That was a dizzying run... 12 laps to the mile, so 24x for the 2 mile. The surface was some kind of pebbly-surfaced substance, don't think it was exactly rubber, maybe some kind of asphalt/rubber mix? Dunno.

The Heritage track was around their basketball court in the gym, they'd accordian the bleachers up against the walls (we'd climb up top and hang out there during the meets). The surface was a rubberized all-purpose slick surface with absolutely no traction. Another 12-lapper. I didn't even know indoor tracks were any other distance until I ran at VMI the first time. The thing I remember most about Heritage's track was the stench of Ben Gay or Cremogesic (sp?) - which we called Cream-of-Jesus - that the sprinters all slathered on to keep their muscles warm. The turns were super tight, too. We'd run dual or tri-meets on weeknights that wouldn't finish until 11pm, then we'd drive 2 hours back to C'ville on a bus with a 45mph governor (for some weird reason, there was a rule that school buses couldn't drive faster than 45mph so they all had those damned governors restricting their speed).

VMI was also weird, the tunnel, those banked turns built into the sides of the building. Sorta cool, all the same. First track I ever ran on that wasn't a 12-lap.

Another one was Woodbury Forest School - they had a field house but no track... we had to go outside to run the distance events. I remember running a 10:02 2-mile outdoors in February at about 10:30pm.

Va Tech bought the old Madison Square Gardens board track in about '83 or '84 - that was a sweeeeet track to run on, love the springy boards! Only got one chance to run there, tho, so never really figured out how to run well on the boards.

William and Mary had (has?) a suck-ass indoor track in William and Mary Hall... yet another 12-lapper, similar surface to Lynchburg College except the tried to put straights in it and, subsequently, the turns were super tight. Only ran one race there, my freshman year at W&M.

Have you guys ever ran at East Central University's indoor track? Wow! That thing is something. It is made from recycled tennis shoe soles and rubber car parts, but it's not refined. One time I tripped on a spark plug and got my foot caught on an old shoestring. In addition, the inside of the track is filled with an olympic size swimming pool and people are ACTUALLY swimming in it during the race. It's horrendous.

I have seen numerous unusual tracks but the most unusual thing I have seen at a track, no joke about this, was a high school runner, probably a kid 16-17 years old doing it doggy style behind a plie of mats with a woman who had to be older than 70. Just imagine screwing your grandmother while in high school. I could not have sex for a full week after seeing it I was so distraught.

The Portland Expo in Portland, ME is a pretty crappy track. 144 meters, with steep, steep banks around a basketball court inside a convention center, built before World War II, and with the ventilation system to prove it.

I ran on a track that was just a circle painted around the outside of a high school gym. It was 5 or 6 laps to an 800.

ZZrunZZ, you must be from upstate New York. Did you ever run at the Union College track or on the track in the basement of the west gym at Binghamton University? They were both terible tracks.

Hey Shud Up...

Where you from...I ran in the WL halls a few times myself in the early/mid-90's and I feel your pain.

A kid from my school (Ell.) broke his arm on a locker coming around a corner a fews years after I graduated...

Stony Brook

177.77777m / lap = square track (9 laps / mile)

They got cheap and decided to make the building smaller than what was required for 200m. Typical BS from them. They built a new outdoor stadium and to make the "sight lines" better for football, they removed the track from the plans. The original lie was they were trying to save 750k, then it came in 2 years late and 8 million over budget, go figure, so they came up with the "sight lines" lie to explain why their program has no place to even practice.

Indoor tracks:

Old NAIA Indoor Championships track in Kansas City Municipal Arena downtown was a 12 laps to the mile wooden bank track. They would sweep the saw dust off between races. Felt like you were running on a broken trampeline. The 2 and 3 mile races were interesting.

Many 10 lap mile flat basketball court-like hard rubber tracks (Pittsburg State, William Jewell College). Always fun.

Graceland College had a track that had the basketball court stands on the inside of the track so you can't see from one end to the other. Always made for interesting things, like one time a guy tried to push me into the pool vault mat.

And yes the KU indoor track is an odd one made of some material I've never seen before anywhere else. Not a very fast surface.

Oh man, indoor track such fun for distance runners! Not!

I ran a 4x880 relay in Kansas City at NAIA and got disqualified and thereby lost the flight reimbursement money for the college (only top two relay teams got reimbursed). It was a bogus disqualification, as it just so happened that just as I passed a guy, he lost his balance on the tight banks and stepped onto the infield for a stride or two. There was no contact, but there was an optical illusion that somehow I had pushed him to the infield. The guy I beat would have beat me by 4 seconds on an outdoor track, but because I was really practiced on running on crappy indoor tracks and he wasn't, I could edge ahead. I could run @ 1:51 outdoors, he could run 1:47 outdoors. But at Kansas I managed 1:54 and I doubt that he did better than 1:56! I do believe that you would lose 3 seconds or more when running on that Kansas track compared to a good outdoor track.

RPI, in Troy, NY, used to have a track that was approximately octagonal (4 short straightaways connected by 4 extremely sharp turns), was something like 9 1/3 laps per mile, and had a seating section located on top of a tunnel over one of the (4) straightaways. In the relays, runners would receive quite literally blind handoffs in the tunnel, as the approaching runner would be visible about 2 meters before the exchange zone. I heard they renovated the track building, but I haven't been there in 5 years, and don't know what its like now.

We had a track that was not even in oval dimensions. It weaved around and had some dips and even some inclines. This one part went over a - oh wait a second, that's our XC course. Never mind.

ran in a meet in jablonec, czech republic, they had an indoor track of 300m with 120m straights and 30m banked curves, it was actually pretty fast