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

Carleton College has a banked 120m indoor track that is the absolute pits. But will be replaced with the new fieldhouse. York High School in Elmhurst has an indoor flat 120m track with 4 lanes that is in the depths of Mordor it is so shitty. You should run 3200 on it some time! Now, the outdoor track is something else, though, a world- class track that the House of Newton built.

someplace in conn has a track where both straightaways are under the bleachers with pillars on the insfield to support it.

Hey you one of Amy Acuff's publicity bitches?!!

Get off the board before I shove a goddamned spike up your ass!

An actual circle (not an oval) imprinted around three hard basketball courts. 400m = 5 laps.

My 7-12 secondary school has two gyms--one for the high school and one for the middle school. There are two garage doors that connect them (despite only opening up enough room for a car and a half at two different ends) as the wall is 2.5 stories tall. So that allowed us to use a 120 yrd track...but it's 120 yards from the second of four lanes only. Once a week we'd get the gym during the indoor season and the sprinters would practice handoffs on turns and the high jumpers could practice, the shot putters could practice, and the long jumpers could almost practice as they'd leap onto high jump mats.

So then the school decided that no indoor track runners could run in the hallways because of school safety (locking up the fire-doors to stop loiterers), so they made all of us run in the gym on those days. Let's just say when there are 2 inches of ice on the streets it's not safe to run outside...and a 120 yd track is a painful way to run a distance workout.

The indoor track in Ottawa is a perfect circle

When i ran in high school, we ran at an indoor soccer facility. They would take the walls out between two fields and you would be running on astro-turf with the occasional step going across cement. The sprints went down the middle of the field between the soccer goals. It was like 11 laps/mile. Horrible horrible meets were run there.

BU's track or i hope it sill exists. 4 lanes and the outside lane was 5 feet high. The slope of the track was unbelieveable, but it was very fast. In fact you had to run fast to hold the turn.

At the University of Detroit, there is a 2 lane hard rubber track upstairs in the basketball arena. It is rectangular in shape, with very sharp corners. On the long straights you have an brick wall on your right and duct work on your left, so you must stay on the track, and on the short straights u have a brick wall on your right, and sum duct work/hurdles and other runners on your left. It is apparently an insane place to workout.

Carnivore 69 wrote:

The St. Christopher's High School track in Richmond. The track itself is fairly standard, but the wild thing is how you finish many of the races. There is a massive garage door past one end of the straightaway that leads to a service lane outside. All of the sprints and some of the distance events use that door as the finish line. Which means it has to be open. 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. One year, there was so much snow outside that the sprinters all wrecked into a snowbank to slow themselves down before they hit the ice going downhill. Then they came back inside completely covered with snow to find out their times and places.

Carnivore 69, what school did you run for? I went to St. Christopher's for a couple years and always hated that track. I don't think they're using it these days though, and their home meets are in the Arthur Ashe Center (not that that's much better.)

Ofuut AFB, NE, has a track in an old airplane hanger. It is 600 meters plus--the air quality is great--nice place to run during the winter months.

placido wrote:

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.

Woodberry Forest actually has a pretty nice indoor facility at the Barbee Center now. It's 200m, and has a surface without much traction, so you really need spikes. At least now Papi Soudek isn't there anymore to freak out if you haven't put tape over the bottom of your shoes. Other than that and the fact that the whole room has that eery orange hue, it's a nice track. That was the only place where I broke 10:40 in the 3200 my senior year, indoor or out. Ugh.

Carleton College's old track:

Hugely banked turns (about 30 degrees)

Pillars on the inside of the turns (lean with the bank and you'll smash your face)

Classrooms on the infield (walls right next to ln 1)

Track is no more than 4m wide

Don't know the distance, but it's likely 1/10 mile.

The Swarthmore College track could be viewed as pretty cherry on paper, because it is banked AND oversized. But there are wooden boards that are part of the structure of the stands that come right up to the beginning and end of one turn on the track and force you to turn wide. And the bank is definitely the smallest bank I have ever seen. And it is oversized to 216 m. We are just starting winter track, and my favorite workouts are ladders (remembering where the 400, 600, 800 and 1000 start) and 100 m that fly around the turns. At least we cut our football team, so we can put the pads that used to be on the goalposts on the wooden boards at the turns. The netting system was actually replaced last year with a new, state-of-the-art automatically retractable netting system with heavy metals bars along the bottom so it doesn't swing out onto the track.

My personal faves (in the Phila area) are the West Chester track, and the Wissahickon high school indoor track (perfect 160 yard circle on a balcony above the basketball court, 24 laps to the 2-mile).

For those who know....

THE EXPO in Portland Maine. Its the oldest indoor track in the country and is a wooden, banked 120 yard track. Very very sweet

University of Colorado's track is a real piece of shit. It's 3 lanes (with an actually somewhat decent surface) but the facility has all these pipes and struts sticking out from nowhere and you go under all these overhangs. Apparently the university thinks its a piece of shit too since that is where you stand to get into their football games. And after the BolderBoulder, that is where you get your post-race snacks and beer, and when that takes place, the poorly ventilated track becomes the stinkiest f***in' place in the world.

The University of Kansas has a pretty strange track. It is 232 meters, a real even number. It is this sickly looking beige color too. And the surface is this strange rubbery chunky surface I've never seen anywhere else. It looks like about 1,000 frat kids puked after a night of partying and they covered it with a thin layer of beige rubber.

Ok, I think I'm going to win this hand down....1st case: Windsor Locks High School, Windsor Locks CT...the "HALLWAYS" of a school. At least they were all left hand turns. I ran a 5:00 mile and was a legitimate hero. Ok, so not all that great, but it was impressive.

Ok, even better - Suffield High School, CT...hallways, left hand turns, right hand turns - what the f***....11:00 3200 was a good run...insane....crazy...

[quote]TL Starbolt wrote:

University of Colorado's track is a real piece of shit. It's 3 lanes (with an actually somewhat decent surface) but the facility has all these pipes and struts sticking out from nowhere and you go under all these overhangs. Apparently the university thinks its a piece of shit too since that is where you stand to get into their football games. And after the BolderBoulder, that is where you get your post-race snacks and beer, and when that takes place, the poorly ventilated track becomes the stinkiest f***in' place in the world.

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Whatever you think of the CU track now, it's nothing compared to what it was prior to the Tartan surface. It still had three lanes,dirt, but it had 4 rounded 90 degree turns per lap. At each corner was a burm of compacted dirt. Each night one of the athletes sprayed the dirt in the entire field house with water to softed it and keep the dust levels low. The advantage was that it didn't give you that dry hacking cough that you get from the dried out air in the winter.

The basketball court was in the middle. The traction on the court was so good that it was tearing up the players knees. They were forced to spread a layer of sand on the court and then sweep it off to reduce the traction.

Rochester was weird. never raced there, but I applied to the school and visited...doing a couple laps with thier track guys. A tunnel, a f***ing tunnel!!!!!