Ryun's 3:33 on cinders VS today's track

This has been mentioned before....

Don't equate some soft high school track you might have run on with top grade cinder tracks used before the late 60's and onward. A good cinder track felt FAST and was fast. Not as fast as today's tartan tracks, but still, very conducive to pickin' them up and puttin' them down.

trailrunner64 wrote:

This has been mentioned before....

Don't equate some soft high school track you might have run on with top grade cinder tracks used before the late 60's and onward. A good cinder track felt FAST and was fast. Not as fast as today's tartan tracks, but still, very conducive to pickin' them up and puttin' them down.

u are correct. A well tended cinder track is far different than the ignored cinder track that is almost like the long jump pit. I still have a stadium record for the mile in (small) college, where I ran a 4:07 on cinders in the early 70's. They've had a tartan track there now for 25 years, too. Still, Ryun would have run at least 332 that day he ran 333 in the LA Coliseum, all other things being equal.

trailrunner64 wrote:

This has been mentioned before....

Don't equate some soft high school track you might have run on with top grade cinder tracks used before the late 60's and onward. A good cinder track felt FAST and was fast. Not as fast as today's tartan tracks, but still, very conducive to pickin' them up and puttin' them down.

Definitely. It bugs me when people here use the phrase "dirt" to describe all non-all-weather tracks. "Dirt" implies running through cow pastures or something. The best cinder tracks were very good, indeed--they were not primitive. That said, they were certainly a bit slower than good all-weather tracks today. The common "conversion" between the two has been one second per lap. I think that may be a tad generous, and we're better off assuming only a half second per lap. But, even with that cautious conversion, the "same" mile time on a cinder track would be about 2 seconds superior to that on an all-weather surface.

There is also the misconception that a gravel track is the same as a cinder track.

Cinder tracks were I believe originally made with the byproduct of incinerators. Ashes in other words.

SMJO wrote:

There is also the misconception that a gravel track is the same as a cinder track.

Cinder tracks were I believe originally made with the byproduct of incinerators. Ashes in other words.

A variety of materials were used in these tracks...and rather thick books written on the science and engineering of it all. Bottom line: "dirt" is a pretty useless word to even begin to describe these things.

SMJO wrote:

There is also the misconception that a gravel track is the same as a cinder track.

exactly.

the OP said as if he ran on a GRAVEL track. world o difference.