Here's your opportunity to contribute something to the science behind how we do things in track and field!
On June 21 of this year, Bethan Knights won the girls two mile at the Brooks PR meet in a time of 9:53.54. That time was believed to constitute a new high school record for the girls two mile at the time. Track and Field News, however, which bills itself as "the Bible of the Sport," is not listing the time as a US high school record, staying instead with the 9:54.22 posted by Aisling Cuffe in 2011.
The main issue here is the lack of a rail on the track in Renton, Washington, used for the event.
The thinking goes like this: for any track with a rail, the distance run in the inside lane is to be measured along a continuous line 30 cm outside of the inside lane line (which should correspond with the location of the rail). For a track without a rail, the distance run in the inside lane is to be measured along a continuous line 20 cm outside of the inside lane line. Obviously, those two distances will differ owing to the different turn radii when measuring 20 and 30 cm outside of the inside lane line.
The argument goes that Bethan Knights' effort did not constitute a full two miles because there was no rail on the track. The line 20 cm from the inside lane line comes up about a meter short of 400 meters.
In practice, in the situation where a track has no rail, cones placed at four-meter intervals around the turn are supposed to constitute an adequate substitute. I can't speak one way or the other as to whether than actually happened at the track used at Brooks PR. The video certainly seems to suggest it is possible the cones were there with the required spacing, but you can't measure that on video. In any case, the record is not going on the board, so we may assume T&FN deems something about the coning around the turns to be suspect.
What seems more suspect, however, is the assumption that the rail actually has the effect of displacing runners in the inside lane 10 cm (roughly four inches) farther away from the inside lane line. If this is not true, then the logic behind the rule fails and we are guilty of accepting or rejecting national records on a faulty premise.
I would like to know if the assumption behind the ruling is true. I hope I'm not the only one who finds this question intriguing and the answer worth knowing. And, fortunately, there seems to be an easy way to answer this question.
All we need to do is the compare wear patterns on railed and non-railed tracks that have had enough use since the last surfacing to show a wear pattern. I'd like to ask your help in this regard.
I'd like to ask you to visit your local track and carefully measure the distance from the center of the wear pattern to the outside edge of the inside lane line. It's probably best to measure it in three or four locations and average the distance. Then, send me an e-mail (use the e-mail address in the lower left corner of this page) and give me your average measure and tell me whether your track is has a rail or has no rail. Note that for a track to count as a railed track, the rail must be in place more or less all the time as most of the wear on the inside lane of a track occurs outside of meets. And please tell me the location name of the track so that we don't accidentally get multiple data points from the same track.
I will accumulate data and report back to you on what we find.
