Everly-Montgomery Field at Longmont High School is a great place to road-test new ideas in track and field.
There are a number of reasons for that. I'll list a few of those reasons...
It's a great track and field facility. The people who run meets there, chiefly Tim McIntire, Mark Roberts, and their collective staffs, know track and field. They've been around track and field long enough to have a great sense for what isn't working as well as it could and needs to be tweaked. McIntire, Roberts, and company aren't afraid to change things from the way they've been done forever.
That's a pretty nice convergence of reasons.
So, here's the problem you see at almost every meet in Colorado: Starting at about lap five of the 3200, the leader (or leaders) of the race have caught up with the trailing runners of the race. Most meets don't have a rule about lapped runners moving out a lane and those that do have that rule don't enforce it. It's not difficult to understand why--it's a hard rule to enforce. And if you do enforce the rule, you penalize the lead runner because every runner behing him/her gets a clean inside lane whereas the lead runners does the hard work of passing the trailing runners which must move out only after they have been lapped.
The problem gets worse the larger your invitational is. And, frankly, some of the state's 3200 runners are so very good that even some legitimate varsity-level runners are getting lapped in 3200s.
So, this past Saturday at the Longmont Invitational, Mark Roberts and Tim McIntire tried a new idea. The idea essentially involves running two simultaneous heats of the 3200. The top heat starts at the usual starting line with approximately 200 meters to collapse into lanes one through three. The second heat starts more or less on the opposite corner of the track (varying a little with the radius of the turns on the track) and runs the entire race in lanes four through eight.
There were a few logistical matters to iron out. The sound of the starting gun had to be miked over to the second heat. Otherwise, there would be both a small delay and a possibility of the runners on the far side not being able to clearly identify the report of the starting pistol. On the first effort, the report of the starting pistol was not loud enough through the sound system and there was a brief moment or two of hesitation for the competitors. A larger, louder starting pistol was used for the boys' 3200 and the problem resolved itself nicely.
A second logistical matter involved reporting splits to the runners of the second heat in lanes four through eight. Mark Roberts addressed this problem by marking off and coning the seven intermediate 400 meter points and reporting splits to runners at each of those points. While this wouldn't have to be done, it was clearly an effort to do things right for the runners in the second heat.
The stagger for the second heat of the 3200 was determined by wheeling the distance from the start line to the 4x200 meter relay stagger in lane four, thus finding identifying the proper distance for a four-turn stagger in that lane. Since this model for the 3200 requires a 16-turn stagger, the measured distance was multiplied by four and wheeled out to the eventual starting line for the second heat.
Obviously, this tedious bit of wheeling and measurement is not an ordeal you'd want to repeat very often, but these points (and the intermediate 400 meter marks) could be measured and marked on the track easily enough--thus eliminating the need to repeat the process for each meet.
The result was a success on a number of fronts. Only one runner was lapped in the top heat of the 3200. The leaders had essentially clear sailing en route to their finish times--something that the leaders of every other track event always enjoy (The 3200 is the only race where, by the very nature of the event, the winner is typically compelled to run more than the actual race distance even when all passes go without incident.).
An equally desirable, but less immediately visible, result was accomplished at the scoring computer. The task of identifying and sorting runners who had finished the race and those who had been lapped and still had one or more laps to go in the finish camera images was greatly simplified. Any coach who has ever had the misfortune of having a 3200 runner's time lost or incorrectly recorded on account of this problem should immediately appreciate this benefit. Not to mention that it takes a lot of pressure off the person reading the images from the finish camera.
Finally, by running two heats of 3200s concurrently, at least a half-hour of meet time was saved. All in all, not a bad return on the time invested to create a solution to the problem.
Roberts indicates that the idea was successful enough that we will see it again at more meets at Everly-Montgomery Field. And you may think of this article as a shout out to the beauty of creative problem solving.