Cinder tracks

[BillVol]

I come with a new topic for the board.

Has anybody here ever run on a real cinder track? Is there any event that a cinder track is better suited for than a rubberized track?

We had a five-laps-to-a-mile cinder track at Hixson Junior High in Chattanooga. We never had meets on it. We always ran away meets. I thought it was cool though when they'd pull the weeds out and line it off. Some good memories on that track. I wonder how many cinder tracks are still out there. My junior high's track was taken up just a couple of years ago.

[dukehjsteve]

There's plenty of us, over age 60 or so, that ran all our meets on cinders in high school and in college too. A good hard cinder track felt great, and sounded even greater.

" chaff chaff chaff chaff ...."

[kuha]

Heck yeah. In HS in the 1960s, I ran on cinder tracks, grass tracks, dirt tracks, and (literally) one track composed of crushed rock (traprock). One HS in our conference had a track that I'd swear was sand--it felt like running on the beach (the dry part). Indoors, the old University of Connecticut fieldhouse had a 200y dirt track that was smooth as silk.

Its wrong for young folks to presume that all pre-tartan (type) tracks were "dirt" or lousy. That's just not true. A well built and manicured cinder track was quite nice, indeed.

[utopian]

Cinder tracks could be harder than the present ones. I also ran on them with adidas shoes that had a metal plate to hold the spikes.

Either my shoes were too small or the tops, made of kangaroo hide, were too tight, but at the end of my workouts my feet were close to blistering. They also forced the flesh together to form a sort of trough in the bottom. Eventually calluses were formed that had to be shaved away.

And I ran like this in the snow in minus 20° weather in southern California. No wonder I moved to New England.

I did like the sexy smooth kangaroo hide, though. I think that I was the first in my block to have them. And I am still loyal to the original brand.

[SQUACKEE]

i will always remember they way our dirt,clay,cinder, im not sure what it was. it was reddish. anyway before each meet it would be chalked in the mornin. i would walk to school that day already nervous and then see the track all dressed up with those bright white lines and almost pee my pants. there is something about dirt that is cool im just not sure what it is.

[dukehjsteve]

squackee, you are sure right about the sight of that freshly-limed/laned track on Meet Day. It made my skin tingle just to see it. Couldn't wait for the school day to FINALLY end so I could get OUT there !!!

[SQUACKEE]

> Couldn't wait for the school day to FINALLY end so I could get OUT there !!!

im i correct in assuming you were not a distance runner?

[dukehjsteve]

>> Couldn't wait for the school day to FINALLY end so I could get OUT there
>!!!

im i correct in assuming you were not a distance runner?

HS: HJ/440
Coll. HJ/LJ

[SQUACKEE]

didnt you find the 400 really painfull?

[dukehjsteve]

>didnt you find the 400 really painfull?

That sand gets awfully deep and soft coming off that last turn.

[SQUACKEE]

i hear ya brother. as a 2 miler i was surprised when my coach in an early season meet ask me to run the 880- mile relay double. in the 880 i was just locked with a runner from the other team the last 110 and stumbled across in front by inches. then in the mile relay, me, the slow skinny distance runner was gonna anchor. of course i was gonna anchor since i could pull a 54 out of my ass at command.

i got the baton ten yards in front of the SAME dude i barley held off in the 880 ( pitefully completed in 2:03).

again its me and this fast muscular type guy locked together the last 110. again i stumble in inches in front ( he actually hit my foot sending me forward thru the quick sand) to win with the cheers of the entire team. my split 54, wow look at me the mile relay guy.

anyway it was one of the most painfull meets i every ran in high school. to be locked in a sprint twice with dat beat on my back made me embrace the mile or 2 mile for the reat of the season.

[marknhj]

I used to train on cinders - remember sliding around when it rained and them closing it when it froze solid in the winter!

[James Fields]

"I wonder how many cinder tracks are still out there"
---------
They still exist in Seattle at varied sites such as Seattle Pacific University, the older high schools, and some of the Seattle Park Department ovals. But over time the cinder layer has become very thin at some sites, notably Ballard High School in northwest Seattle where the lower (dirt) layer dominates.

Rain could pass through an upper layer of cinders and leave a good running surface. But when dirt dominates, there will be puddles; action photos of runners there will show mud-splattered legs.

Spikes, longer than those now used on artificial surfaces, were required for traction. But a sprinter needed to "come up" quickly from the start or risk the front spikes catching which would pitch the runner downward for a painful landing on knees, elbows and some times upper body. I still remember personal experience with such a fall. Ouch!

Other posters on this thread mention the pleasure of seeing a freshly-striped track. I also recall such pleasure as well as its counterpart -- the labor of marking the track when, later, I was a coach and meet manager. After hours of work, one could scan the finished product with pleasure in having created a visual treat. The labor and the pleasure are gone with modern tracks on which lanes, starts, and staggers do not need replenishing for each meet.

Footnote: References to marking tracks, and the playing surface for football and other sports, may refer to the marking substance as "lime." Maybe that was correct before World War II but my (later) experience was always with "agricultural gypsum" which was available for purchase in large bags to refill the marking carts.

[utopian]

One of the problems with cinder tracks was that originally they were cinder, but as the years passed, no one knew what they were. The original builder was gone, coaches changed, the ground-keeper merely dragged some sort of heavy plane around and then sprinkled it.

Mostly they were dirt, particularly if the drainage system was suspect, and weren't they all. Sliding around was typical, because what was described as cinder eventually just became fine grained dirt.

Yet they were still better than what some schools claim to be modern tracks, often just a layer of asphalt with lines painted on them. Hard as a rock in the winter and spongy in the spring and summer.

[marknhj]

I actually learned to flop on cinder tracks. One track that was pure cinders (I shudder at the thought now, but I was jumping around 1.90m at the time) and one with a small "tartan" take-off rectangle. One advantage was you could see every step in the run-up as your feet left an impression in the track. My coach and I developed my run-up pattern using that and talcum powder; 4 years later I had basically the same approach at the Moscow Olympics.

[slowcoach]

Herb Elliott ran his WR at Santry on a cinder track. It was reckoned to be the best cinder track in the world at that time ('58). I ran on it in the 70's, and it was still super: hard, flat, well drained and maintained.

I don't think there's as much difference between these and the modern tracks as some people think. Hayes was proof of that.

But there is much wider variation between individual cinder tracks. The modern ones are very consistent.

Edited to add:

There is a track across the road (I mean 200m away) and it is shale or something. Not nearly as nice, and not as well maintained. My son ran .2 from his 100m PB on it, so it's decent enough, though you have to have spikes, I reckon.

[SQUACKEE]

tommie smith's 440 world record and jim ryans 3:51.3 are very memorable dirt track run's from my youth.

after my highschool dirt track i went to a junior college which had that typical cheap, rock hard "all weather track" not tartan.

[kuha]

Actually, all three of Ryun's mile/1500 WRs were set on cinder tracks. I'd venture that 3:33.1 may well be the fastest cinder track time ever... I also agree with slowcoach above. Fine cinder tracks were really superb--but they required careful construction and meticulous maintenance. With cinder tracks there very definitely WAS a huge range from "superb" to "awful." Remember Landy's comments about his 1954 season? He couldn't wait to get out of Australia to go to Scandanavia, where (by general agreement) the best tracks were absolute dreams to run on...

[Bruce Kritzler]

Crushed brick "Red Dog" tracks are plentiful in the Southeast.

[dukehjsteve]

Moving to the first generation "all weather" surfaces, in the early 60's, while most tracks remained cinders, many of the LJ, PV, and HJ runways were converted to surfaces as hard as US 1 or I 70. Without a plastic heel cup in the HJ your plant foot's heel would be fried in no time.. particularly with the hard heel plant of the straddle. Fortunately most of these early ill-considered super hard surfaces were short-lived.

[Halfmiler3]

We were still running the NJ State Championships on cinders in 1970 at Highland Park. With a straight 220, no less.

[BillVol]

>A good hard cinder track felt great, and
>sounded even greater.

>" chaff chaff chaff chaff ...."

Good observation, Steve. I remember hearing the footsteps very clearly during practices. It was quite intimidating for someone with little talent like me. It was loud! I would think that competition on cinder tracks was different since you could hear your competitors. They couldn't sneak up on you, so you could pick it up when you "heard footsteps."

I enjoyed the comments about seeing the freshly-striped dirt tracks. How exciting it was to see our little track all gussied up with the stripes! I never knew why our track was ever lined off, since we never ran meets on it.

[mojo]

Cool story Mark!

I ran ALL my PBs on cinder tracks! Brockton Oval in Stanley Park Vancouver is still there I beieve. It was cinder.

Cinder is much easier on the legs and so I wish we had one around where I live for kids to train on.
Remember how dirty you would get at the start? We all developed the habit of cleaning off our hands as we got in the blocks- still did it when running on a rubberized track!!

Anyone else remember pounding the nails in your starting blocks into the hard track?? There was usually only one hammer around so we would find a big rock and use that too.

[Kevin]

I was still training and racing on a cinder track at my college in the late 70's. It was a very forgiving surface to run on. Much less forgiving when you lost your footing. After a particularly close finish in the mile relay, I stumbled and took quite of few of the cinders home with me. Was still picking them out two days later.

We also had the 220 yd straight. I think that must have been a difficult race to run. Looking all the way to the end a furlong away.

[lonewolf49]

Gather round younguns. Lemme tell you how it was in the olden days in depression era, rural Indian Territory.

Competing from elementary through college (1953), I never ran on, or even saw, anything except a dirt or cinder track until I started competing Masters at age 40 (1971). I ran on some good cinder tracks in college but in HS they were unversally bad.
Most HS tracks, in my neck of the woods, were not lined. Those that were, were lined, not with chalk or gypsum, but by dragging a 2X12 with appropriately spaced spikes around the track. The lines were a little wavy in places but, in the last throes of a race, we were generally a little wavy anyway.
My rural HS dirt track was scraped out each spring by the county road grader. Having no curbs, it got smaller each year, at least until it reached the baseball backstop which limited incursion on that side of the track. It was disheartening, after running 47s to not break 50 the first time running on a regulation 440 track.
In retrospect, since our "coach" was the math teacher, it seems he would have figured out that our average 110 yard times were danged near as fast as our 100 yard times on our measured course. He was really the basketball coach, fresh out of college, and his method of picking a team was line everybody up, run a 100, fastest three ran 100 and 220, next three ran 440 and 880, next three ran the mile, leftovers threw shot and discus. The jumpers kinda self-selected on merit. Hmm, maybe that was not a bad system of natural selection.
Most tracks were around the football field, or at my school, the baseball field. Rural schools did not play football.They started classes the first week of August and went on hiatus for two months in the fall for cotton harvest, resuming in time for basketball. In the small schools (there were 21 in my senior class) nearly every able bodied boy played basketball, baseball and ran track. And, played in the band at half-time of basketball games. I am not kidding.
Most tracks, including college tracks, had 220 straight-aways, frequently on both sides of the track. 220s were run on the straight-away and 440s out of the chute with a staggered start. Thank goodness for that if you drew lane 8.
If you have never run a straight-away 220,just envision that the finish line is much like an ever receding desert mirage.
The guys that I pitied, running on cinders, were the hurdlers. HS hurdles were usually crude, unforgiving, homemade obstacles, more suitable for the Maginot line. They were more sophisticated in college but, 50 years later, I have hurdler team mates who claim they are still picking cinders out of their knees and shanks.
Even in college, there were few runways for LJ and PV or hardstands for HJ. We just ran on a beaten path in the grass along the football sideline or jumped off the grass in the HJ. I don't think anyone thought about having steps in the HJ, you just made it come out right. We did have raggedy boards for LJ and TJ,(nee Hop-Step-Jump}, which we only competed in Olympic years, in my case 1952.
I even competed LJ in pits of spaded dirt, no sand, and had officials who measured the fartherest mark made in the pit instead of the closest, others who measure, if beind the board, from (approximately) where you took off instead of at the foul line, which probably explains why the LJ was the only HS PR that I never exceed in college. I remember one official who insisted it was a foul if you stepped on the board. I don't think he was USATF certified and I guess they didn't cover that at the John Deere managers school.
In fact, what with all the fancy equipment, nit-picking rules and honest measurements, it took me four years in college to match most of my HS PRs.

Our crossbars were spindly bamboo poles with jumper friendly sags, conducive to fabulous PRs, thanks to unenlightened "officials" who recorded measurements off the premarked standards, which were upright 2x4s with holes for a nail drilled at 1" intervals. No sissy fractions for us.
Vaulting poles were friction tape wrapped bamboo. The box was a hole in the dirt. We even had an antique ash pole about 10-12 feet long, tipped with a metal spike. That thing must have weighed twenty pounds. Only the shot-putters could lift it. Maybe it was left over from jousting days although we never found the armor. You just rammed it in the ground, hopefully, and held on. We actually had a vaulter who cleared about 9' with it. Of course, that was in practice over a bamboo crossbar. I don't recall that it was ever used in competition, although it would probably have been allowed.
HS officials kinda went by hand-me-down rules in those days. We still had a rule that if you got out of the pit before the crossbar came off it was a fair jump. Not so far fetched. Every year, I come across HS coaches who think that rule is still in effect.
And, if a team was shorthanded for a relay, there was no reason a stud couldn't run two legs. A little tricky in the 440 relay but our best all-around athlete routinely did it, fairly successfully, in the 880 relay or ran consecutive legs in the 440 relay. Heck, we could have won a lot of 440 relays with him running three legs, maybe all four. He even tried it in the mile relay. Once. Bad idea.
In those pre-Fosbury days there were, of course, no jump-pit pads. In the HJ jump, after finessing your way over the crossbar in the straddle or roll, you had to manuever your body to land on one foot and hand into a (partially ) sand filled pit. Landing on your back of neck from a height of 6+ feet is not conducive to longevity. The scissors was much safer, you just dropped both feet after you cleared the bar.
Shotput and discus rings were carefully inscribed circles of, presumably, the correct diameter, scratched in the ground or outlined with chalk. Toeboards and metal rings did not come into play unless you made it to the regional meet to qualify for state.
We had no semblance of team uniforms and did not need them until the rare instance when we made state. Then we wore our basketball vests with assorted shorts. We competed in workshoes, basketball shoes, dress shoes and cowboy boots. The latter suspected to be an economic necessity, rather than any rational conviction that the pointed heels improved traction in the soft dirt tracks.
God, is it any wonder I love track and field?

[dukehjsteve]

Great Stuff Lone Wolf !

[kuha]

Yes, this IS great stuff, thanks! Even though I went thru HS about 15 years later, much of this rings true to my own (very small school) experience.

[BillVol]

Thanks, LW!!! One of the best posts I've seen here!

[Conor Dary]

Our high school (ca. 1972) in Hinsdale, Illinois had a cinder track. They really kept it in great shape. It was really special on the days of a meet as the maintinance staff would roll it and chalk the lane lines. It was quite an inspiration to run on it then!

In fact, the track had such a reputation for speed that Dave Merrick from nearby Lincoln Way was going, according to his coach, to try for a 4 minute mile in the Hinsdale Relays in 1970. However, the day of the meet was too windy and he just ran to win.

[lonewolf49]

I was living in Wichita, Ks when Jim Ryun was in HS at Wichita East. I saw him run 3:58 (pretty much solo the last 1320) on the Wichita State cinder track. Head bobbing all the way.

[kuha]

WOW! That was really a race to see: 3:58.3 in a genuine HS competition. It's no surprise that we haven't seen a sub-4 run in similar conditions since...

[lonewolf49]

A succession of good milers came out of Kansas.
Cunningham in the 30s, Santee in the 50s, Ryun in the 60s, Charley??? from Salina, right after Ryun, was running 4:10 in HS. I moved away, never knew what became of him.

[lonewolf49]

A succession of good milers came out of Kansas.
Cunningham in the 30s, Santee in the 50s, Ryun in the 60s, Charley??? from Salina, right after Ryun, was running 4:10 in HS. I moved away, never knew what became of him.

[Conor Dary]

In Illinois the sixities and early seventies had some superb HS runners, starting with Tom Sullivan's 4:02 in 1962 and other sub 4:10's such as Andy Rupert, Ken Popejoy, Dave Merrick, Craig Virgin ... And most of those on cinder tracks.

[SQUACKEE]

WOW! That was really a race to see: 3:58.3 in a genuine HS competition. It's no surprise that we haven't seen a sub-4 run in similar conditions since...

imagine today in a highschool mile. 3:48. thats 5 secounds slower than the world record

[kuha]

Exactly. I don't want to start another We'll-never-again-see-the-likes-of-Ryun thread, but it's pretty much true. By the standards of the day (that is, comparison to existing AR, WR, etc.), Ryun's HS performances will NEVER be remotely approached, ever.

[Kevin]

I agree with you kuha. Mainly because professionalism has gone a long way toward making the careers longer and the records better. Do you think, though, that his rapid ascent and high level of performance at such a young age played a part in his shorter career? Or is that pretty much another remnant of the lack of professionalism? I am discounting the ITA here, as it was composed of a small talent pool.

[No Name]

My high school had a cinder track, which is unusual because I graduated from high school in 1997. Lots of fond memories of running on it. One thing that amused me was that when I got to college (which had a modern track), I would run 200s and the splits were suddenly 3 seconds faster.

[lonewolf49]

>>>>>One thing that amused me was that when I got to college (which had a modern track), I would run 200s and the splits were suddenly 3 seconds faster. <<<<<

It do make a difference don't it?

I was more amazed than amused to discover that after PR 9.8 (100 yds) on cinders in college, I could still run 10.2 on synthetic track when I started running Masters at age 40.