Elite Young Runners Are Becoming Freakishly Fast. Welcome to ‘Trackflation’

A couple of years ago, my teenage son decided to spend the long New York winter running indoor track. An accomplished soccer player, he joined the team with the modest goal of staying fit during his main sport’s offseason, but before long his competitive streak kicked in. He trained like a demon for two months straight, brutalizing his legs and lungs with high-intensity workouts . The suffering paid off: His time in the 1,600-meter run (just shy of a mile) dropped so much that he earned a spot in our sectional championship, competing against runners from three nearby counties.

My son had the race of his life at sectionals, shaving several seconds off his personal best. He also got absolutely smoked. The top three boys all finished in well under 4 minutes and 30 seconds. The next six broke 4:38. By the time my son collapsed across the finish line in second-to-last place, the winner was deep into his post-race stretching routine.

Had teenage runners at mid-tier meets always been that absurdly fast? Based on my limited knowledge of track, I suspected not, so I looked up the 1,600-meter results from the 2015 sectionals. Back then, only three boys broke 4:40, and my son would have finished in the middle of the pack. I was now curious whether kids beyond my provincial corner of New York were getting a lot faster too.

I followed a few track social media accounts, and soon the algorithms deluged me with highlights of young runners obliterating records on what seemed like a daily basis. A 12th-grade girl from Ohio ran an indoor 2-miler in an otherworldly 9:37.15 , breaking a national high school record that had stood since 2013. A 10th-grade boy from Texas ran an outdoor 100-meter dash in 9.92 seconds, just a tenth of a second off the collegiate record. Crunch the data on any race in virtually any school-age meet and you’ll find that the top and median times have plunged since the late 2010s, often by several seconds.

My favorite videos were made by a former University of Pittsburgh hurdler named Shyheim Wright, a master at channeling the bewilderment of track fans. “Pack it up, pack it up right now!” he marveled over footage of a ninth-grade girl from Georgia running 100 meters in 11.01 seconds, a time that made her faster than all but the very best college sprinters. “I’m so glad I don’t run no more, I’m so glad. The times now is getting ridiculous.”