Young Runners Are Getting Faster: 'Trackflation' Reshapes Youth Track Records

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.

The Explosion of Middle School Records

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.”

Coining 'Trackflation'

The track world has coined a name for this much-discussed phenomenon: trackflation. In June 2025 at the New Balance Nationals, an annual championship that draws around 6,000 top youth athletes, more than 100 kids beat previous meet records. “There might now be a hundred kids that run under 4:10 in the full mile,” says Will Rodgers, who ran track at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in the early 2010s and now co-owns RunningLane, a coaching and events business. “Back when we were competing in high school, it might’ve been like 20 at max.”

Club System and Super Shoes

Until seven or eight years ago, few eighth-grade runners operated with the degree of maturity and determination seen today. There were no middle-school divisions at the big national meets, and 13- and 14-year-olds rarely put serious weekly mileage on their legs. But the youth sports boom inevitably expanded to include track. As millions of exhausted parents can attest, sports such as soccer and baseball have become dauntingly competitive over the past generation. Some families decided they could avoid that madness by steering their kids toward track, which had relatively few participants at its entry-level ranks. Grade schoolers began flocking to local track clubs. Dennis Robinson, head coach of the Zephyrs Track Club in Chicago, told me that for most of the 2010s he only managed to sign up high schoolers. “We were concerned about the future of our club,” he said. “Now we’re starting to see more and more younger athletes. And when I say young, I mean we’ve had to turn away athletes who are 4 years old.” Another club, the Youth Track Foundation in Portland, Oregon, signed up 60 kids in its first two years and has a lengthy waiting list. These clubs have also benefited from track’s growing reputation as an antidote to the politics and favoritism that plague less objective sports. “I have so many parents that join our club, and they’re just like, ‘This is so great, because we had this terrible experience with the baseball team because this parent was coaching and he never let my kid pitch,’” says Brad Peterson, a cofounder of HP Distance, a track club in Indiana. “But in track there’s no argument.” The stopwatch determines everything.

Technological Footwear

Kids are increasingly doing that training in so-called “super shoes” such as the Nike Vaporfly 4 or New Balance FuelCell SuperComp Elite v5, both of which now often sell for well under $200. These shoes’ carbon plates and ultralight foams help return kinetic energy to the wearer’s body with every step. In races, super shoes have been proven to boost performance by 2 to 3 percent, which translates to roughly a second per 400-meter lap. Geoff Burns, a sports physiologist with the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee, believes the shoes’ energy-return component decreases the traumatic stress endured by young bones and muscles. “If you’re able to do that same work but not have that mechanical collateral damage or nearly as much of it, then you’re just not building up as much scar tissue that could potentially inhibit performance,” he says. Instead of diverting lots of cellular energy to the healing process after every workout, the body can dedicate more resources to building strength.

As middle schoolers have gotten faster, big-name meets have made room for them. New Balance Nationals now includes middle-school divisions. The impact is clear: a 13-year-old like Jaiden Hammett ran 800 meters in 1:57.75, on par with his home state’s fastest high school runners. Trackflation is redefining what's possible in youth athletics. For more background, see the Wikipedia page on track and field.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/teenagers-running-trackflation