You’ve probably read all you ordinarily would about Josh Kerr setting a new world record in the mile. I won’t go into an analysis of the race. But I think you should watch it. Because his ability to break the record while running without the benefit of pacers or anyone pushing him for the last 600 meters is one of the most incredible athletic feats in any sport I’ve ever seen.
That said, I don’t think we should be at all surprised that the record was broken. I said the same thing about the marathon world record, although the Internet seemed to have a lot of really strong-yet-uninformed opinions about that one. Things are more tame for this record, if for no other reason than a lot of sports-focused people were paying attention to the World Cup and not the Diamond League. But, like the marathon, we’ve actually had several runners sort of hanging around that world record for several years now. I think it took someone with the bravery of Josh Kerr to call his shot and dare rivals to meet him to do it. Yes, shoes and special uniforms help, but Kerr’s race proves that those things didn’t give him much of an edge, he obliterated the field in a way that is awfully difficult to do whether on record pace or not.
Relatedly, a WIRED magazine piece this week introduced me to a word I can’t believe I didn’t invent: “trackflation.” In the story, writer explores his discovery that youth track times are collapsing at a pace that’s making longtime coaches do a double take. Middle schoolers running sub-4:20 miles. A 13-year-old boy has more All-American honors than most Division I seniors. A state record that doesn’t crack the top ten at a national meet. One coach described watching video of a girl’s world-record mile like this: “Nobody else was even in the frame with her.”
None of this should surprise anyone who’s paid attention to what’s happened to youth sports generally. Better equipment, private coaches poached straight from college programs, training templates that used to take years to discover now a chatbot away. Of course the times are dropping. That part’s just math.
And while the tone of the piece was partly marveling and partly cautionary, I want to call more attention to the part that concerns me. There was a quote buried two-thirds of the way down, from a college 800m runner talking about her own career: she said she’d spent her whole life running a race fueled by fear, expectation, and the need for other people’s approval.
That’s really bothers me.
Because I’ve spent the last few months chasing my own mile time, and I’m 58. I have no state record to lose, no scholarship on the line, no dad in the stands wearing a hoodie printed with my accomplishments. What I have is a stopwatch, a training log, and a stubborn hope that I can run something respectable before my Achilles has the final word. As hard as I’m working, the whole thing feels a lot lighter than it apparently feels for a lot of these kids. I want to run fast. I do not need to run fast. That distinction is important.
Watching a 13-year-old’s dad wear that hoodie touting the litany of records and honors on his chest for anyone standing trackside to read… That changes something from a point of pride to a public ledger. If you read that and thought, “Ew, gross,” I think that’s because what’s gross about it is that’s exactly why the 800m runner above is afraid. And that’s a terrible motivator.
This is the same road that club soccer and travel baseball have already gone down. The one where a sport built for children quietly becomes more about the adults. Track has (mostly) avoided it in part because it never had travel teams to make, or even cuts as I have written before. That was part of the appeal. The irony, if trackflation keeps accelerating, is that track absorbs all the pressure it was supposed to be an escape from.
I wrote a while back about how much of athletic success comes down to luck rather than merit. And not just the genetic kind, but circumstantial luck: which family you’re born into, whether that family can afford a private coach or a $2,000 flight to a fast meet in North Carolina. The WIRED piece is full of such examples. Kids with hired coaches who used to run Division I. Families who can afford a $200 pair of super shoes for a middle schooler. Parents who can take a week off work to chase records at meets three time zones away. That’s not talent, it’s access.
It adds inequity to a sport that is at its most pure because egalitarianism is what it’s all about: The clock doesn’t care who you are.
A kid training with a borrowed pair of shoes and a public school coach isn’t just competing against faster kids anymore. He’s competing against other families’ bank accounts. And when the sport itself can’t tell the difference between “worked harder” and “had more help,” the fear that runner described earlier, the sense that you have to keep up or you’ve failed, is an accurate read of the incentives everyone around her built.
I don’t think the fast times are the problem. I think it’s genuinely good that a sport this unglamorous is pulling in more kids, training smarter, going faster. But it worries me is the fear underneath some of it. The sense, in that one runner’s words, speed had become the price of being loved or noticed rather than something chased for its own sake. And I worry that the “growth” is going to have the effect of shutting out too many great kids.
At 58, chasing a mile time nobody’s tracking but me, I’ve got the privilege of finding out what it feels like to want something badly without needing it to mean anything about my self-worth. I’d like every kid on a track to get to feel that too.