The 'Trackflation' Phenomenon: Why Youth Runners Are Breaking Records

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.”

The track world, I discovered, has coined a name for this much-discussed phenomenon of kids getting ultra-fast: 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.”

I had to know why kids today are essentially breaking track. And that meant trying to understand the dramatic shift happening at the sport’s roots.

In early May, I drove down to Baltimore to attend the East Coast International Showcase, a two-day outdoor track meet sponsored by the shoe company Puma. One of its main draws was an 800-meter race featuring two fixtures of the elite youth circuit: Henry Bartle of Carmel, California, and Gunner Hammett of Williamsburg, Virginia.

As these two stars warmed up alongside Morgan State University’s faded blue track, I spotted Hammett’s dad wearing a custom hoodie that listed his son’s credentials: “2 Time World Record Holder 800m, 18 Time All-American, 5-Time National Record Holder.”

Those achievements were all the more impressive given Hammett’s tender age: He was 13, just a bit younger than the 14-year-old Bartle. Both boys were still weeks away from their eighth-grade graduations.

The thin-limbed, bleached-blond Bartle ran the two-lap race in a personal best of 2:03.52, an outrageously good time. Three years ago that would have been enough to win the middle-school 800 meters at the New Balance Nationals. But he was nowhere close to Hammett, who coasted to a 1:57.75—a performance that put him on par with his home state’s fastest high school runners.

“Guess I got smoked by you again,” a genial Bartle told Hammett as they gasped for air past the finish line. Bartle has, unfortunately, grown accustomed to falling short. Seven weeks earlier, he and another kid both shattered California’s age-group record for the indoor mile, but Bartle still finished six seconds off the podium. In the one-line caption for his Instagram post about that race, Bartle captured the essence of trackflation: “Living in a time where a state record still doesn’t medal at Nationals.”

Once Bartle had recouped enough oxygen to function, he gave me a thoughtful breakdown of his recent progress. “Last year, even if I had somewhat of an injury, I was very stubborn and I trained through it,” he told me. Now he’s prioritizing recovery as part of his regimen, and he believes a sub-two-minute 800 and a sub-4:30 mile are well within his grasp.

Until seven or eight years ago, few eighth-grade runners operated with Bartle’s degree of maturity and determination. 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 perhaps inevitably, the youth sports boom 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. Even for third and fourth graders, there’s a constant scramble for spots on prestigious travel teams, followed by nerve-racking fights for playing time. 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 I spoke with, the Youth Track Foundation in Portland, Oregon, signed up 60 kids in its first two years of existence 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.

The rise of track clubs was apparent on the second day of the East Coast International Showcase, when I watched wave after wave of kids aged 5 to 9 compete in the 100 meters. The many standouts ran times that would be dazzling for boys or girls several years older, and I took note of their efficient mechanics—evidence, it seemed to me, that they’re already being coached to develop good habits.

When talented elementary-age kids from the club system move into their tweens and early teens, they’re primed to start the grueling training that used to be reserved for high schoolers. “I’m asking middle-school girls to do eight 400s in 75 seconds, so at a 5-minute-mile pace,” says Peterson. “Whereas it used to be the middle-school program was, ‘Hey, let’s jog 20 minutes and let’s go play Capture the Flag,’ right?”

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 added its middle-school division in 2023, and other prominent track events followed suit. Athletes like Bartle now spend a significant chunk of every winter and spring traveling across the country.

The results make track old-timers shake their heads with wonder. In April, for example, an eighth-grade boy shattered the national middle-school record for the mile (he ran it sub-4:18). Just two weeks later, an eighth-grade girl ran the 400 meters faster than any US high schooler had at that point in the year (she clocked 51.58).

It’s not just the superstars who are getting faster. The runners in the pack behind them are picking up the pace, too, and they’re transforming what’s considered a decent time. “I think I have 10 middle-school girls who run between a 4:56 and a 5:16 mile,” says Peterson. “Ten years ago, you’d be like, ‘That’s insane.’ Now it’s nothing.” When these kids head to high school, they have the strength and experience to flourish right away. But given the sky-high expectations they face, the intensity can come at a cost.

There has long been a vast discrepancy between the number of high schoolers who run track and the money their programs receive. Outdoor track and field boasts more high school athletes than any other sport, with over 1.1 million participants—a figure likely inflated by the fact that teams tend to make few if any cuts. (The second-most populous co-ed sport, basketball, has fewer than 900,000 players.) Many athletic departments treat track like an afterthought, undeserving of the resources needed to hire coaches with real expertise.

“When I was coming through, my coach was a retired Marine who had never run a step in his life,” says Caryn Gehrke, an all–Ivy League runner at Columbia University in the early 2000s who now coaches in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “His entire philosophy was the more you hurt in practice, the more you can hurt in a race,” which is possibly the most counterproductive advice a runner can hear.

Today, a high school runner can scrutinize workout videos posted by pros or simply ask ChatGPT “How do I run a sub-2:00 800?” and develop a more effective training plan than anything their forebears were using in 2016. But for runners with any financial means, hiring a private coach for one-on-one guidance has become commonplace. It’s easy to find former collegiate runners on Instagram who are eager to capitalize on their years of geeking out on training methods. These coaches have popularized techniques such as heat acclimatization, in which athletes overexert themselves in sweltering conditions—say, by running on a treadmill next to a space heater—so that their bodies will produce extra plasma. (This is sometimes referred to as “legal blood doping.”)

They’re also a big reason why high school kids are dabbling in double-threshold training, which was pioneered by Norwegian pros. This approach involves doing a hard morning workout, then analyzing a drop of the athlete’s blood to see how much lactic acid their muscles produced. The runner then adjusts their pace up or down during a killer second workout of the day.

Private coaches also preach about proper nutrition and supplements. Survey the trash cans at any meet and you’ll see empty tubs of Maurten Bicarb System, a sodium bicarbonate powder that runners consume en masse before races. The substance suppresses the development of lactic acid in muscles, allowing runners to stave off fatigue for a tad longer than normal. According to a 2021 meta survey, bicarb may boost performance by 1.5 percent, or around three seconds per mile.

There’s plenty of chatter that some teen athletes are emulating the pros by ingesting banned substances—a cheat that’s almost impossible to detect, since there’s virtually no drug testing at the high school level. “I’m not saying I’m 100 percent on this, but I can pick out the athletes who are on it,” says Timothy Goldsack, a cofounder of the coaching service RunCCG, who cites human growth hormone and testosterone-replacement therapy as two popular performance enhancers. He blames familial pressure on kids to use track as a ticket to college: “Parents are crazy, you know that.”

To impress college scouts, high schoolers must travel to the national meets that are known for producing the most trackflationary times. These meets tend to have bouncy polyurethane tracks, favorable weather, or pace lights that keep runners apprised of the tempos needed to break records. A few well-known teen runners receive airfare and hotel rooms for gracing these meets with their presence, but most competitors spend small fortunes to attend. “If a family has the money to invest in that and it costs them $2,000 to fly a kid across the country to take 15 seconds off their time, and that all of a sudden opens the door to another tier of scholarship or whatever, that’s a pretty good investment,” says Geoff Burns of the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee.

In mid-April, I spoke to Chris Catton, the other cofounder of RunCCG, as he prepared to coach several of his clients through a notoriously fast meet, the Asics Carolina Distance Carnival in North Carolina. “I have people who have flown here from Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, New Jersey,” he told me by phone from his Airbnb in Charlotte. He was excited because the racing would take place at night, when times are fastest, and runners would be grouped together in heats according to their personal bests—a reliable way to get kids to push each other in a tight pack.

Two days later, Catton texted me a heads-up to check out the Carnival’s results. They were staggering: In the high school boys’ mile, the top 14 finishers all went sub-4:10. Five middle-school girls had broken the 5-minute barrier. Catton said that one of his clients, a ninth-grade girl who ran the 3,200 meters, had set an Oklahoma state record at the Carnival, yet only managed to come in 14th—half a minute behind the winner.

The social media content generated by these meets has turned a number of high schoolers into influencers. Some o