A Sensible Explanation for Trackflation

Earlier this week on X, MileSplit posted the below graphic, which describes just how much more 1600m depth there is today than in 2019. Posted along with this fairly innocuous statement of statistical improvement was a seemingly innocuous question for the track and field community: what's driving it?

Like Oliver Twist demanding more gruel, the good people of the internet asked for more. MORE STATS. Was the trend highlighted in the 1600m detected across other events, too? Here's what we dug up, data-wise, for the 800m

In fact, high school athletes seem to have improved the most over 800m out of any event in track and field.

But that doesn't mean the bolstering of depth at the high end of results is limited to middle distance events. The sprints have also seen "trackflation."

And these findings hold up when applied to the collegiate ranks, too. 

Where major improvements haven't been seen, however, is in the field events. We asked the MileSplit community for its thoughts on what might be going on. Based on responses to that post's poll, of the four options presented - access to better training, super shoes, better track meets, and running becoming mainstream - the MileSplit faithful believe improved training is the primary contributor.

Recognizing this verdict's potential to stir the pot, our intrepid social media man decided to whip the community into an even deeper frenzy, asking if people agreed with the "better training" stance held by a slim majority. Of course, many people disagreed. Is it possible to tap into X discourse and bottle up something resembling true wisdom? Sounds unlikely! But we are going to try anyway. 

The knee-jerk response by many is to simply attribute trackflation to the shoes, and the shoes alone. 

This explanation makes a lot of sense. The field events aren't experiencing a universal explosion in higher-end results, and they're also the events where improvements to footwear haven't been as significant. The proliferation of super shoes tracks chronologically with the swell in faster times, more or less. And we've seen times get faster at every level of the sport, not just among high schoolers - the shoes are a factor in college and the pro ranks, as well.

Plenty has been written about super shoes already - much of it by lab-dwelling, beaker-clutching poindexter-types who have conducted the research and crunched the numbers. The benefits of what we broadly describe as "super shoes" apply to the big foamy road racers you're likely envisioning, but also to the new gen sprint and distance spikes that employ a lot of the same high-performing materials. We won't belabor the scientists' points, aside from reiterating that modern footwear does demonstrably improve performance. Any discussion of trackflation that doesn't mention super shoes is at least a little bit deluded.

This is where things start to feel personal... which makes sense. No athlete wants to have their successes diminished by somebody saying "you only ran that time because of your shoes." Similarly, no coach wants to be told that they didn't develop their athletes, and that it was the kids' shoes that did the job. It stings to hear your accomplishments aren't solely your own! 

And saying "it's the shoes and the shoes alone, dummy," is almost assuredly not accurate. 

Shoes certainly play a part in trackflation, in that they certainly do give athletes an in-competition advantage. But there's more to the story. The armchair philosophers on X also point out - rightfully - that training today is a whole lot better than it was even a decade ago. 

This is a gross oversimplification of a popular contemporary approach to distance training, but here goes: by focusing more workouts around threshold pace, rather than the old school approach (either not targeting any specific pace zone or defaulting to more VO2 max-ish efforts), athletes can perform harder efforts more often, with a lower injury risk and easier path to recovery between sessions. This vaguely Norwegian-inspired training philosophy means overall volume can be higher, and more work can be stacked, without the body breaking down.

The shoes assist here, too. Go ahead and pull up a chair, because it's time for a quick old man yelling at clouds sidebar. You youngsters probably don't remember this, but it used to be that the day or two after a race in spikes or a huge track session in trainers, your calves would be knotted up balls of agony. The rest of your legs would be sore six ways from Sunday. And you'd be stuck doing recovery jogs until things improved.

With modern racing footwear, yeah, you might feel a little beat up the morning after running a big mile PB, but delayed onset muscle soreness isn't as likely to force you to skip a workout or long run. Of course it's not just the shoes or the training systems that are enabling the current wave of athletes to absorb their training loads more effectively.

Recovery culture has improved, too! It seems like the further removed we are from the release of both Steve Prefontaine biopics (1997's Prefontaine and 1998's Without Limits), the more American distance runners have recognized that Pre-style running (glorifying beating the crap out of yourself in training and racing, not caring about what you eat, not prioritizing rest and quality sleep) doesn't necessarily lead to Pre-like results.

As we continue along this explanatory path, by now we are reaching a sort of critical mass of compounding factors. Shoes, training, nutrition, rest, bicarb (which is a boring explanation that, while likely contributing to trackflation, isn't worth expounding on beyond saying it's effective gross goo). You bottle all of these things up and divvy them up to the tens of thousands of high school kids who care about their performance on the track, you're bound to run into the sort of in-race matchups that'll push you to your potential more frequently. Couple this virtuous cycle with the rise of NIL/social media stardom for top high school athletes, and the goal-setting bar has been raised for an entire generation of prep runners.

No matter the reason you favor for explaining trackflation, super shoes are a throughline. But they're hardly the only reason. And so, to conclude in a way that hopefully makes everyone happy - even those who are perpetually mad on X - let us say this: trackflation is hardly a mystery, it's hardly unique to track, and it's not a real problem. 

Along with the steady march of time, athletically speaking there's a steady march of progress. In just about any sport, the top athletes today are better than they used to be, for many of the same reasons we outlined above in the context of track. With the exception of the crankiest of cranks, this is widely accepted. It's also widely understood that even though the best modern athletes would generally run roughshod over the competition if teleported back in time to a game/race/match from 50 years ago, if a throwback star were deposited in modernity and given a year to partake in all our contemporary training advantages, they'd probably still wind up a star by our new standards.

It's every contemporary youngster's right to clown on their forebears in sport. Just like it's every past-their prime ex-athlete's prerogative to boldly exaggerate what their PRs would have been had they had a pair of carbon-plated shoes in their primes. And that's the beautiful thing about sports when appreciated properly. It can simultaneously be exciting that kids today are faster than they used to be, on the whole, while also being true that runners who were good in their own time were genuinely good, even if their times aren't as quick by today's standards.