Trackflation: Why There's Never Been a Better Time to Train

Last month we waded into controversial waters by attempting to provide a clear-eyed explanation for the driving force behind "trackflation." During that exercise, we settled on a - what we thought was - reasonable, if unsatisfying answer: people are running faster than ever because a bunch of things have gotten better - shoes, training, competition, expectations, etc.

It's rare that a wide-reaching phenomenon is caused by a single factor, and we still maintain that trackflation is no exception to that rule. But when we polled the MileSplit community what you believe is the reason everyone is so fast now, you said it was access to better training. So let's go with that for a bit!

To better accentuate what "better training" looks like, let's roll back the clock 20 years. At the conclusion of the 2006 outdoor track season, these were the national leading marks:

Compare these marks to what the quickest boys and girls posted this year, and yeah... we'd agree that there's a whole lot more going on than just the shoes!

Now we can't know for certain exactly what sort of training philosophy each nationally-leading athlete from 2006 was utilizing, so it's tough to do a direct one-to-one comparison about how much better today's approaches tend to be, but in a way... that's incredibly telling.

Short of calling up or emailing one of these athletes to ask if they kept their old high school training logs and would be willing to share them, in 2006 you were limited to speculation or rumor. 

"He's fast, so he must do insane training like 30 x 400m at mile pace with 30 seconds rest."

"I hear she did 3 x 200m in 25 the week before she won Nike Outdoor Nationals."

Unless an athlete or coach went out of their way to outline their training approach in an interview given to one of the few outlets covering high school track at the time, chances are, the rest of the country couldn't definitively say what they were doing, which means they couldn't learn from it.

In 2006, there was no Strava, no Instagram, no TikTok, no YouTube, no podcasts, no portable device that made a forever-flowing group chat possible, certainly no user-friendly AI interfaces. Yeah, there were rudimentary online training logs and there were online message boards, but the world was a much more fragmented place, information-wise. 

For most athletes in 2006, success hinged on whether or not you had a coach that cared enough to study the sport, from some combination of first-hand competitive experience, trial and error, and reading extremely dry tomes on training written by exercise scientists, who, remember, were operating with a 2006 understanding of physiology.

Lord help you if your training was overseen by an uncaring football coach who drew the short straw and got stuck coaching track! And you'd be astonished at how many ambitious high school distance runners begged their coaches to try the workouts fictional miler Quenton Cassidy subjected himself to in the 1978 novel Once a Runner. 

Compare that with today.

You can message just about any athlete on the planet with a training question. (Whether they'll reply is another story.)

You can check out your local state champ's entire cross country build on their Strava profile, or even unpack what their year-over-year training progression has looked like.

Just about any pro or collegiate athlete worth listening to has made at least one podcast appearance in their lives, during which they explain in often excruciating detail what their training looks like and how they approach racing mentally.

An increasing number of high-achieving athletes have even written entire books about the lead-up to the most significant moments in their competitive careers.

Just a click away from you at any moment are thousands message board threads - exercise caution when trusting these! - in which runners of all levels swap hard-earned training wisdom and ask and answer questions about how to go about executing essentially every type of training plan.

You know exactly where you stack up against the competition, both hyper-locally, at the area level, within your state, and even nationally, thanks to - not to toot our own horn too much - MileSplit's comprehensive results database and rankings.

And if you feel so inclined, you can ask whichever AI agent you have do your mental grunt work to parse through your own training data and point out potential weaknesses or areas of opportunity.

That's just the sheer amount of stuff on the internet that makes taking ownership over your training more feasible than ever. (As a quick aside, if you're a high schooler who's a total geek for this stuff and are unsure how to bring training suggestions up to your coach... make it a conversation! Share some of the information you've found particularly interesting and see what they think about it. At the end of the day the best training is 1.) the training you'll actually do, 2.) the training that will keep you healthy and able to stack efforts, and 3.) the training you and your team believe in.)

Once you start to put your newfound understanding of training theory to practice, you also have more data from each individual workout than a 2006 athlete probably got during their entire high school career. Accurate heart rate information to keep efforts in check or tell you where to push! GPS watches that make measuring workouts a breeze! Devices that measure cadence or even alert you to imbalances in your stride! If you're an absolute sicko, gadgets that display your blood lactate levels after completing a rep!

Sure, if you lean too much into these gizmos and fail to develop the ability to listen to your body, they can be technological handcuffs. But as part of a holistic approach to training, they take the guesswork out of workout paces and recovery, helping reduce injury and prevent overtraining. And they make it possible to truly personalize your training to your exact ability level and goals, if properly guided.

Which brings us to our conclusion, now that we've convinced ourself that maybe it is the training... the shoes aren't going to run the workouts for you, or do the plyos, or lift the weights, or prioritize sleep. And they certainly won't run the race for you! You've still gotta do the actual work and train. And by just about any indication, there's never been a better time to train.