Track workouts – Runners World

While I don’t do track workouts all that often, I do enjoy them.  My ‘home’ track is at East River Park. It is about 1.1 miles from my front door to the track, which is a perfect warm up / cool down distance. In the last year, my typical track workout is 2 x 1 mile and then 2 x .5 miles.  The last time I did this workout, in late November, I clocked an unbelievable 7:21 in my first mile.

While working through this month’s issue of Runners World, I came across their 4 page spread on track workouts.  I’m glad they covered the topic, as they provide great tips and information, and also, remind us of the fact that the track is there, and is a great way to do speed workouts.  As I mentioned, my last track workout was back in November, and I think I’ve been inspired.  I WILL do a track workout this week!

As informative as the article was, it did not answer a question I’ve had for a long time.  Exactly how do you run 1 mile on a track?  I know that a mile is 4 times around the track, but, is that measurement from the inside lane, or the center lane, or some other way?  The article points out that the outside lane can be 40-50 meters longer than the inside lane, and over 4 loops, that can be a significant difference.  At this point, I assume that the measurement is taken from the inside lane, but it would be nice if the article spelled out exactly how that works. I know the difference is negligible, but, 4 loops around a track is 1600 meters, and 1 mile is actually 1609.344 meters.  So, 4 loops would leave you 9.344 meters short!

I typically run in lane 2, giving me lanes 1 and 3 for passing,. Maybe this is just right, if you consider the 9+ meters you’d be short with 4 loops!  Inquiring minds want to know…

EDIT – I reposed this question to my DailyMile feed, and big thanks to Stephen W (http://whereswaldon.com/running/) for coming through!  He pointed me to this site, that allows you to do all kinds of calculations on all kinds of tracks! http://www.eracewalk.com/CalcTrac.htm

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