When Indoor Track Was Organic • Bungalow 204

On Racing People, Not Standards

The Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden, New York City, New York was an event—an extravaganza.
Madison Square Garden is glamorous. It has star power. For decades, Millrose was the premier indoor track and field meet of the season.

An eleven-laps-to-the-mile wooden track snapped into place, bolted together, pressed down onto the basketball floor. The crowd sat right on top of the athletes. Only four lanes wide, with tight turns, passing was nearly impossible.

Contained Chaos

As runners came by, you could hear—and feel—bodies pounding the boards. Elbows out. Fighting for position.

The infield held everything: pole vault, long jump, high jump, shot put, sprint lanes—all packed tightly together. Indoor track was once called “sport’s answer to the three-ring circus.”
And it was.

Now the meet has moved to The Armory. Still New York City—but not the same.

The track is blue Mondo. Two hundred meters long, with banked turns engineered for maximum efficiency. The surface is fine-tuned for speed.

Athletes run fast.
Very fast.

But something is missing.

Sharpen Your Elbows

Racing on the boards had an edge to it. To win, you had to be tough—and aggressive. Tactics mattered. So did courage.

Splits were called at strange places, catching you off guard. Your sense of pacing disappeared, so you simply raced. You didn’t chase pacer lights or qualifying standards. You worked to catch the person in front of you—or to hold off the one behind you.

You raced a somebody.
Not a light.
Not a standard.
A person.

Have Fun, Run Silly Races

Indoor track was never meant to be serious. It was a novelty—something to race off energy during months of rain, cold, and snow. It invited experimentation. Strange distances. Small fields. Events you didn’t see outdoors.

The 60-yard dash.
The 60-yard high hurdles.
The 600-yard run.
The 1,000-yard run.
Oversized plastic shot puts.
Even the 640-yard relay and a
Sprint Medley Relay with legs of
440yd-160yd-160yd-1,000yd.

The tracks themselves differed. Some were faster. Some were springier. Some had steep banking; others were flat. There was no real standard, which made comparing times almost meaningless—and that was the point.

You raced those people on that track, that day.
You competed.

I ran an indoor meet at the D.C. Armory in December 1973 on a flat wooden track with athletic tape marking the lanes. A month later, I raced at the Naval Academy on a flat 200-yard synthetic surface.

I was in heaven. Running indoor track was being able to “run in the house” without being punished.

There was no way to compare performances. No universal conversion. No optimization. You raced who showed up.

Innocence Lost

I feel like in this metric-centric era of running, we’ve lost some of the sport’s innocence.

We all came to running for different reasons. Mine was simple. Shoes, shorts, and wide open spaces was enough for me.

My first running shoes were white Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars. I didn’t know any better. I was a freshman, running through the woods in what I had. My next pair of “running shoes” were adidas Gazelles—basketball shoes. Royal blue.
And they looked so cool.

Innocence.

Maybe that’s what’s changed—not just indoor track, but our comfort with letting things be organic rather than engineered.