Elite Young Runners Are Becoming Freakishly Fast. Welcome to ‘Trackflation’
Elite Young Runners Are Becoming Freakishly Fast. Welcome to ‘Trackflation’
精英少年跑者速度快得惊人，欢迎来到“田径通胀”时代
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.
几年前，我那十几岁的儿子决定在纽约漫长的冬季参加室内田径训练。作为一名出色的足球运动员，他加入田径队的初衷只是为了在足球休赛期保持体能，但没过多久，他的好胜心就被激发了出来。他像疯了一样连续训练了两个月，通过高强度锻炼不断磨练自己的双腿和心肺。这份苦头没有白吃：他在1600米跑（略短于一英里）中的成绩大幅提升，以至于赢得了参加地区锦标赛的资格，与来自附近三个县的选手同场竞技。
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.
在地区锦标赛上，我儿子跑出了他人生中的最佳水平，将个人最好成绩缩短了几秒。然而，他还是被彻底“秒杀”了。前三名男选手的成绩都远低于4分30秒。接下来的六名选手也都跑进了4分38秒。当我儿子倒在终点线、以倒数第二名的成绩完赛时，冠军选手早已在进行赛后的拉伸放松了。
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.
中等水平赛事中的青少年跑者一直都这么快吗？基于我对田径运动有限的了解，我对此表示怀疑，于是我查阅了2015年地区锦标赛的1600米比赛结果。那时，只有三名男生跑进了4分40秒，而我儿子当年的成绩本可以排在中间位置。我开始好奇，纽约我这个偏远角落之外的孩子们是否也变得快得多了。
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.
我关注了一些田径社交媒体账号，很快，算法就向我推送了大量年轻跑者几乎每天都在打破纪录的精彩片段。俄亥俄州一名12年级的女生以9分37秒15的惊人成绩完成了室内两英里跑，打破了自2013年以来一直保持的全国高中纪录。德克萨斯州一名10年级的男生在室外100米短跑中跑出了9秒92的成绩，仅比大学纪录慢了0.1秒。分析几乎任何学校级别赛事的比赛数据，你会发现，自2010年代末以来，顶尖成绩和平均成绩都出现了大幅下滑，通常缩短了数秒之多。
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.”
我发现，田径界为这种备受讨论的“孩子们变得极快”的现象创造了一个词：田径通胀（trackflation）。在2025年6月的New Balance全国锦标赛上——这是一项吸引约6000名顶尖青少年运动员参加的年度赛事——有超过100名孩子打破了此前的赛会纪录。“现在可能有一百个孩子能在一英里跑中跑进4分10秒，”威尔·罗杰斯（Will Rodgers）说，他在2010年代初曾是阿拉巴马大学亨茨维尔分校的田径运动员，现在是教练和赛事公司RunningLane的共同所有者，“在我们读高中参加比赛时，这个数字最多也就20个左右。”
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.
我必须弄清楚为什么今天的孩子们几乎是在“摧毁”田径纪录。这意味着我需要去理解这项运动根基处正在发生的剧烈转变。
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.
5月初，我开车前往巴尔的摩，参加了由彪马（Puma）公司赞助的为期两天的东海岸国际展示赛（East Coast International Showcase）。该赛事的一大看点是800米比赛，参赛者包括精英青少年赛场的两位常客：来自加利福尼亚州卡梅尔的亨利·巴特尔（Henry Bartle）和来自弗吉尼亚州威廉斯堡的冈纳·哈梅特（Gunner Hammett）。
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.”
当这两位明星在摩根州立大学褪色的蓝色跑道旁热身时，我注意到哈梅特的父亲穿着一件定制连帽衫，上面列出了他儿子的资历：“两届800米世界纪录保持者，18次全美最佳阵容，5次全国纪录保持者。”
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.
考虑到哈梅特尚且年幼，这些成就显得尤为令人印象深刻：他才13岁，比14岁的巴特尔还要小一点。两个男孩距离八年级毕业还有几周时间。
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.
四肢修长、染着金发的巴特尔以2分03秒52的个人最好成绩完成了两圈比赛，这是一个极其出色的成绩。三年前，这足以赢得New Balance全国锦标赛初中组800米比赛的冠军。但他与哈梅特相去甚远，后者轻松跑出了1分57秒75的成绩——这一表现让他足以与他所在州最快的高中跑者相媲美。
“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.”
“看来我又被你秒杀了，”巴特尔在冲过终点线喘着粗气时，和蔼地对哈梅特说。不幸的是，巴特尔已经习惯了这种失利。七周前，他和另一个孩子都打破了加州室内一英里跑的年龄组纪录，但巴特尔最终还是没能站上领奖台，与奖牌失之交臂。在关于那场比赛的Instagram帖子中，巴特尔用一行文字抓住了“田径通胀”的精髓：“生活在一个连州纪录都无法在全国赛中获得奖牌的时代。”
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.
当巴特尔恢复了体力后，他向我详细分析了他近期的进步。“去年，即使受了点伤，我也很固执，坚持带伤训练，”他告诉我。现在，他将恢复作为训练计划的一部分，并相信跑进2分钟的800米和跑进4分30秒的一英里对他来说已是指日可待。
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.
直到七八年前，很少有八年级的跑者能像巴特尔那样成熟和坚定。大型全国赛事中没有初中组，13岁和14岁的孩子也很少进行高强度的周跑量训练。但也许不可避免的是，青少年体育热潮已经扩展到了田径领域。
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.
正如数百万精疲力竭的家长所能证明的那样，过去一代人中，足球和棒球等运动的竞争已经变得令人望而生畏。即使是三四年级的孩子，也要不断争夺知名旅行球队的名额，随后还要为上场时间进行令人神经紧绷的斗争。一些家庭决定通过引导孩子转向田径来避开这种疯狂，因为田径在入门阶段的参与者相对较少。