So like...every Air Force Base track ever?

The Air Force is obsessed with very squarish tracks, miserable to run on.

Here's a picture of a track at Lackland AFB. The AF is stupid as shit.

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The Chinese version looks like much more of a knee buster.

I would much rather have that than the indoor track at the college I swim at.. It is basically a tri oval and you are constantly turning, you are only allowed to go in the direction of travel for that day and it totally screws up your legs since one is always going less distance.

That's just military efficiency. Why make a 400M oval track when you can have a 500M square one.

Reminds me of running on the deck of cruise ship. It was a tough debate with just using a treadmill...with no fan, in a 75F fitness room as my other alternative. I tried both, the sweatfest on the treadmill still won out. But it was ugly. Took about 5 towels to clean up that disaster after a 1 hour run.

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Plus the actual track is right, they just painted it square because they were too lazy/incompetent to paint it the correct way.

Care to revisit that quote?




John

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Isn't that curved bit at the end where the lines should have went through?

Our local private school is home to this masterpiece. The worst part is it's about 550 meters long, not ever standard.

https://goo.gl/maps/0ZRDl

Ack a city near here built themselves a beautiful astroturf soccer field. Before the project started their stated goals included "build a running track if budget allows it". Well we got the red rubber around the field, but guess no money to finish it, because the rubber is almost square (rounded corners like that USAF track) and there are no lanes painted on it. Too bad.

That looks like banking of some kind, so possibly. Although I've never seen a square corner on a track, except for the 100m start area. And that was only on one end of a track.

John

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Oh no! How would someone ever run on this? Its not like most sidewalks use 90 degree turns :P

2nd paragraph of the article.

Kinda like Beach Middle School in Va Beach, which is a rounded corner square, so each side is 100m, at least I always thought. There weren't really any marks, so if you did anything other than 4/8/12/16, it was an estimate and you'd try to line your water bottle up with that one fence post, etc.
It never bothered me that much, but I always did recovery intervals the wrong way, and my warmup/cool down was running to the track. I moved away, and now the track nearest me is a real oval, so that's nice.
Indoor tracks blow though, my college had a 180m track last resurfaced in the late 80s. We did all out workouts in the outer lanes because outside about halfway in lane 4 was a dotted line where it was actually 200m around, but people still got weird lateral injuries you'd never expect from 400/800/1500 runners.

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"...every Air Force Base track ever?" Moody AFB - standard 400m oval in blue synthetic material...excellent. RAFL - standard 400m oval in red synthetic material...excellent. Tyndall AFB - standard 400m oval in red synthetic material (I ran on it when it was dirt). Just depends on which base, whether they had the funding ... and the space ..., and whether whomever developed the requirement in CE had a clue. The Air Force has some stupid people like any organization, but the Air Force is not stupid.

You know what I meant, http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hyperbole

AETC bases have these a ton.

But yes, the AF has tons of good tracks too!

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