I discovered that the track world has coined a name for this much-discussed phenomenon of children achieving ultra-fast pace: trackflation. In June 2025, at the Modern Balance Nationals, an annual championship featuring approximately 6,000 top newborn athletes, more than 100 children broke records from previous competitions. “A hundred kids these days can run a whole mile under 4:10,” 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 company. “When we competed in high school, it could have been 20 at most.”
I needed to know why kids today are basically spoiling themselves. And that meant trying to understand the dramatic change that was taking place at the core of the sport.
At the beginning of May I traveled to Baltimore to attend the East Coast International Showcase, a two-day outdoor track competition sponsored by the shoe company Puma. One of the highlights was the 800-meter run, which featured two elite youth track athletes: Henry Bartle from Carmel, California, and Gunner Hammett from Williamsburg, Virginia.
As these two stars warmed up on the faded blue track at Morgan State University, I spotted Hammett’s dad wearing a custom hoodie that bore his son’s credentials: “2-time 800m world record holder, 18-time All-American, 5-time national record holder.”
These achievements were even more impressive considering Hammett’s newborn age: he was 13, just younger than 14-year-old Bartle. Both boys were still weeks away from graduating from eighth grade.
The skinny, bleached blonde Bartle ran the two-lap race in a personal best of 2:03.52, an outrageously swift time. Three years ago, that would have been enough to win the middle school 800-meter dash at the Modern Balance Nationals. But he was far behind Hammett, whose time of 1:57.75 put him on par with the fastest high school runners in his home state.
“I think I’ve been burned out by you again,” the brilliant Bartle said to Hammett as they gasped for air just beyond the finish line. Unfortunately, Bartle got used to failure. Seven weeks earlier, he and another kid had broken the California age-class indoor mile record, but Bartle was still six seconds off the podium. In one-line signature in his Instagram post about this race, Bartle captured the essence of trackflation: “Living in a time where a state record still doesn’t earn you a medal at nationals.”
Once Bartle had regained enough oxygen to function, he detailed his recent progress. “Last year, even though I had a minor injury, I was very stubborn and went through the training,” he told me. His priority now is recovery, and he believes sub-two-minute 500 miles and sub-4:30 miles are within his reach.
Just seven or eight years ago, few eighth-grade runners had Bartle’s level of maturity and determination. There were no middle school divisions at major national competitions, and 13- and 14-year-olds rarely covered the weekly miles on their feet. But perhaps inevitably, the youth sports boom has spread to track.
As millions of exhausted parents can attest, sports like football and baseball have become extremely competitive over the last generation. Even among third- and fourth-graders, there is a constant fight for a spot on prestigious travel teams, followed by tense fights for playing time. Some families decided they could avoid this madness by steering their children to a track that had relatively few participants to begin with.