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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
