What is your favorite sport? We bet you said football, basketball, baseball, or soccer. When asked this question, hardly anyone even thinks of track. There aren’t that many track “fans” and it’s hard to appreciate, or sometimes even notice, track athletes.  While athletes in other sports reap the benefits of extensive exposure and raving fans, track athletes rarely get the praise they deserve for their successes.

“Since it’s more of an obscure sport people don’t really give it the time of day, and it can also be a tough spectator sport since the meets are so long,” says Nick Lukas, a talented veteran track runner who once competed for VHS.

Additionally, the amount of publicity the track teams get is minimal.  When the track team wins a sectional championship, there is about a three inch write-up in the paper. If the football team has a good game, they get the whole front page of the sports section.

It’s true that people generally just don’t have six hours of their day to kill at a high school track meet, as opposed to a high school basketball game which takes no more than two hours. Even at the biggest meets of the track season, in which some of the best athletes in the state compete, you will still find only a smattering of fans. Another factor is location: who wants to drive an hour away to watch their school compete?  This is often required with group meets.  Many sports have the luxury of competing at home or within a twenty minute drive.

Another factor hurting track as a spectator sport is how disjointed meets are. Some spectators cannot appreciate the sport as a whole because they only come to watch one specific event. Many events go unseen while spectators have their attention diverted elsewhere. Great talent and months of training can often go unnoticed by the spectators and even an athlete’s own teammates.

Many athletes who compete in other sports view track as a “fall-back” sport or merely a means of staying in shape for one’s “real” sport.  In many schools, everyone who shows up to practice makes the team, so a large percentage of those students are just looking for a sport to put on their college application. Other sports are taken much more seriously, or followed with much greater fervor. Here in Verona, most sports dinners take place in lavish catering halls, requiring the athletes to formally dress up. Meanwhile, track dinners are held in the high school cafeteria and the town community center. There is no formal standard of dress for track dinners–in fact, most of the athletes wear jeans and t-shirts.

The lack of respect “trackletes” get ignores the fact that unlike in team sports where blame for a loss can be placed on everyone, a tracklete recognizes that his or her success relies solely on himself or herself.  In meets each top time or top performance earns the team points. If you can’t perform, you don’t earn the points—a contributing factor in the stress a tracklete must endure.

A common slogan among many trackletes is “My sport is your sport’s punishment.” In football, if you make a mistake or fail to follow a coach’s instruction, what does your coach make you do? Run. Whether it is suicides, quick sprints, or speed endurance, running is known universally among athletes as grueling.  In all sports it is used as a means of getting in shape and improving your game. But in track, all you do is run. The training is extremely strenuous because there is so much to work on to get faster. On a given day, your long distance run will be anywhere from 6-8 miles. On other days you’ll go to the track and do an exhausting speed endurance workout combined with quick speed training. And on top of all of that cardio, you need to make sure that you maintain your strength by lifting weights and doing exercises to gain core strength. Your body is constantly at work, often yielding intense soreness, fatigue, and potentially even injuries.

“Missing days of running is really detrimental so in order to have success you need to be out there every day putting in the miles… It’s all about consistency which takes a ton of hard work because it’s so easy to lose fitness,” Nick commented.

Track athletes are some of the strongest in their ability to push through the pain and leave their complaints at the door on a daily basis, through any conditions. You have to give it everything you have, until you have no energy left in you.  So maybe one of the least respected sports should be one of the most respected.  To win, you have to work.