Days before the Races & Places in August, meet director Dave Milner received texts of encouragement and good luck from fellow race organizers around the country. After months of navigating safety regulations, travel restrictions, and facility shutdowns amid the COVID-19 pandemic, A U.S. Track Circuit for Pro Runners Is Launching in 2021. Will You Follow Along.
Now, that same group of meet directors are working together to launch a new professional circuit called the adidas Adizero Adios 6.
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Milner, along with Jesse Williams and Abby Stanley of Sound Running, Craig Rice of Portland Track, Blake Bolden of Drake Relays, and Nick Dwyer and Max Paquette of the Ed Murphey Classic plan to host a formal track season, running from May to August 2021. Athletes will compete against each other for prize money through a point system at six established meets and one new event—the Iowa High Performance.
As the schedule stands now, the series will kick off with the Track Meet in Los Angeles on May 14, 2021. The next event will be the Portland Track Festival on May 29, followed two days later by the inaugural Iowa High Performance meet in Des Moines on May 31. The next event will be the Music City Carnival on June 5 in Nashville.
The series will take a brief pause for the U.S. Olympic Team Trials scheduled for June 18 to 27, 2021 in Eugene, Oregon, and return with the Under Armour Sunset Tour on July 10 in Los Angeles. The second Sunset Tour competition will take place on July 17, also in Los Angeles. The season will conclude with the Ed Murphey Classic in Memphis on August 14.
“We need an actual formal season, and we need it to be convenient for athletes, something to build a fan base,” Williams told Runner’s World.
U.S. Olympic Team Trials postponed or canceled last spring, CA Notice at Collection, the meet directors started communicating about the challenges facing event organization, and how they could safely host races that summer.
Over Zoom calls, the group discussed plans for organizing COVID-adjusted competitions, including how to secure venues, coordinate with USA Track & Field, and implement safety measures. Together, they created a list of COVID event safety guidelines, which include premeet testing, event size regulations, face mask The 2021 Runners World Calendar.
Their work paid off, and a few competitions prevailed with new formats. In July, Portland Track kicked off in-person domestic competition with the Big Friendly, a series of five micro track meets for local professional runners in the Portland, Oregon area. In August, the Races & Places hosted a smaller field of elites and high school athletes for an afternoon of distance races in Nashville, and Sound Running organized the Sunset Tour in Los Angeles, California, where 31 runners achieved personal bests. In December, Sound Running returned to host the Track Meet, a two-day event with paced 5,000 and 10,000-meter performances where 14 runners hit the Olympic standard.
“I think [COVID adjustments] made everybody just game up to a level of like, okay, we’re going through all this, we got to get creative,” Williams said. “And maybe from that creativity came, we have to do more than this. Next year when we come back, we can’t just have these meets and do what we’ve always done. How can we make it better?”
In a September Zoom call, the race directors brought up the idea for a professional series. By connecting the competitions in Los Angeles, Memphis, Nashville, Des Moines, and Portland for a formal season, the meet directors aim to generate a bigger following for the sport and provide more racing opportunities for athletes.
“It’s pathetic that all the best athletes in America go to a different continent for most of their racing,” Milner told Runner’s World, in reference to the Diamond League circuit and second-tier professional track meets, many of which are hosted during the summer in Europe.
“That’s the position we’re in with track because for as long as I can remember, there’s just been a dearth of competitive opportunities for professional track athletes here,” Milner explained. “So they have to go to Europe and live out of a suitcase for four or five weeks at a time, and that’s just so hard for people to do, especially those that have families or have jobs. I feel like it’s been slowly killing the interest in the sport for the public for decades. …We need to bring the sport back to the U.S. to keep it relevant.”
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This isn’t the first time a pro track season has been created in the U.S. The How to Watch the NCAA XC Championships brought American athletes from different training groups and sponsors together in three major cities, but the competitions only lasted two years (from 2016 to 2017). While applauding the efforts of the TrackTown Series, Williams hopes this new series can build on preexisting rivalries between training groups around the country.
“You already have these professional groups in these cities, so we’re not creating any of that. We’re just trying to say, here are six to eight dates every single year you can count on,” Williams said. “And if we make those dates compelling enough, then we’re going to see the stars of our sport matching up for six to eight weeks in a row. That's momentum you can build from.”
In the past, most of these meets have featured star-studded middle and long distance races, but the goal with this new series is to create equal opportunities across event groups. By providing the same amount of competition offerings for distance runners, sprinters, jumpers, and throwers to earn points and prize money at each event, the meet directors hope to generate more excitement, not only within individual event groups but also with a unique competition in overall series standings (which will include an additional prize money structure).
[The 2021 Runner's World Calendar features gorgeous photos, monthly motivation, and tips to inspire your running all year long.]
And with the Olympics returning to Los Angeles in 2028, Williams would like to see more Americans get excited about track and field by following a stateside professional season featuring a consistent set of events and match-ups fans can tune in every year instead of every four years.
“We should be able to have something people can know,” Williams said. “When you look at the NBA season, you know every single year it goes from this date to this date, the playoffs are in June, and this is going to happen. In track and field, I would say most people don’t know how to follow it. And so the more consistent we can be in the packaging of these things together as a season, to be able to talk about them that way, I think helps our cause. It doesn’t fix track and field, but it’s a step in the right direction.”
Taylor Dutch is a writer and editor living in Austin, Texas, and a former NCAA track athlete who specializes in fitness, wellness, and endurance sports coverage. Her work has appeared in Runner’s World, SELF, Bicycling, Outside, and Podium Runner.
