BOULDER — Balch Fieldhouse at the University of Colorado is old, dark, gloomy and occasionally smelly, as thousands of Bolder Boulder runners can attest. They shuffle through it every Memorial Day, exhausted and drenched in sweat, to pick up lunch bags and refreshments after the race.
In a sense, Balch launched the American running boom of the 1970s. It was the reason a young Yale graduate named Frank Shorter moved to Boulder to train in 1970. Balch had the only indoor track above 5,000 feet in the U.S., and Shorter understood the benefits of altitude training. Two years later, he was Olympic marathon champion, and soon distance runners from around the world were moving here to train.
Balch has been outmoded for a long time — it was built in 1937 — and CU will have an new indoor track when its new fieldhouse opens next year. The new fieldhouse has gotten attention for what it might do for the football program, but it could give CU track a huge boost.
The three-lane track in Balch is 200 meters long with tight corners. The six-lane track in the new fieldhouse will be 300 meters with curves similar to a typical 400-meter track outdoors.
CU has been a power in distance running for a long time, having won seven NCAA cross country team titles, but the program hasn’t been attractive to the nation’s best sprinters and hurdlers because it didn’t have a high-quality indoor facility where they could train in the winter. Now it will.
“We will now have a place where the best sprinters and hurdlers and jumpers in the country can effectively train from November to April,” said head track coach Mark Wetmore. “They can come indoors. It’s 70 degrees; it’s a clean, well-lighted place (with) big, broad, safe turns — a great place to prepare. And, therefore, an attractive place to that kind of talent. Venerable Balch Gymnasium, frankly, hasn’t been attractive to that talent since about 1945.”
Wetmore said athletic director Rich George was keen to make sure the new fieldhouse had a track after he succeeded Mike Bohn in 2013.
“He basically said, ‘We’re not building a new facility that doesn’t have a track in it,’ ” Wetmore said. “It’s going to be really good.”
The turns in Balch are 48 meters long, versus 93 meters in the new facility. That means the new track will be faster, and it will have a lot less potential for causing injuries because there will be less torsion on the legs of those who run there. The surface (Mondo) will be the fastest in the world.
“Minus the elevation, it would be the best indoor facility in the country,” Wetmore said. “We can’t do anything about the fact that it’s at a mile high of elevation, but it’ll be very fast for the 200, the 400, the 4×4, the 800.”
CU track coaches are scheduled to move their offices from Balch into the new facility in August, and it’s likely the track will be finished in time for CU’s annual indoor meet (the Potts Indoor Invitational) in January.
Shorter, who also won a silver medal at the 1976 Olympics, still holds a Balch Fieldhouse record, having run the 3,000 meters in 8 minutes, 4.2 seconds in the 1977 Potts Invitational.
John Meyer: jmeyer@denverpost.com or
