The New Balance Indoor Grand Prix comes to Boston's latest supertrack today

They should just start shooting runners out of cannons from the top of Bunker Hill

The New Balance Indoor Grand Prix, still colloquially known as the Boston Indoor Games, was held at the Reggie Lewis Track Athletic Center in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood every year from 1996 to 2019. I went in 2001, when the meet was sponsored by adidas, about six weeks before my one and only race at “The Reggie.”

Covid completely prevented the appearance and transmission of the 2020 version; one year later, in a perfect encapsulation of society’s macabre new priorities, the RLTAC was being used as a C-19 testing site. This forced the 2021 NBIGP a short plane-hop southwest to the Ocean Breeze Athletics Complex on Staten Island (results). The meet remained in New York City for one more year (results) before returning to Boston today.

The Boston Indoor Games are no longer at the RLTAC, but instead in a facility in the city’s Brighton section, close to New Balance’s world headquarters. The much-anticipated factor today is the oval inside the facility that opened in April and is simply called “The TRACK.” It may be the fastest indoor track in the world; if not, it’s probably still the second-fastest in all of Boston.

Citius Mag uploaded a video on Wednesday featuring members of the New Balance Boston team who will be competing today. The video follows the squad during its recent high-altitude stint in Flagstaff, Arizona, an interesting selection given that NBB head coach Mark Coogan lived in Boulder for years and trained here during his build-up for the 1996 Olympic Marathon (a choice he describes in this rapidly disappearing book).

Citius Mag does journalism the same way Rebel News or Project Veritas does, just with advance warning and no rude questions. That is, they basically film short, polite reality shows. But provided its representatives refrain from all attempts at editorializing about anything whatsoever, and just wander around quietly with cameras doing free advertising for different shoe companies, they are at worst boring.

The redhead you see in the stands at the beginning of the video is Kristie Schoffield, who won the 2022 NCAA outdoor D-1 800-meter title. I had already forgotten that a fellow Concord, N.H. native became an NCAA distance champion last year, surely the first as well as last person to ever accomplish this. Actually, she's from a village within the city called Penacook, which is treated as a real part of Concord by the rest of the city’s residents only when it produces unusually pleasing news.

Schoffield went to Merrimack Valley High School, whereas I went to Concord High with the rest of the inked-up hoods, motorheads, and ne’er-do-wells. I lived only three miles from MVHS and seven from CHS, farther than literally every other Concord High student, but the vagaries of districting forced me into the inner city for my education. I’m grateful for this experience in hindsight.

In my adult years living in Concord, I did almost all of my track workouts at Merrimack Valley, because I lived, or at least usually slept, about two miles away, just up the road from the New Hampshire State Prison. For a while, I had some “PRs” on that track “set” in long, solo workouts, including a 48:28 15K. One time—I forget when, but it had to be in the Clinton years—a sinkhole opened up on the first turn, in the outer lanes. Not during a meet (imagine that), but still, one morning there was a—

Anyway, in 2017, Schoffield was one of three athletes who turned the Meet of Champions girls’ 800 meters into one of the most exciting races in New Hampshire history.

Since I have already mentioned Citius Mag, it’s proper to acknowledge that another producer of social-media-driven chattergab, Ali Feller of Ali on the Run, is from tiny Hopkinton, one town over. Actually, she’s from Contoocook, a minuscule village within tiny Hopkinton. And Pat Piper, another Hopkintonian, was an All-American at N.C. State, placed 12th in the junior race at the 1984 World Cross-Country Championships in New Jersey, and was 18th in the senior race at the 1987 USA Cross-Country Championships in the Bronx. (New England wasn’t always like this; In my day, I had to make my own damn village, and I was its only and smartest idiot.)

Others in the “It's Not That Deep” video have past scholastic connections to New Hampshire, though none are natives. Katrina Coogan (Mark’s daughter) went to Phillips Exeter, and Drew Piazza spent most of his collegiate career at the University of New Hampshire. American indoor mile record-holder Elinor Purrier, expecting a baby next month and not in the video, also went to UNH. 

World Athletics has an exhaustive preview of the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix events here, and Letsrun’s is here. Start lists are here; among the athletes in the men’s 3,000 meters is Woody Kincaid, who just set an American indoor record the 5,000 meters at the Terrier Classic across town. I didn’t realize until yesterday that Kincaid had left the Bowerman Track Club and that the race at B.U. was his first race on his own, so I corrected this post. If I’m to continue disliking the BTC, and I intend to, then I should probably keep tabs on the roster from time to time.

Live results of the meet, which gets underway at 10 a.m. EST, are here. NBC will broadcast coverage between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., and Peacock will stream the action for paying subscribers in the same time window.