Half way through my training for the Hampton Court Half Marathon. Seeking inspiration, I sought Mo Farah on YouTube. And there he was, gliding around the track, effortlessly.
And the it struck me. Why do they always run round the track in an anti-clockwise direction? Here's why...
According to a certain Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge, at Olympia and elsewhere in Greece both the running track and the hippodrome were straight, using up-and-back "laps" and even in the early modern Olympics - Athens (1896 and 1906), Paris (1900), St Louis (1904) - athletes ran clockwise.
At the time of the 1896 Games, most track races in England were also run clockwise and at Oxford and Cambridge University, both important athletic institutions, races also ran clockwise (Oxford until the late 1940s and Cambridge until the 1950s)
But a number of countries began to settle instead on the American custom of running counter-clockwise...
One theory is that early races were run on horse tracks, which ran in that direction.
Anti-clockwise became the norm by the early 1900s and the Olympic organisers came under pressure to conform. The change was compete world-wide between between 1950 and 1954 and Roger Bannister's four-minute mile was run in the anti-clockwise direction.
So we have the Americans to thank it seems – but does running anti-clockwise make a difference to left or right-legged athletes?
Answers on a postcard please.
