On January 23 and 24 this week, Gainesville hosts the eighth annual Jimmy Carnes Indoor Track & Field Invitational. It seems this will be the last Jimmy Carnes Meet at the University of Florida’s O’Connell Center because renovation plans for the center don’t include an indoor track. The Sunshine State will be without an indoor facility.

There also weren’t any indoor tracks in Florida in 1978 when I arrived at Florida State University as a freshman distance runner. None of the schools in our conference had an indoor track either, so the 1979 Metro Conference Indoor Championships were at a non-member school, Virginia Military Institute. The 220-yard VMI track was more of a rectangle than an oval; it didn’t have turns as much as it had corners. At two of the corners you went under some bleachers. They weren’t low enough that you had to duck, but at race pace you always felt like they were. Between the two corners you were behind the bleachers where no one could see you. In cross country we talk about whether or not a venue is a good spectator course or not. VMI was a lousy spectator track.

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Not all the facilities where we raced were grotesque, misshapen mockeries of tracks, though. East Tennessee State had a beautiful six-laps-to-a-mile track in a building so large that I suspect it has its own weather, much like the NASA rocket assembly building. Louisiana State had a 220-yard oval in their fieldhouse that I always enjoyed, probably because I finally broke 9:00 in the two mile there. Whatever length, banked or flat, in a fieldhouse or a basketball arena, all the indoor tracks had one thing in common--they were all far away.

That changed when the O’Connell Center opened at the end of 1980. In Gainsville, just a 340-mile drive from either Miami or Pensacola, there was a world-class indoor facility. The short straights and long, gentle turns on the 200-meter track in the O-Dome made it hard to pass, as I found out when losing a 3,000-meter race to Keith Brantley in 1981. Those same gentle turns contributed to making it a very fast facility, though--I ran my best indoor 5,000 at the O’Connell Center in 1982.

This weekend’s meet is a memorial of course to the late great Gator track coach, Jimmy Carnes. My first track race ever was an age group race that Coach Carnes included on the schedule of the 1971 Florida Relays. This was before everything went metric, so it was a one-mile race. I lost, but I kept running anyway. Like that long past Florida Relay, the Jimmy Carnes Invitational runs the mile. Not the 1600, and not that abominable child of international athletics the 1500, but an honest English mile. Indoor track in general usually gets this right, but not always. It’s a youth meet, so there are what seems like dozens of sections of the classic event based on age, plus “Rising Stars” sections. Once you negotiate this maze, Armando del Valle of Columbus seems to have been the fastest high school miler in the history of the Jimmy Carnes Meet, running 4:20.77 in 2010. In other years the fastest milers were Phillip Wise in 2008 (4:32.69), Del Valle in 2009 (4:22.82), Jack Feliz in 2011 (4:24.51), Avery Lopez in 2012 (4:31.78), Lopez again in 2013 (4:24.87), and Rayford James in 2014 (4:27.10). On the girls’ side it was Grace Van De Grift in 2008 (5:20.69), Stephanie Strasser in 2009 (5:17.43), Strasser again in 2010 (5:04.16), Carmen Carlos in 2011 (5:10.74), Stefanie Kurgatt in 2012 (5:12.23), Emily Edwards in 2013 (5:04.98), and Edwards repeating in 2014 (5:06.12). These are the phantoms that this year’s milers will be chasing as they race eight-plus laps around the O’Connell Center track.

It’s not just the mile though. There will be the 3000 meters, the 800, and a variety of other events. Elbows will be thrown. Shins will get spiked. It’s indoor track, and for one more year at least, it’s in Florida.