Some of the pictures have some unnatural distortion as I have blended photos
for the wide panoramic effect.
Chaminade High School
This photo is facing southeast. I'll guess the school colors motivated the
blue lines on the orange track. This track nice looking stadium crammed between
the baseball field and the school. With the stands built into the hillside,
and the right field fence just behind the opposite stands, they were limited
in width. The far end by the scoreboard drops off to a narrow row of trees,
a drainage channel and their neighbors back yards just a few feet away--logistically
a difficult retaining wall to make. On the west side, on the foreground side
(which was so close to the spot I shot from that I couldn't make the pictures
align), the track ends at the edge of the parking lot. I guess they decided
the lost parking space, and the resulting odd shaped parking lot, was not a
price they wanted to pay to have a proper sized track. Compared the the public
high school facilities in this area (aside from Birmingham) this is spectacular,
but go over the hills into Ventura County and this would be about average.
As a result, the track is an odd 373.4m. The 3200 start line is about 14 meters
before the 200m start line. Unfortunately, when I visited, they chose to blockade
the track by storing the soccer goal in the outer 3 lanes there.
This continues around the track with the 1600 (high school race) and 4x400
start line in the final 4x100 passing zone.
As I describe on the track marks page, when the track is not a perfect 400m,
the passing zones for the 4x400 have to progress away from the finish line incrementally.
Note in lane one, the beginning of the 1st 4x400 zone is almost on top of the
end of the 4x100 zone.
Further up the straightaway the second 4x400 and third zone are marked by
blue lines. The 800m staggered start is a gray line in the lanes.
And finally the 400 start is down the straightaway from the common finish
line (down at the end of the straightaway by the bench). The end of the 4x400
zone is a bit hard to see, opposite the seam in the pavement.