HOLLYWOOD — On a warm Thursday evening the Hollywood High track filled with an unlikely field: a knot of eight-year-olds in cotton shorts, a handful of high schoolers in spikes, and a lane of gray-haired sprinters stretching with the seriousness of people who know exactly what the next twelve seconds will cost.
The all-comers meet is a spring series run on the school track, and it asks little of anyone. You pay two dollars, print your name on a clipboard, and step to the line for whatever event is called next. There are no qualifying standards, no team affiliations, and no ceiling or floor on age.
“We have timed a five-year-old and a seventy-eight-year-old in the same hour, and both of them wanted the number to the tenth,” said Harold Sarkisian, 58, who directs the meet and recruits the volunteers on the stopwatches. “People think track is only for the fast. Out here it is for anybody willing to find out where they stand.”
The timing is done by hand, thumbs on stopwatches, results printed later off a laptop by whoever’s turn it is. Heats are seeded loosely and often mixed, so a masters runner can end up beside a teenager, each pretending not to race the other and racing anyway.
Yolanda Beckman, 52, runs the 100 and the 200 and has the calf muscles to prove she does not treat either as a jog. She took up sprinting in her forties, she said, precisely because everyone assured her it was a young person’s event.
“The hundred does not care how old you are. It tells you the truth in eleven seconds,” Beckman said. “I run it because it still scares me a little. At my age not much does.”
The younger the runner, the shorter the memory of the result. Marisol Fenn brought her second-grader to try the 50-meter dash and watched him finish dead last, dissolve into tears, and demand to enter the next heat immediately.
“He cried at the line and then signed up again before I could say no,” Fenn said. “That is the whole thing, really. It stings, and then you want to go again.”
The evening moved through its events without ceremony — the dashes early, the distance races later, a long-jump pit raked by a teenager working off service hours. A few of the older runners traded notes about the Runyon Canyon 10K, gone quiet for years now, and whether anyone would ever bring it back.
As the light went orange over the west stands, the mile went off last, and the field strung into a long line, the fast kids up front and a pair of walkers bringing it home to the loudest cheer of the night. Sarkisian tallied the sheets, taped the results to the fence, and told the stragglers to come back next Thursday, daylight permitting.