Elle Purrier St. Pierre’s eyes lit up.
The Team New Balance Boston runner and Olympian had just won the silver medal in the 3,000-meter final at last month’s world indoor championships in Belgrade, Serbia. Moments after the race, she credited a key workout she did with her teammates in early March in Brighton at New Balance’s new indoor track and field facility for helping her finish second.
The post-race conversation stayed on the New Balance track for a moment. A reporter wondered how it compared to Boston University’s indoor track, considered one of the fastest in the world. Purrier St. Pierre didn’t hesitate.
“Oh yeah, it’s faster, I think,” Purrier St. Pierre said. “It’s awesome. It has all the bells and whistles. I’m pretty excited about it.”
Back in Brighton, Purrier St. Pierre’s words were music to everyone’s ears inside New Balance headquarters. And that excitement becomes reality this week, as the track and field facility – officially named the TRACK at New Balance – will open its doors to a world-class, state-of-the-art complex that will be home to an indoor track that seats up to 5,000 spectators around it, a sports research lab, and several more features and amenities that the company is hoping will set a new performance standard for professional and amateur athletes.
The vision started more than a decade ago, when New Balance owner and chairman Jim Davis looked out his window from the old company headquarters on Guest Street and saw acres of vacated industrial buildings. Davis wanted to do more for New Balance’s brand and the community.
Davis’ vision became Boston Landing, where New Balance headquarters overlooks the Mass. Pike, and where the Bruins and Celtics built their practice facilities. The track and field facility, which broke ground in 2019, is the next piece of the puzzle of Brighton’s flourishing neighborhood.
“It was just a vision that the neighborhood loved,” said Jim Halliday, president of the New Balance development group. “It was a vision that the city loved. And so it was really able to take off.”
The facility will not only serve elite athletes, but also the community, designed to accommodate sports and athletes of all ages and ability. With four levels and space covering more than 400,000 square feet, the complex also has the flexibility to set down 6-8 basketball courts on the main floor, and it can also roll out a turf field to host sports like lacrosse, soccer and field hockey. There’s also another multi-purpose area that holds two basketball and volleyball courts as well as a track and field throwing area.
On the second floor, a sports research lab is programmed with the ability for New Balance to study athlete performance enhancement and injury prevention, with the space featuring athletic flooring for athletes to train in.
“It’s really something that is going to become a leader in the industry in terms of that kind of research back to the athletes,” Halliday said.
The biggest draw of the facility is the 200-meter track, which New Balance makes no secret in its intentions. “Designed to be the fastest track in the world,” it says on its website.
There are multiple factors to make that happen. During the design process, former Olympian Don Paige worked with the architectural team to bring track experience and knowledge to the table. The finished product features a track that can hydraulically bank its turns by 12 degrees, and Halliday explained that the way the athlete enters and exits those turns help encourage even greater speed.
“Basically, it’s how the runner is led into the turn and then accelerates through the turn on the other end,” Halliday said. “It’s how you enter and it sort of whips you out the other side. Because it’s more oval-shaped, you’re able to keep that centrifugal force helping to move you along.”
The track surface – produced by Beynon Sports – has a suspension element and makes it feel bouncier for athletes, too, which encourages speed. And Halliday explained there’s a psychological element included as well. A warmup track area – which also features a trainer’s room and hydration stations – allows athletes to prepare properly, get their spikes conditioned on the same surface they’ll race on, and get down to the main track without thinking about anything else than performing.
“It’s really been designed from that experience level of the athlete to put them in the best frame of mind psychologically,” Halliday said. “Frankly, we’re putting it back on the athletes that there aren’t any excuses not to run fast here.”
New Balance is putting that to the test right away. The company has assembled a women’s relay team that includes three of its runners – Purrier St. Pierre, Heather MacLean and Sydney McLaughlin – and high school 800-meter national champion Roisin Willis that will try to break the world record in the distance medley relay on Friday night.
“We’re hoping we come out of that tooting our own horn,” Halliday said.
And, they hope, the beginning of an exciting future on Guest Street. More than a decade in the making, New Balance is ready to expand its worldwide footprint on the track and field scene in ways it never has before.
“They thought of everything and they thought of everyone while they were constructing it,” said Brenda Martinez, a New Balance runner since 2010. “From all sports, from the youth level all the way up to the professional level. … I know I’m going to get use of it once I get to Boston or whenever I want to go visit Boston. I can train there, I can use the performance lab, but I think they’re going to do a lot of good things with it, bringing the community together. …
“I think when they have these events, they’re going to have NCAAs, the Grand Prix, I think even the college athletes are going to want to sign with New Balance after the experience at the track. It’s really good company and when they were making the plans for this, I was just like, now the time is here. I’m excited to get over there and just take it all in.”
