Finding Franklin Field (Penn Relays 2025, first day)

Finding Franklin Field felt like reading the novel Heart of Darkness, where you keep circling more inward towards the middle of the University of Pennsylvania campus without ever seeing the actual field. The only signs you might be drawing near are people jogging around in warm-up suits.

Once I got here, I was drawn to the grandeur of the 130-year-old Franklin Stadium, which looks like a hybrid of colonial, Gothic, and Victorian architecture. According to a Google search, Pennsylvania’s campus style is colonial or Victorian Gothic, so I’m on to something. Franklin Stadium was founded in 1895, when it was known as the Penn Relays Carnival. There are a handful of signs around this historic stadium indicating the grandeur of this space.

The stadium has 55,000 seats, and it might be the only collegiate football stadium in the country where there is a higher attendance for track and field (stemming from this one event) than there is for football. According to a communications director at the Penn Relays, this is the largest track and field event in America: There are 2,000 high schools, 200 colleges, 34 states, 28 countries, and nearly 18,000 athletes in attendance. They also stated before I came here that they have over 100,000 fans in attendance each year. Will that be an overestimation? Who will know? The stadium wasn’t full when I got here today, but Friday afternoon isn’t the high point.

The action started at 9 a.m. with the High School Boys 4 X 800m heats.  Doesn’t strike me as the Penn Relays having a lot of confidence in the event, if they’re going to bury it so early. It’s a shame because it’s a very exciting event. After a boatload of 4 X 100m relays, there came, what I imagine would have been some inspiring heats of sprint relays: There were some elementary school shiutle relays and sprint relays for athletes north of 60 and 70 years old.

By the time I got there, the Penn Relays was in the middle of an enormous block of high school 4 X 400m relays that lasted over 3 ½ hours and featured some 46 heats! I like a good 4 X 4 as much as the next person, but it felt like an interesting state of purgatory. The effect here was also a little interesting because the core of every good track meet below the international level is enthusiastic parents cheering in the stands (and even then, the world’s elite have their parents in the stands too, unless you’re an Ingebrigtsen). I had…