Earlier this week I helped paint the track for the upcoming short track event here in Chicago. Mayor Daley’s Speed Skating Classic will be held on January 27th, 2008 at the McFetridge Sports Center. Here is a quick behind the scenes look at how the track gets laid out for an event.
Here are a few quick shots of the rink at McFetridge, before we drilled holes in the ice and poured in the paint for the blocks and start lines.
Here is picture of our guide to laying out the blocks. As you can see, there’s some paint on the sheet from it being used over the years… I’ve highlighted the areas that we need to drill into the ice, and fill with paint, with red outlines (the blocks and starting/finish lines). Also, you’ll notice the red triangle that I inserted on the right hand side. Once we take the meausurements of the rink, we measure to a center point to traingulate from - then we use that point to layout the track/blocks.
Here I am at Center Ice, as we take the exact measurements of the rink from Board-to-Board. The ice ended up mearsuring out to 100′ x 85′ 5-1/2″.
From here we started our meassurements. Two pics below - first pic is after I set the center (triangulating) point, as Peter and Carl prepared to set the first block. The second shows them measuring out the distance to the first block from the starting line, as Elise holds the tape measure at the starting line.
I had my camera in my pocket as we did the trinagulating so I didn’t get any shots of the tape measures crossing each other to find each point where a block should go… sorry, I know you were all looking forward to those pics! 
So, skipping ahead, here you can see the end result. Three tracks and starting lines, almost ready for racing… once the zamboni does a drive by and shaves off the extra paint. Because this is a smaller event there are only three tracks painted. For those unfamiliar with the sport of short track speedskating, the ice can get chewed up very fast during races. So the track (blocks) are moved from one set of dots to the next after almost every race. Water is poured onto the ice frequently during a race day, and there are resurface breaks, all to help prevent the track from becoming too choppy. Best analogy I can think of is to ask you to imagine what the baseline looks like at Wimbledon at the end of the final match, now imagine what it would look like if they had three baselines to rotate. Would probably look a lot better, right? And they don’t have 18″ blades under their feet! 
