Thanks, I was delighted, especially after the hassle I had with the coaches.

Hi. Thanks for subscribing, are you a member of the southern G1MRA? No, I haven't written about the construction. In brief, the brick pillars were built (from recycled bricks) to provide something solid to work from at the higher elevations. I surveyed and laid the whole thing out four times before I was satisfied that I'd got it right. 4 by 4 wooden posts are between to provide vertical support. The centre to centre distance of the supports is nominally 6' which works out with the nominal 11' radius. Each section is a 4 by 2 frame screwed to the wooden posts and bolted to the brick pillars. I used stainless steel screws to hold the frames together. In the curves, the frames are tilted in about 4 degrees to give some superelevation. For consistency, I used a 9" spirit level with a screw in one end adjusted to give me the angle I wanted, a sort of sine level. The slats are 6 by 5/4 and 17" long to get 7 slats from a 10' board, the longest I can carry in my car with the trunk closed. (It is necessary to choose the 6 by 5/4 boards with great care, many of them are badly bent and twisted.) I laid the slats out by eye to a fair curve and then clamped and screwed them to the frames. The frames are laterally solid because they form a vertex at each wooden post. I used 2 by 6 frames for the straights to increase stiffness where geometry isn't helping. Another reason for increasing the frame depth on the straight is that it comes to the ground right by the deck and must be strong enough to withstand being stepped on. At the ground, I still used 4 by 4 posts on 6' centres but infilled under the frames with gravel. Where I haven't used brick pillars, the posts are either on concrete bases (where I couldn't get into the ground because of lumps of concrete under the topsoil) or directly beaten into 4" diameter augered holes. All wood is pressure treated and the posts that are directly in the ground were given several coats of some thick goopy stuff to protect them. My experience of pressure treated wood in the ground is that it will likely outlast me. At the point that I worked this out, I'd never visited a track. There are many, many ways to do it some of which are clearly superior to mine. The way I did it, I could go to Home Despot twice a week and buy a kit for a section and simply kept repeating that until the job was done. I hope this helps.

Thank you for the detailed response. I am a G1MRA member, but not a member of any chapter. I will save your reply as guidance when I complete my running track. I simply love your brickwork.

Thanks. The brickwork was an inspiration. I was quite concerned about how I would manage the high sections using just poles are whatever. Then it came to me to use the bricks from a patio that I had torn up to build pillars and that made all the difference, both in the ease of construction and in the finished appearance. It just happens that my house is built of the same varigated brick and that was a large part of what had attracted me to it in the first place.

Excellent description thank 🙏🏻