What Is a Heat in Track?

Enter a race with more than eight people and someone has to split the field, since a standard track only has eight lanes. That splitting is what heats, sections, and flights all do, just for different kinds of events, and mixing up which term applies where is an easy way to misread a psych sheet. A heat splits a sprint or hurdle field into separate qualifying races. A section does something similar for distance events, but often scores by time across the whole field rather than by place in each one. A flight rotates field-event athletes through their attempts. None of them is the final; they are simply how a big field gets narrowed down to it, and knowing which term applies tells you exactly how you can still make it through to the round that actually matters.