The Daily Feather — Hurdling Through a Record Long Cycle

Some of the first hurdle races took place at England’s Eton College in 1837 and covered about 100 yards in distance. In the beginning, runners approached the hurdles and jumped over each hurdle in turn, landing on two feet and checking their forward motion. That changed in 1885 when A.C.M. Croome of Oxford University revolutionized the hurdle sport. When jumping, he extended one of his legs ahead of him while leaning forward, setting the standard for the method used today. With the adoption of this innovation, the race distance was extended to 110 meters. And then came the Big Time. In 1886, Hurdles got their capital ‘H’ when the addition of the discipline to Track & Field events at the Athens Olympics. The women’s sprint hurdle race was added in 1932. For Olympians, the race originated as an 80-meter that was extended to the current 100-meter format beginning in 1972. In 1900, the men’s 400-meter hurdle race was added, followed a mere 85 years later for women.

At QI Research, we’ve gone a step beyond macroeconomic innovation. In what we consider to be a revolutionary approach, we’ve laid the groundwork to treat the current expansion as one that commenced in June 2009. On July 19, 2021, the Business Dating Cycle Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) released the following determination: “The committee has determined that a trough in monthly economic activity occurred in the U.S. economy in April 2020. The previous peak in economic activity occurred in February 2020. The recession lasted two months, which makes it the shortest US recession on record.”