Cross Country scheduling for colleges.....has it changed that much in 30 years? for example:

We would race 8-10 times in XC if you made it to DII nationals. Yes we had a couple of dual meets because our coach wanted to brag to other coaches(FB and BB) aabout beating a conference foe. But since those duals were on Tuesdays, we really turned them into an interval session.

Our asst. coach who actually trained us had us run the 5 mile XC race, change out of spikes, then run 3 mile hard run, rest 5 minutes and hard one mile run to "complete" the workout. Plus our Sept. weekend races warranted very little resting before meet. We were working through them.

When the important races came, we got to rest up for them. And raced well with fresh legs. I agree that the way to learn how to race is to race more often. Many runners today haven't learned how to race. Tehy have learned how to train, just missing the racing portion.

circa 1976

right-o, charlie. We had regular, yearly duals the years I was at PSU while you were one state over at CMSU. We had Wichita State, Southwest Mo. State, Emporia State on the X-C schedule every year. Not these days. A couple of Invitationals, (The Wichita State and Southwest Mo State Invites, which drew alot of good teams from D1 schools like KU and Arkansas, Oklahoma, etc, as well as d2 and naia. Then it was Conference and Nationals. We never flew anywhere. No money.

First of all, I think the pros generally make a mistake by racing as infrequently as many of them do. Read Ron Hill's "Long Hard Road." He did a lot more than five mile races each week for 8-10 weeks. Weekly races were pretty much year round for him and he was no different than loads of fast Brits from those years.

Secondly, you would not necessarily do 8-10 consecutive weeks. Race on maybe 4 consecutive weekends, have a week off, then 3 more, then an off week, then the big meets.

But yes, you would know better than any of us old guys as to how tired we felt.