The Best High School Cross Country Runners Of All Time

Ritz had no kick. If it came down to 200ms between him an webb he was toast.

nova cats baby wrote:

asdfasdfas wrote:

2) I have no clue what think you just did. Heres a hint. Championship races are not time trials, they are races. You run to win the race not to try and get the largest possible margin of victory.

Because running to win means running slow? Are you really as dumb in person as you are on here? Running to win means running fast sometimes, if you run fast you have a good shot of winning. Guess what, it often works. In the case of high school XC, see Ritz in 2000 FL in orlando. in the case of the pros, see Bekele 5k final in Beijing. Who the f*** said you must run slow to win a race, god you're stupid.

You have a bias towards modern runners. Just off HS times (with no conversion for tracks), I doubt Fernandez was going to mop the floor of a 28:32 runner (chapa) or 28:55 (Hulst) over a 5k cross country race. I don't know who would win the race, but Fernandez did nothing in HS to suggest he would mop the floor with either of them.Course records in XC are a crap shoot. You run most courses once or twice and weather differences mean that some guys never get a chance.

Biased toward modern runners? Bahhh-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!!! I have less of a bias toward modern runners than anyone does, even malmo. If anything, I'm stuck in the past and clinging to the jock straps of the 70s runners. But guess what. Everything points to a few of these recent guys being every bit as good as Lindgren was and better than Virgin or Pre. Fernandez ran 8:34 for 2 miles - eight thirty-four - and he tore up California cross country, breaking a couple of highly respected and long standing course records. Yes, he was still human and lost at at Foot Locker nationals, but he was on another planet at his best and remarkable even on average, which is what we're talking about in a hypothetical matchup with runners from other eras. He was such a better overall high school runner than Hulst that even though I think Hulst was much tougher in cross than on the track, Fernandez would beat him straight up if both had their best race. The Fernandez who ran 14:24 at the CA state meet - probably the greatest performance in CA cross history - would beat Virgin, Pre and Hulst on their best days. There. I said it.

Galen Rupp ran a 13:37. Any idea how good that is? I think Lindgren could have done better in hs in the right race on a good track. There's hardly any doubt he'd have run better than that 13:44. Maybe even 13:30. I think he was a better runner in hs than Rupp was. But Hulst running with Rupp? Based on his numerous 2 miles and 10k efforts, 13:50 would have been a stretch on the most magical day of his career. The guy was absolutely, positively maxed out at 8:44 for 2 miles. He'd have to split 8:43 for 3,200 and keep going to stay with Rupp. Even Virgin and Pre would have had a lot of trouble with that. Yeah, we're talking track now when we should be talking cross. But these track times show how good these guys were in more comparable terms. They were all good in cross, too. If we're going to draw comparisons without a lot of races on the same cross country courses, we need to use a common measuring stick - 2 mile and 5k - and the better overall runners are most likely going to be the better cross country runners, especially if they are 10 seconds faster for 2 miles (Fernandez vs. Hulst) or can run 5k at another guy's 2 mile pace (Rupp vs. Hulst). Get it? Fernandez and Rupp were better overall runners than Virgin and Pre in high school and much better than Hulst. That said, Hulst did accomplish a great deal more in hs cross and was good enough by the universal measuring stick of track times that he should be ranked higher as a cross country runner if cross country honors won are the most important criteria for the rankings.

To reiterate, most of us are assuming Lindgren, with his 4:01, 8:40, 13:44 and Olympic berth at 10k would beat Hulst on any surface, right? Even though we don't have a lot of cross country results to go on, we know he was the best of his time and could even have been a worse cross runner than track runner and probably still beat Hulst in cross. Same with Virgin and Pre. Why do we think that? Because they were faster than Hulst at all the track distances they raced and were also known cross country stars. But Fernandez and Rupp were better still. 8:34 and 13:37 are much better than Pre or Virgin ever ran and are light years ahead of anything Hulst could have done. And Derrick, with a 13:55, was likely at least as good as Hulst. Sure, Rupp did try a track 10k and wasn't as fast as Hulst, but Hulst trained for the longer distances, trying to make the Trials standards in both the 10k and the marathon, and it took him several races to break 29 minutes. He might have been better in cross relative to track, but guys like Fernandez and Rupp were so frighteningly much better in track - and were highly regarded cross runners - that it's almost silly to think Hulst could simply tough his way to a win against them if they were at their best.

That's in a heads up race. Based on overall accomplishments, guys with world titles, like Hulst and Kimball, and other guys from the past who were undefeated in cross and put up track times to back it up, like Virgin and Pre, have to rank higher than Fernandez and Rupp, who weren't undefeated and didn't have high international finishes. Even Reina and Reynolds would rank higher in terms of accomplishments than either Fernandez or Rupp, and I think Fernandez and Rupp would blow them out of the water if they were all at their best. Hypothetical matchups aren't always what rankings are about.

All I know is Bob Kennedy won the D1 NCAA XC title about 5 months after graduating from HS. I don't believe any of the others mentioned accomplished that. I know it was after HS, but surely is indicative of his overall talent relative to others.

justsayin wrote:

All I know is Bob Kennedy won the D1 NCAA XC title about 5 months after graduating from HS. I don't believe any of the others mentioned accomplished that. I know it was after HS, but surely is indicative of his overall talent relative to others.

I agree with you. I think Kennedy, Goucher, and Torres, are not getting enough respect because they ran in a supposedly "weak" era.

And I know this is about their performances in high school XC, but it is impossible to evaluate runners on different courses and in different eras independently of what they accomplished in track and later in their careers.

These 3, along with Ritz, all won XC championships at the next level (NCAA - and Kennedy won twice), and all performed well at senior worlds.

Top finishes at world XC were:

Kennedy - 12th and 16th

Torres - 11th and 13th

Goucher - 6th and 12th

In fact, these 3 were really among the best non African XC runners in the world at their best.

justsayin wrote:

All I know is Bob Kennedy won the D1 NCAA XC title about 5 months after graduating from HS. I don't believe any of the others mentioned accomplished that. I know it was after HS, but surely is indicative of his overall talent relative to others.

I would have loved to see Kennedy in high run against all-time great competition. His top competition that year was John Sence in XC and Steve Holman in the mile who he beat at Keebler.

Would his pudgy 35-mile-week high school self hang on to sub-14:40 at Balboa Park if he needed to beat a Reina or Davis or Solinsky?

Somehow I think he would. Great combination of talent and racing toughness.

Lindgren

Pre

Virgin

Hulst

Kennedy

Goucher

Torres

Ritz

Verzbicas

All the above in their prime in one race winner take all! That'd be pretty sweet

Of course, freshmen were not eligible to compete when Lindgren was in college. However, he did finish in the top 10 in the Olympic 10000 in what could have been his freshman year.

justsayin wrote:

All I know is Bob Kennedy won the D1 NCAA XC title about 5 months after graduating from HS. I don't believe any of the others mentioned accomplished that. I know it was after HS, but surely is indicative of his overall talent relative to others.

CROSS COUNRTY ONLY = Hulst!

They might have had the innate talent to compete against the best in any era if they had the chance, but for the most part, they did extremely little while in high school that shows they were on the same level as Craig Virgin, et alia. Kennedy did run 4:06, but all three of those guys were 8:55-9:00 3,200 types in track. Maybe they didn't get the chance to run their best in the 3,200 or 2 mile in the spring, but unfortunately that means we can only know for sure that they were 15 or so seconds slower for 2 miles than all those studs from the 60s and 70s. I might concede that they maaaybe cooould have run better in the longer track distances than they did, but sorry, Chief Spread Eagle, I'm not giving them 15 seconds in the 2 mile out of the goodness of my heart. They were not as good runners while they were in high school as the top 70s guys were. Period. The one exception I will make is giving Goucher his due for his marks in Colorado cross country and for running 14:41 at Balboa and easily beating a very solid runner in Keflezighi, who ran 8:51 for 3,200 in the spring.

Somebody pointed out how Kennedy must have been a beast in hs since he won the college nationals less than a year later than he won hs nationals. Maybe he was, but he didn't do anything special enough in cross or in the longer track distances to rank him as an all time great cross runner while in high school. I suspect the fact he moved from 35 miles per week in hs to about double that in his first year of college had something to do with his incredible talent beginning to emerge. Nevertheless, as good as his potential was, we have to discount what he did as a freshman in college. That wasn't part of his hs career, and his actual performances while in hs didn't measure up to the performances of the 60s and 70s studs.

If the competition in the sport of high school running (of which cross country is only a subset) was anywhere near as good in the 90s as it was in the 70s, you'd think there would have been at least a few sub 8:50 2 miles in there. But there was only one - Franklyn Sanchez (8:46+ 3,200). Now look, I'm not about to make the dumbass assumption that those 90s guys were just as good as the 70s guys in cross but somehow every one of them decided to run a full octave lower when their track seasons came around. No sir. I'm not buying that. They simply weren't as good, period. And that means they weren't as good in cross.

Yes, you do pretty much have to use track times as a common ruler when comparing eras that are far enough apart that the runners didn't have common opponents or didn't run often enough on the same cross country course. That shows how the 8:40s guys like Lindgren, Virgin, Pre, Nelson (sub 8:40!), Kimball, Hulst, Reynolds and the others from back in the day really were as good as the more recent 8:40s guys like Solinsky, Acosta, Puskedra, Kiptoo and Webb and they were demonstrably a very large margin better than anyone from the 90s.

But if the topic is hs only, that means hs only. Sure, Kennedy won a national hs cross country title and then went on to the world ranked level, but you can't use that to deduce he was actually better in hs than he ever showed. You have to disregard post-hs performances completely. Otherwise, you could keep extrapolating the "post-hs accomplishments" thing out to an extreme case like Frank Shorter being "underappreciated as a high school runner" because, after all, look how good he became. At the other end of the spectrum, knowing what we know now, Amber Trotter must not have been that good in hs after all, right? But if we're talking high school only, Frank Shorter wasn't that great and Amber Trotter was.

The piece incorrectly states that Ian Dobson wasn't an NCAA Champion. He won the Indoor 5,000 in 2005.

8:34 is fast. But so is 28:55. There is pretty much no difference between the 2 (some charts have one fractionally higher than other. Other charts reverse it). When predicting a 5k result, I tend to favor the 10k over the 2 mile. Now 28:32 and 13:37 are at an even higher perfomance level (8:30-8:25 2mile). Nobody (except maybe Lindgren. Who knows what his time would be on a modern synthetic track with good pacing) in the top 20 or so is really that far outside of anyone else. The all have times around 8:40/13:55/29:00. The way people handle XC versus track is more than the couple second difference in PRs.

There is an army of Kenyan HS kids better than that lot

ukathleticscoach wrote:

There is an army of Kenyan HS kids better than that lot

But no British kids.

Older School kids had less opps.

Billy McChesney...should be on the list, won about everything he ran in high school.

The Best High School Cross Country Runners Of All Time?

If the question refers to what the runner did in HIGH SCHOOL XC, Not track, not after they left high school. Just high school, XC then the answer is Eric Hulst! He won WORLD JR's. Did any other american win world jr XC in high school?

The Beach at Laguna wrote:

The Best High School Cross Country Runners Of All Time?

If the question refers to what the runner did in HIGH SCHOOL XC, Not track, not after they left high school. Just high school, XC then the answer is Eric Hulst! He won WORLD JR's.

Yes, but can he make balloon animals?

The Beach at Laguna wrote:

The Best High School Cross Country Runners Of All Time?

If the question refers to what the runner did in HIGH SCHOOL XC, Not track, not after they left high school. Just high school, XC then the answer is Eric Hulst! He won WORLD JR's. Did any other american win world jr XC in high school?

*************************************************

Rich Kimball DeLaSalle , Concord, Ca. 1974.

It's impossible to say who really is the best cross guy ever because so many runners have run different courses. Some else wrote cross courses are different at different times of the year.

Another issue in the old days was no state meet. Alot of the top runners never ran against each other. Good example is Kimball's senior year. He and Kingery both from northern cali never met on a cross course. The did meet on the track in US postal 3-mile, Kimball 13:43.6 and Kingery 13:56.4.

Would the results have been different on a hilly cross course. Will nevery know.

Maybe some of you computer gods can come up with a system that rates different courses on how hard they are, personal mile, 2-mile, and 5k times and have a national computer champion determined. Just like they do in some the boxing matches pitting old time boxers against the more restent boxers.

Then maybe we can stop all the arguements.

Questionable Screen Name wrote:

Fernandez ran 8:34 for 2 miles - eight thirty-four - and he tore up California cross country, breaking a couple of highly respected and long standing course records. Yes, he was still human and lost at at Foot Locker nationals, but he was on another planet at his best and remarkable even on average, which is what we're talking about in a hypothetical matchup with runners from other eras. He was such a better overall high school runner than Hulst that even though I think Hulst was much tougher in cross than on the track, Fernandez would beat him straight up if both had their best race. The Fernandez who ran 14:24 at the CA state meet - probably the greatest performance in CA cross history - would beat Virgin, Pre and Hulst on their best days. There. I said it.

German is a poor XC runner, as shown by his distanst third at Footlocker and three years of NCAA results. CA course is nothing, just like NJ courses are nothing, only Midwest course records matter. Put any XC great in German's 14:24 race at CA state, and German gets destroyed. There, I said it.