It had been 5k for women through the 80s and early 90s. Since the switch to 6k, I've noticed no improvement in any way for the women. The 5k was a more exciting distance, simply because it was a bit faster and the finishes closer. Further lengthening the race will just make the race slower and the finishes more spread out. Duller, in other words.
Why some people want the longer distance is that they lack speed. It's essentially a self-serving point of view.
I think it is actually equal to have men and women race distances that take approximately the same TIME. So 8k for women, 10k for men would be a pretty good match up. The time spent running indicates the effort and strain of the race better than the distance in my opinion. Just think about an extreme case of the overweight 2 hour half-marathoner vs the 1 hour half-marathoner. The former, if pushing equally hard, has put in what would be a marathon effort for the latter.
asfwer wrote:
The former, if pushing equally hard, has put in what would be a marathon effort for the latter.
That almost makes sense if you don't think about it too hard...
Bump. Can we make this happen?? People on here don't seem to realize that a lot of people want the distance moved up to 8k, but for whatever reason, NCAA politics gets in the way...
Should we also move women's hurdle heights up to the same as men, and have them throw the same weights?
This comes up every year and it never gets better as an idea. The women's field is just not deep enough to have the race much longer. On the contrary, the women's race is almost perfect - it is short enough that the middle distance runners can both compete and use the season for appropriate training. If the race were longer either the middle distance runners would not effectively compete or their training would be skewed from what they should be doing.
It is also long enough that the distance runners are in their element (6km XC is much longer than a 5000m track race and the race plays out much differently). To illustrate that 10km is way too long, look at the NCAA field for the 10,000m. Decades after it was introduced the field is still so thin that the runners in 20th-24th are just not in the race. That breaks out to less than one runner for each of the 31 teams at the NCAA XC. Yet, you need a team of seven healthy runners to compete. The attrition rate for women trying to run 10,000 meters is way too high, not that many athletic women can train enough to have deep teams for that many squads.
Yes, it is too bad for those several dozen women that are good at very long distance but not at shorter distances because they have to compete with all those other runners that are not too far from their best distance but that would have the tail wag the dog. It sounds like a really good idea at first brush but, in fact, is actually a pretty bad one.
I beg to differ on the deepness of the field. The OP made the post in 2011 (after the field once again finished rather close), and since then we have only seen ridiculously close finishes all across the board (and with athletes running in huge packs the whole way). It's an extra 2k, things would not be spreading out THAT much over that distance.
You can't compare it to 10k on the track because the field is diluted by people running the 5k and 1500. However for this, EVERYONE is running the distance.
One other main reason people would like it moved up to 8k is because it's a more standard distance - plus, the discrepancy between the men and women's distance isn't as much then.