800m Men in X-Country and Mental Toughness

Nick would have a painful time in a fast crosscountry race.

It takes a different kind of mental toughness to endure the pain of 30 minutes than the pain of 2 minutes. Especially the toughness of running the long intervals and fast 10 milers every day. Some champions like Ovett and Walker could stomach it, most 800 runners could (or would) never do it. It is the basic training philosophy of do do you build endurance to go with your speed, or do you train a few months a year with the sprinters and jumpers. Personally, I'd rather sit around doing stretches and a few 200s than slogging through cross country intervals. Especially if the results are about the same either way.

Look dude, you're not going to win the olympics like Ovett and Walker, so just relax and jog along with the team. Do the best you can to help them without stressing out. Go 80% effort and it shouldn't be too painful.

I remember those days. It got to the point where i was in panic about my upcoming indoor season. Not having the experience to relize i was getting in great shape. Mentally, I thought something was very wrong after every meet. Kept getting my iron tested.

All said and done, I rolled during track season and kept getting PR's until graduation. So no worries, You are a mid distance runner. I would slack in practice every now and then to keep from getting injured. That is your priority during XC, help your team out but be smart and realize when you need to be slack or take a day off. AND yes i even told coach i was sick once because he couldn't realize i couldn't maintain anything close to 90 miles a week.

In HS I could survive cross and do ok, first mile fine, second not too bad, survive the last. College XC sucked. I mean my first 3 miles were the same...but that extra two is a biiiiiitch. I saw one poster who said it, have fun, you know whats up and let the others gripe if they wish. Use it to get better and don't beat yourself up on times/places. Its like expecting Rudisha to give Bekele (in his prime) a run for his money after 3 months training, likely not gonna happen.

Was definitely in the same boat as you. As a mid-D guy, my coach always was telling me to go out slower than the rest of the guys and then try to negative split the race. THIS WAS A TERRIBLE IDEA. As mid-D guys we're used to being in the hunt...putting myself too far back always killed me.

My recommendation is this: try to run with the #4 guy on your team as long as possible. If you're still with him at around 3-3.5 miles, you'll start gaining confidence that you CAN do this...versus being so far back and thinking you CAN'T.

Even if you slip off your teammate you'll still probably run pretty fast (compared to going out behind).

So, my advice...try to run WITH you training partners (aka another guy in the top 5) for as much of the race as you can. You'll get some confidence this way and, even if you get dropped, you'll be in a better position to tough it out and help the team.

Asbel Kiprop won World Junior XC, no? And his 800m PB is 1:43.

He is also an alien from the star system Magluto

sigkill wrote:

Asbel Kiprop won World Junior XC, no? And his 800m PB is 1:43.

800m interest wrote:

OK sure ovett ran XC, so did Coe. But consider - Ovett was the WR holder at 2miles and even he basically sucked at XC. I mean he was good - but he wouldn't have a chance in hell at winning NCAAs. Notable for one of the greatest milers who ever lived.

XC is a long dance - not ideal for the 1500/800 type. I think at best a 1500 guy can run with athletes a level or two below him. 800 guys? A very special 800 guy might be able to run several levels below....

How many global 800m finalists could make a top-7 team at a top-10 NCAA XC team? Maybe Kaki and Symmonds? Still - hard to imagine them hustling over 10,000m...

Ovett won the British Junior (I think then under 21) x-country Championship at 6 miles, which would be a a pretty good approximation of the NCAA (Birmingham University won the team that year).

He also won the Inter-Counties (equivalent of a Inter-State competition with the top, I think eight runners from each County/State) x-country over 7 1/2 miles in England, a race which back in the day sometimes served as the trial for the World x-country Championship team. Steve Jones, who was quite good as distance runner was second, so that was almost certainly up to NCAA standard!

He also won the Mallusk x-country over 5 miles in Ireland, from Nat Muir, who was an around 13:18 5k runner, in 24:08.

In addition, I believe that he ran well in the English National x-country over nine miles. Maybe fifth or sixth when runners like Brendan Foster, Mike McLeod and Tony Simmonds - all world-class 10k runners were competing.

Anyway, I would have liked to have "basically sucked" at x-country to the degree that Ovett did.

Of course, Ovett was a very different type of 800m runner to Rudisha, and x-country may not be quite so much fun for the 400/800m type!

This topic came up recently in my running group. Why is it that some 800m runners do reasonably well at XC while others struggle like crazy?

We had two solid 800m guys on our XC team. They were very close to each other in track. But, in XC, one of them was our 5th man while you sort of wondered what the other one was doing out there, as he was getting killed.

I think it was because the one that was successful was really a 1500m guy in disguise. The one who sucked was more of a 400/800 guy.

As other posters have said, I believe your issue isn't your mental toughness. It sounds to me like although you're training for cross country you're true racing talent lies in the 800. However, being a former 800 runner in college myself, I know that your school wants to get the maximum out of you so they're having you run cross country. That's the bottom line. They know it's not what your best suited for but you're probably better at it than some of the other "true" cross country runners. Yes, your building a base of the 800 but the school wants you to score points for them in cross country races as well.

I ran the 800 at a Pac-12 school in the late 80's/early 90's and at one point during my college career my school hired a very successful sprint coach who had previous experience at the University of Florida and other sprint powerhouses. One season he had our two scholarship 800 runners practice with the sprinters some times instead of the cross country team and those two guys never had better seasons than when they did that.

Their worst performances came during the seasons when they focused strictly on cross country in the off season and the same was true for me.

Uncle Systematic wrote:

This topic came up recently in my running group. Why is it that some 800m runners do reasonably well at XC while others struggle like crazy?

We had two solid 800m guys on our XC team. They were very close to each other in track. But, in XC, one of them was our 5th man while you sort of wondered what the other one was doing out there, as he was getting killed.

I think it was because the one that was successful was really a 1500m guy in disguise. The one who sucked was more of a 400/800 guy.

Some of them respond better to the training. The two on your team were probably training the exact same way and one of them responded well to it and the other didn't. You can't train an 800m athlete like the 5k/10k XC athletes no matter if they are training for the same event or not. You train the athlete to the distance you can't train a distance. Mentality probably has a lot to do with it also. I see a lot of people saying "just have fun with it" "Only go 80%" and stuff like that when they should be saying "make sure you recover" "Focus on what you respond to" when you have a slack off mentality it doesn't do any good. Have a tough mentality just like in track, but know you have to do what is best for you in order to perform.

My thoughts have always been unless your team needs an 800m runner to be competitive in XC then it's a no go. I've seen quite a few 800m runners get burned out from running cross for teams that finished in the bottom 4 of their conference. I understand coaches want to field the best possible XC team they can but at what cose? Seriously the future value of your 800m runner in track season isn't worth preloading track season with 2+ months of XC.

You guys are really slow in the head. We are not talking about global 800m finalists from 1980. We are talking about right now. Ovett was a great MILER, but a 1:44-high guy is going to be damn lucky to make semis at a global meet right now.

Even more to the point - Ovett was a 1500 guy - not a 800 guy. Yeah he has that OLY gold but I think we can agree which distance was his speciality.

You keep just reinforcing the point that mid-d guys are not capable of running close to their mid-d class over XC. Even Ovett - not even a 800 specialist - one of the GREATEST all-time 1500 guys is getting touted as winning some brit u21 xc race. That is not exactly the same level.

Rod DeHaven, coach and former athlete at South Dakota State, ran 1:48 in college as well as 4 conference titles and AAs at the d2 level.

Then he went on to win the 2000 US Oly Trials in the Marathon.

It really all depends on your body type. Rod, like Coe and Ryun, isn't a big guy. He weighed in the 120s when competing. Many 800 types are much bigger and it is too much work to haul that weight much farther than 1 or 2 miles.

I was one of those, in both HS and college. Ran for a pretty weak D1 team, and was able to make varsity XC 3 out of 4 years. Doesn't mean I liked the races. They sucked. Or I sucked.

From my Freshman year on, I could do the speed workouts with the best guys--I had trouble getting under 26:00 for 5 miles, but could blow the doors off of our 24:30 guys when doing any kind of speed workout you could name. They hated me. We'd be doing Indian Files and I could make them run so hard they'd puke--but in the races, I'd lose it in the middle miles.

There were two of us half-milers on the team that were in the same boat. It's easy to say that we should have just done our speedwork faster so we'd be working just as hard as the other guys--but it really didn't work that way. I even liked the distance training and tempo runs, and managed some marathons--never lost the speed. I got stronger for the distance runs, but it never carried through to the races like I wish it could have.

Hang in there, track is coming...

800m interest wrote:

You keep just reinforcing the point that mid-d guys are not capable of running close to their mid-d class over XC. Even Ovett - not even a 800 specialist - one of the GREATEST all-time 1500 guys is getting touted as winning some brit u21 xc race. That is not exactly the same level.

Wow, you have no clue. Ovett started as an 800 specialist. He won multi international titles at 800. He once ran the final 200m in a World Cup 1500 in 24 flat, coasting the final 50 while waving to the crowd. He also won many, many senior level international XC races against world class 10,000 specialists. You are dumber than dirt if you think that he wouldn't demolish NCAA xc runners.

John Walker, 1500 gold and 1:45, took 4th place at the WORLD xc championships.

I'm not quite understanding why you think that a mid-d guy can't do xc.

You obviously don't see the correlation between putting a world class 800 runner on Cerruty and Lydiard training and being able to dominate at xc.

800m interest wrote:

You keep just reinforcing the point that mid-d guys are not capable of running close to their mid-d class over XC. Even Ovett - not even a 800 specialist - one of the GREATEST all-time 1500 guys is getting touted as winning some brit u21 xc race. That is not exactly the same level.

Wow, you have no clue. Ovett started as an 800 specialist. He won multi international titles at 800. He once ran the final 200m in a World Cup 1500 in 24 flat, coasting the final 50 while waving to the crowd. He also won many, many senior level international XC races against world class 10,000 specialists. You are dumber than dirt if you think that he wouldn't demolish NCAA xc runners.

John Walker, 1500 gold and 1:45, took 4th place at the WORLD xc championships.

I'm not quite understanding why you think that a mid-d guy can't do xc.

You obviously don't see the correlation between putting a world class 800 runner on Cerruty and Lydiard training and being able to dominate at xc.

800m interest wrote:

You guys are really slow in the head. We are not talking about global 800m finalists from 1980. We are talking about right now. Ovett was a great MILER, but a 1:44-high guy is going to be damn lucky to make semis at a global meet right now.

Even more to the point - Ovett was a 1500 guy - not a 800 guy. Yeah he has that OLY gold but I think we can agree which distance was his speciality.

You keep just reinforcing the point that mid-d guys are not capable of running close to their mid-d class over XC. Even Ovett - not even a 800 specialist - one of the GREATEST all-time 1500 guys is getting touted as winning some brit u21 xc race. That is not exactly the same level.

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The original statement was that Ovett couldn't have won an NCAA x-country Championship. The British Junior Championship - open to club runners as well as college runners - would be the nearest equivalent, and he won that.

More to the point, how many NCAA x-country Champions would have been up to beating Steve Jones - top five in the world x-country Championship one year I believe - over 7 1/2 miles x-country, as Ovett did in the Inter-Counties (trial for the team for the World X-Country Championships)?