17:08? Sam Wharton? Get yourselves together, Nike

They should just make the course not shitty. move it to a place with some hills and decent footing. it doesnt have be be a mountain, but it shouldnt be a flat horse racing infield either. footing wise, it doesn't have to be a manicured golf fairway, but it shouldnt be over ankle deep mud. simple as that. I'm sure that there are 28893497478 places like that around the nike campus.

XC favors strong runners not necessarily the fastest. When you need to dig your feet out of heavy, energy-sapping, mud after each step it favors strong runners.

Geb, for instance, was beaten regularly at XC races whereas he'd kill the same people on the track.

Get Real People wrote:

It is called Cross Country, not Track. What is everybody's obsession with running flat, fast courses in XC? Cross Country is not meant to see who can run the fastest time on the easiest course possible. It is meant to show who is the toughest runner out there and can withstand any and all conditions. Sam Wharton proved today that he is much tougher than anybody else in that race.

Or, we can just skip the bullsh!t and just have Track year round and run Cross Country on the Track if all of you complainers want it that way. Learn the difference between the two sports. We're all becoming too obsessed with fast times rather than toughness.

I think said the course has to be fast or flat, just not a mud pit. The NXN course is not XC, its a swimming pool. The fact is some people just don't know how to run in mud. Its not something you can train for. Stop trying to use extremes to make your point. Do you ever hear people complain how Footlocker's course? Would it too much to ask if Nike moved their national race to a course that isn't always s**t?

If the course favored mudders so much, how come Arcadia from sunny so-cal, won? strong runners win on whichever surface they run.

agip wrote:

got to say I think that course was over the top - I am a believer in XC being XC, but nobody trains or races in that slop - why not run them up the side of mount ranier and call that xc?

It just isn't a good test of normal xc running - it was a test of something else.

It's too bad the race isn't held 5 miles further north at Ft. Vancouver... USATF has had their meet there a few times. Should be decent parking, and it's not really any further from Nike than Portland Meadows. Only problem is that the parking would be a quite a bit further away (Clark College would be big enough, plus Hudson's Bay HS for overflow) ... but if people don't mind walking about 10-15 minutes to get from their car to the race course, then it would be a reasonable place. The other downside is no covered seating for people to stay dry/warm in cold/wet years.

But at any rate... I don't think the course at PM is ideal, but I don't think it ruins the meet either. Just a factor that could be improve upon.

You do know Nike waters down the course before NXN every year? So it's partly Nike's fault.

If they moved NXN to somewhere else every other year, that work I think, but having it in Oregon, where the course is ridiculous every year is stupid. And this IS cross country, not a circus. Why are there stinkin hay bails and small woppdie doos? Where's the big hills?

I'd be a lot more impressed with the Nike party line on this if the erstwhile elite athletes they had interviewing the teams weren't bending over backwards to put words in the mouths of high school kids about how great the course (mud) was.

If you don't believe me, go back and watch the interviews again (if Nike is brave enough to post them).

Sorry, Nike, when you have to stoop to this you know it's a reach. Time to stop reaching. Time to get yourself a real course you don't have to goad kids into saying something nice about.

Yes, we all know you have it at PM because you can almost count on that place being a swamp every year. Good for you, you like swamp water.

If hay bales, mud, and whoop-de-dos make a course more challenging (and more challenging = better), there's a course at 10,200 feet in Leadville, Colorado, I'd like to introduce them, too. That course would be very challenging this time of year. Bring in all the hay bales you like. No whoop-de-dos required there.

Pre is my favorite wrote:

I like how the first kilometer was 2:29 and no others under 3:40. Hahaha. Race is a joke.

LOL the course/race wasn't the problem.

The problem was kids not being able to pace themselves. Nice coaching!

The "first kilometer" has always been around the half mile mark, not the kilometer mark.

Now I'm just guessing on this part, but they might be using the same pad for the "1k mark" as they do for the 3k split. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong and they actually have multiple pads they are getting splits from on that side of the course.

Someone is going to lose their job I bet.

I loved watching that weenie interviewing the Elmhurst kids and them all saying the course was terrible into the microphone for everyone to hear.

The NXN course is not representative of the conditions run by 95% of HS cross country runners across the nation all season long. Why would this silly course be the definition of a team or individual champion?

I appreciate what Nike has done to promote the sport, but I think they really have mismanaged this event to the long-term detriment of the HS sport. Footlocker was once the definitive event that determined the best HS cross country runners in the nation. National caliber HS runners didn’t have to make hard decisions about where to run at the end of the season, but Nike changed that. They created an unnecessary chaos for HS runners. Why would they do that?

Nike originally promoted the concept of “Team” championship as the basis for NXN which could be easily differentiated from Footlocker. And this new concept of team spirit in a sport that was generally about individuals (they don’t pass the ball in cross country) seemed like a great concept. However, when Nike decided to add individuals to the race, treat the race like a kids summer camp with plays, mud angels, sexy photos, Nike commercials and generally a circus environment... it called into question their original motives.

I believe the NXN has resulted in a step-back in the basic integrity of HS cross country running. I think Nike contributed greatly to the recent progress of professional runners in the US. However, Nike needs to rethink the HS approach and get back to them in late college.

+1

get this race the hell out of oregon.

Everyone is hatin on the sloppy course but this is cross country and all that matters is ppl racing in the same place. XC isn't about a longer race on a golf course, old school xc courses had fences and mud and other obstacles. It's supposed to be mentally tough and I think the course and this race emphasize that aspect. It's apparent a handful of guys crashed and burned today, they didn't handle the conditions as well as others or race up to their potential. But everyone was racing at the same place, same time - let the chips fall where they may.

Best here have best European XC potential. XC = mud.

The NXN coverage was pathetic. Why are they positioning professional runners in harms way and making them look like fools?

Nike needs to walk away from HS cross and do a better job promoting professional runners.

DaveW wrote:

The NXN coverage was pathetic. Why are they positioning professional runners in harms way and making them look like fools?

Nike needs to walk away from HS cross and do a better job promoting professional runners.

Harm's way? Yeah that stage is a real treacherous place for Shalane and Kara.

Dissapointing race, i feel bad for guys like bernie who cant run at footlocker and chose to run at nike. They deserved a race where it came down to who ran the best race and not who can survive a horrible course.

glxc wrote:

Everyone is hatin on the sloppy course but this is cross country and all that matters is ppl racing in the same place. XC isn't about a longer race on a golf course, old school xc courses had fences and mud and other obstacles. It's supposed to be mentally tough and I think the course and this race emphasize that aspect. It's apparent a handful of guys crashed and burned today, they didn't handle the conditions as well as others or race up to their potential. But everyone was racing at the same place, same time - let the chips fall where they may.

I don't think people want a golf course race. If Nike held it on a decent course like Van Cortland, Bowdoin, Terre Haute, or Mt. Sac, I'd love that. I cut my Cross Country teeth racing at Holmdel, and to this day it's my favorite course (video:

). Tough, but not favoring one specific type of runner. It's not the stupid hale bales or whirleedoos that make Portland Meadows ridiculous, but the mud.

Deliberately putting it on inches of mud is just stupid, though: it substantially changes the dynamics from a typical cross country race. I think people would feel the same whether they made the kids race up Mt. Rainier or across the Sahara Desert.