2019 National XC rankings/predictions

Blahzinga wrote:

Looks like the national title picture is starting to take shape. Great meet at Clovis shows Great Oak trending up and the arrival of Allred shows Corner Canyon will be a solid number 2. Newbury Park is phenomenal, but trending down and will miss the podium. Individually, Nico Young takes 4th again! Newbury Park ran their national championship at Woodbridge.

Daschbach beats Sprout and Young beats Daschbach so who are the three guys you see ahead of Young?

Crowd Sorcerer wrote:

Blahzinga wrote:

Looks like the national title picture is starting to take shape. Great meet at Clovis shows Great Oak trending up and the arrival of Allred shows Corner Canyon will be a solid number 2. Newbury Park is phenomenal, but trending down and will miss the podium. Individually, Nico Young takes 4th again! Newbury Park ran their national championship at Woodbridge.

Daschbach beats Sprout and Young beats Daschbach so who are the three guys you see ahead of Young?

Young got 1st at Clovis. It’s his teammate Aschbrenner that got 4th.

Crowd Sorcerer wrote:

Blahzinga wrote:

Looks like the national title picture is starting to take shape. Great meet at Clovis shows Great Oak trending up and the arrival of Allred shows Corner Canyon will be a solid number 2. Newbury Park is phenomenal, but trending down and will miss the podium. Individually, Nico Young takes 4th again! Newbury Park ran their national championship at Woodbridge.

Daschbach beats Sprout and Young beats Daschbach so who are the three guys you see ahead of Young?

I think Nico Young is amazing, but I also don’t think he will improve as much over the next couple of months as Daschbach or Sprout. I also think there will be someone else that is unexpected like Young was last year. Young is truly a generational talent, but is probably at his peak now like the rest of his team while the others will improve. It’s just a hunch, but based a bit on Newbury Park’s recent (that’s all we have to go on) history of peaking early (again, relative to the competition).

Blahzinga wrote:

Crowd Sorcerer wrote:

Daschbach beats Sprout and Young beats Daschbach so who are the three guys you see ahead of Young?

I think Nico Young is amazing, but I also don’t think he will improve as much over the next couple of months as Daschbach or Sprout. I also think there will be someone else that is unexpected like Young was last year. Young is truly a generational talent, but is probably at his peak now like the rest of his team while the others will improve. It’s just a hunch, but based a bit on Newbury Park’s recent (that’s all we have to go on) history of peaking early (again, relative to the competition).

Newbury Park ran their best at the CIF State meet and NXN last year. I'm guessing they are setting up for for the same.

Blahzinga wrote:

Looks like the national title picture is starting to take shape. Great meet at Clovis shows Great Oak trending up and the arrival of Allred shows Corner Canyon will be a solid number 2. Newbury Park is phenomenal, but trending down and will miss the podium. Individually, Nico Young takes 4th again! Newbury Park ran their national championship at Woodbridge.

NP's 1 and 2 have a huge gap on GO's 1 and 2. That will be a lot of guys at NXN and better chance for NP. At the big dance NP takes the win on todays results.

It will be fun to watch.

NP also set the all time course record with a 15:13 average at Woodward park today.

Blahzinga wrote:

Looks like the national title picture is starting to take shape. Great meet at Clovis shows Great Oak trending up and the arrival of Allred shows Corner Canyon will be a solid number 2. Newbury Park is phenomenal, but trending down and will miss the podium. Individually, Nico Young takes 4th again! Newbury Park ran their national championship at Woodbridge.

NP's 1 and 2 have a huge gap on GO's 1 and 2. That will be a lot of guys at NXN and better chance for NP. At the big dance NP takes the win on todays results.

It will be fun to watch.

NP also set the all time course record with a 15:13 average at Woodward park today.

grew up in UT wrote:

Blahzinga wrote:

I think Nico Young is amazing, but I also don’t think he will improve as much over the next couple of months as Daschbach or Sprout. I also think there will be someone else that is unexpected like Young was last year. Young is truly a generational talent, but is probably at his peak now like the rest of his team while the others will improve. It’s just a hunch, but based a bit on Newbury Park’s recent (that’s all we have to go on) history of peaking early (again, relative to the competition).

Newbury Park ran their best at the CIF State meet and NXN last year. I'm guessing they are setting up for for the same.

Did they? According to what data? Their team time was 49 seconds slower at state than Clovis last year. They were much better at CIF finals last year than they were at state relative to the other teams in D2. In a 1 year sample size, their best meet was at Woodbridge last year and based on Woodbridge and Clovis it seems to heading in that direction this year.

HS-COACH wrote:

Blahzinga wrote:

Looks like the national title picture is starting to take shape. Great meet at Clovis shows Great Oak trending up and the arrival of Allred shows Corner Canyon will be a solid number 2. Newbury Park is phenomenal, but trending down and will miss the podium. Individually, Nico Young takes 4th again! Newbury Park ran their national championship at Woodbridge.

NP's 1 and 2 have a huge gap on GO's 1 and 2. That will be a lot of guys at NXN and better chance for NP. At the big dance NP takes the win on todays results.

It will be fun to watch.

NP also set the all time course record with a 15:13 average at Woodward park today.

It is going to be epic at NXN. With Nico Young at the front, it definitely makes the team scoring interesting. However, Newbury’s #2 was 19 seconds in front of GO’s #1 at Woodbridge and only 9 in front of GO’s #1 and 24 in front of GO’s #5. In another couple months, it would not be surprising to see multiple GO kids ahead of Newbury’s #2.

Blahzinga wrote:

grew up in UT wrote:

Newbury Park ran their best at the CIF State meet and NXN last year. I'm guessing they are setting up for for the same.

Did they? According to what data? Their team time was 49 seconds slower at state than Clovis last year. They were much better at CIF finals last year than they were at state relative to the other teams in D2. In a 1 year sample size, their best meet was at Woodbridge last year and based on Woodbridge and Clovis it seems to heading in that direction this year.

49 seconds slower, really? That's news to reality.

Here's your Clovis vs. State times. One guy ran 2 seconds slower at State. Everyone else ran faster. Team time 69 seconds faster. Great Oak's top 5 at State ran a combined team time just 15 seconds faster than they did at Clovis. But yeah keep sucking GOs D buddy.

15:09 - 14:59 = 10 seconds faster for Young

15:28 - 15:30 = 2 seconds slower for Ronk

15:52 - 15:35 = 17 seconds faster for Aschbrenner

16:22 - 15:52 = 30 seconds faster for Long

16:06 - 15:52 = 14 seconds faster for Sahlman

16:03 - 15:53 = 10 seconds faster for Goldstein

DNR - 16:54 = Appleford

As for their best meet being Woodbridge, Aschbrenner didn't even run at Woodbridge. Clearly it was not their best team performance. It may have been Ronk's best individual performance relative to others, but if so only by about 5-10 seconds tops. Every other person on the team ended up performing better or the same at State than they did at Woodbridge. Overall as a team they were clearly stronger at State than they were at Woodbridge.

I see now that I didn't use the right 5th man for Clovis, which means their team time would be about 49-50 seconds faster at State, not 49 seconds slower. You got it exactly backwards. Congratulations.

Yes, Newbury Park ran best at Nationals and State 2018. No reason they won't do the same in 2019.

NP set team time record on a herald CA with plenty of great teams that have raced on it. Not trending down (trends are not made on one race compared to previous race). National championship will come down to NP, GO, and LV and Clovis shows that on any given day things can change. GO does have the small gap going for them. It will come down to if NP’s front runners can be enough in NXN. Head to head GO 28, NP 29. The comment of NP is off the podium is way off base and probably why people are critiquing your post more.

NP's pacing was awful last weekend. I understand Young needed to burn Daschbach early so I get it for him, but the remainder of the guys went out way too hard. They would have won if they'd paced better. Great Oak pulled a CU and was way behind at 1 mile and 2.1 miles and pulled out the W in the last mile.

If NP is doing a bunch of VO2 max work I would tend to agree that the team and the individual athletes have a bit less room to improve than other teams/athletes, but last year they peaked fine, it seemed. Nico Young's best race was NXN by a decent margin.

Creaky Bones wrote:

NP's pacing was awful last weekend. I understand Young needed to burn Daschbach early so I get it for him, but the remainder of the guys went out way too hard. They would have won if they'd paced better. Great Oak pulled a CU and was way behind at 1 mile and 2.1 miles and pulled out the W in the last mile.

If NP is doing a bunch of VO2 max work I would tend to agree that the team and the individual athletes have a bit less room to improve than other teams/athletes, but last year they peaked fine, it seemed. Nico Young's best race was NXN by a decent margin.

Awful pacing? Here’s their places at the mile and finish:

N Young 1-1 Held his spot

Aschbrenner 8-4 Moved up 4 spots

Sahlman 13-12 Moved up 1 spot

Goldstein 12-30 Lost 18 spots

Lex Young 46-31 Moved up 15 spots

Appleford 18-38 Lost 20 spots

McDonnell 74-41 Moved up 33 spots

Goldstein and Appleford clearly got out a little hot and paid the price but relative to the field NP had 5 of their 7 guys move up or hold their spot, which obviously is not awful at all. GO got out conservatively and it paid off for them, barely.

If this was NXN today NP would win. Young and Aschbrenner will have a lot of guys in between them and the first GO guy. NP's 3 only had two GO guys in front of him. The rest of the NP and GO team are very close. In a much bigger meet like NXN the win would have gone to NP today because having two from runners at a really big meet helps a lot with points.

GO was clearly going for the win and did so by holding back the first half of the race. The NP clearly let their guys run for the win up front. Considering it's October12th they both had different philosophy's on their mid season race approach. I don't think NP or GO mad a bad choice, just different.

It will be a fun battle at NXN for them.

Eh, you're looking at it wrong if you're only looking at places. They may have died less than a lot of other teams, and Nico went out hard and pulled everyone to a slight positive split, but they didn't die less than the team that mattered.

If you correct for the hills / course profile using like

http://www.runworks.com/calculator.html

, the last 2.1 should average about 8-12s/mile slower than the first mile due to the slight net downhill of mile 1 and the slight net uphill (with one "big" hill) of miles 1-3.1. So if a runner ran an "even" pace with the correction, you'd expect their first mile to be about 4-6 seconds faster than their eventual average pace. No one on NP really got close to that, or even into single digits--Nico was the closest and his brother did alright. The other guys were probably hurting a lot.

Newbury Park:

Runner: 1st Mile/Total Average (difference)

NY: 4:29 / 4:39 (+10)

JA: 4:36 - 4:51 (+15)

CS: 4:42 - 4:57 (+15)

LY: 4:48 - 5:01 (+13)

NG: 4:42 - 5:02 (+20)

DA: 4:43 - 5:03 (+20)

TM: 4:53 - 5:04 (+21)

GO:

Runner: 1st Mile/Total Average (difference)

CV: 4:48 / 4:53 (+5)

CSY: 4:49 - 4:53 (+4)

CS: 4:50 - 4:57 (+7)

GA: 4:49 - 4:58 (+9)

MJ: 4:49 - 4:59 (+10)

AR: 4:50 - 5:00 (+10)

JW: 4:50 - 5:06 (+16)

I was @ Clovis 2019 wrote:If this was NXN today NP would win. Young and Aschbrenner will have a lot of guys in between them and the first GO guy..

This is definitely true, but I think it's still closer than it seemed at Woodbridge, because most of the elite guys that are between NP's 2 and GO's 1 aren't going to be counted for the team score. So it's not gonna be as big a gap when the team scores are broken down as it looks on the complete results. Sprout, Daschbach, and basically all of the dudes in the MS Top 25 aren't gonna matter.

This course is run that way. You want your first mile way faster. They do clinics about this with all the data. Tim O'Rourke talks about the second mile being 15-20 sec slower them your first mile.

15 seconds slower for mile 2 makes sense, but the NP splits were way worse than that. They were like 20-30 seconds slower average for both mile 2 and mile 3, so probably like 30-40 seconds slower mile 2 than mile 1, and then on top of that 10-20 seconds slower mile 3 than mile 1.

GO had it about right—their splits indicate about 15-20 second slower for mile 2.