2014 sub 26 8k

Try Hard Go Far wrote:

Raced a 5k today on our home course. It's a flat fast course around some farm fields. Weather was a cool 55 degrees. Ran 15:40 for the 5k with splits of 4:47 (everyone hammered the first mile) and 9:47. Big pr for me as my official High School XC pr was only a 16:24 (16:15 in a road race last summer, but I don't count those). Pretty happy with how it went. Next up is an 8k in a few weeks. On a fast course and on the right day sub 26 is certainly achievable.

Congrats!

My son's a walk on at a D1 program. So, it's always good to see others make the successful transition from HS to College walk on.

It's too bad that more programs don't accept walk ons.

Keep up the hard work!

i understand. sub 26 may not be a good goal but i want to get close to it as much as i can.

pretty much, the coach likes my friend and i. but hes just not sure about us and wants to make sure if we r the right people for the spots in an event of injury.

i really want my spot back i missed the guys on the team and other benefits. new benefits also motivate me more. i want to finish my undergrad running career with the guys i started with.

in order to get my spot back, i have to do what i have to do. calf injuries are unfortunate but its part of the life of sports. i have gotten injured and i end up bouncing back. centro and even joanie got injured and had a short time period to train. they end up doing great things. if they can do it then i can too. i just have to work my butt off at the fields and im the gym.

biz man: Thank you. I hope your son is having also having a successful d1 track/xc career.

The majority of coaches aren't good at recruiting. Saying I have a chip on shoulder would be a massive understatement. It's more like a boulder.

D1 recruiting is a joke. I was not an elite hs runner, nor am I advocating or saying that I should have been widely or heavily recruited. But it just blows my mind how transactional the recruiting is. How fast did you run, is all the coaches care about. It doesn't matter if you're 17 or 19 years old your senior year. It doesn't matter if you look like you're 12 or if you look like a 30 year old man. It doesn't matter if you run 45mpw (which is what I ran as a junior) or 75mpw. It doesn't matter if you're coach never was a distance runner (he sprinted in hs), or whether you live in Wisconsin or New Jersey.

I think it's funny when a top d1 school gets an elite hs runner and he doesn't improve in college or doesn't do as well as expected. A recent example is Bernie Montoya. Why hasn't he come close to the 4:01 he ran jr year of hs? Probably because he was training at almost a professional level running 100mpw in hs. On the opposite side of the spectrum is Sam Penzenstadler. Sam finished 3rd in the 1500 at NCAA's with a time of 3:39. He runs at Loyola, the only D1 SCHOOL THAT EVEN RECRUITED HIM. He ran 4:18 and 1:57 as a senior. Another example, Cam Levins.

I'm out to prove that a guy who ran 4:22 in hs (as a junior, hurt at the end of senior year) can claw and scratch his way up to the top of NCAA D1 track and field. That's what drives me day in and day out. Okay rant over haha.

Last few days of training after the race on Saturday,

Sunday: 14 miles

Monday: 8 miles

Tuesday: 3 miles wu, 8k in 27:07 on our home course (same course where I ran 15:40 for 5k). First 2:00 of each kilometer was hard/race pace of some of the faster guys (5:00 or so), slow down to the start of the next kilometer where we'd start another 2:00 hard section. So the easy paces were around 5:35ish or so. 3 mile cd. Felt good about the workout. Now I have to run an 8k 68 seconds faster and at an even 5:12 pace.

Wednesday: 9 miles

today i did 4 x 1 mile repeats. started off with 5:49, 5:45, then died.. 5:52 and 5:55.

i think my legs and core are good from all that biking and core work, but i think its the cardio thats out of shape.

That doesn't seem right. How wouldn't they take that into account?

Shanel: The coaches aren't to blame completely. Financial and time requirements definitely limit the coaches. But I talked 12 different coaches and asked a lot of questions about the recruiting process. When I brought up my age and late birthday, I had coaches tell me that they didn't care and that a high school senior was a high school senior to them plain and simple. If you want to run d1 run 4:15 and/or 9:15 or faster as a junior at all costs unless you improve so much during your senior xc year that you win your state championship (large schools). The only thing coaches care about for the most part other then times is your gpa.

hey try hard when you were at UW did u train by yourself ? who provided you the workouts? im just wondering

M 8 easy

T 10 w/ workout

W 8 easy

workout tuesday was 2 miles at tempo pace (11:21) changed into flats. then ran 8x~400m on the grass. ranged from 75-80, distance was approx anyway so went by effort. then we jogged about 3min then did 1 mile on the road somewhat hard. i ran 5:02ish feeling like a final mile repeat type of effort

now i'm 10 miles behind after 3 days this week. gotta hit those doubles hard now

I generally agree with your recruiting rant. I get it that D1 coaches have limited roster spots and if they have more highly qualified candidates than roster spots, that they should generally take the guy who ran 4:15 as a jr over the guy that ran 4:22 (even if the latter guy has a lot more potential).

What I don't understand is how very few coaches even consider potential. With my son, the only coaches that did were D3 (Wash U, Haverford). If I were a coach, I think I'd apply more of a moneyball approach and look at age, training age, mpw, quality of competition / teammates, trajectory, etc.

Put it to you this way, if you were a D1 coach, who would you pick?

Runner A: 4:15 1600 as jr, 18 yrs 10 mos old, been running since 6th grade, runs 75 mpw, comes from a traditional track / XC powerhouse, ran 4:19 as a soph.

Runner B: 4:20 1600 as a jr, just turned 18, been running since Soph yr in HS (former soccer player who got cut), runs 40 mpw, comes from a program that isn't known for running, ran 4:36 as a soph.

Honestly, I wouldn't recruit ALL 'Runner B' types, but I'd take a portfolio approach and definitely recruit some A's and some B's.

biz man wrote:

If I were a coach, I think I'd apply more of a moneyball approach and look at age, training age, mpw, quality of competition / teammates, trajectory, etc.

How are the coaches supposed to know this? It's not MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, no one is tracking anyone's training age, or mpw. They can only look at trajectory and actual race times.

Coaches have no way of telling if the athlete is under trained or over trained. Are they supposed to just take your word for it? Then everyone will just lie and say, "Yah I'm only running 30MPW coach, I swear."

I feel your pain. I grew up in a conference where our dual meets had 1 footlocker finalist in them every year. I had a D3 coach tell me that he likes to recruit athletes who at least won their regional meets. If I had won my regional meet, I would have been a nationally recruited athlete, not some kid meeting with a D3 coach. He obviously didn't take this into account or bother to ask. In addition to having no way taking into account other mitigating factors, most running coaches probably aren't smart enough to, either.

Napoleon Dynamite: It's hard to figure out exactly what kind of mileage an athlete is running. Having said that it's not hard to find out their birthdate and times from previous years. It's also not hard to look at a kid and see if he's done physically maturing or whether he still looks like he's 15. It's not impossible to find out mileage either. I'd look at coaches, previous NCAA athletes running the same events from the same high school and coach and how they did in College.

You can track training age. You can track quality of competition. You can look at his teammates. You can talk to the athletes coach. You can look at their trajectory/previous years times. Coaches choose not to. It's foolish. I'd be looking at that info and churning over the bottom spots of my roster looking for those diamonds in the rough that can be developed.

Last year at UW I trained with the coach of Club Northwest for my first few months there doing primarily xc/distance training. Once it go to November and December, I started doing faster more track specific stuff that I came up with on my own as well as collaborating with my dad. From February until August before I left for College, I found a knowledgeable private coach and followed his plan.

I don't see how this matters? Most of the national caliber type HS athletes I knew looked like they were 13 years old. They had very little room to mature as runners, yet physically looked young. This is running not football.

Yes it is

How does one do that?

They don't have the time to do so. They are college coaches not internet stalkers.

Point in case, "diamonds in the rough". I"m assuming you dont fully understand this phrase. It's almost like looking for needles in a haystack.

I think it's awesome what you're trying to do and hope you succeed, but faulting the coaches and the process they use for you not being recruited is just not right. You're not seeing the full picture here. I don't think the solution to the problem you pointed out will come from changing recruiting, or some weird quantitative modeling way of identifying talented athletes.

What coaches and teams need is a better feeding system. Some fortunate schools are able to have programs with huge "benches" with many athletes who don't travel with the team but are able to workout. For reasons less apparent to me not all schools are able to have that large of non "varsity" squads. I think its related to insurance but who knows. It'd be great then if there was a stronger club system, either through the schools or through USATF, that was focused on developing runners currently attending colleges.

I appreciate the support.

You\'re certainly entitled to your opinion as I am to mine. I\'m not saying it\'s easy to find out this information or the fact that it\'s hard to find \"a diamond in the rough\" however, I don\'t believe it\'s not quite as hard as you make it out to be.

Having said this I am not an NCAA D1 College Coach, so I don\'t have first hand experience on recruiting athletes.

Many of the elite runners I ran against clearly looked more physically mature than me. I also believe you have an advantage if you\'re born in July of 1994 compared to July of 1995 if both athletes are in the same grade.

I would look at the ages of the runners in the recruiting class. I would look at progression year over year. Ex: runner goes from 4:40 soph year to 4:22 jr year would be more valuable than the guy that went 4:25 to 4:19. I\'d look at the history of their program.

I think it would be fun to be a D1 coach but the salary just isn\'t there.

I\'d love to hear the opinion of a D1 coach on this.

Did the private coach and/or your dad provided a strength training program?

Man I wish my father is really supportive of my running.. but then most asian parents arent...

Today I ran for 1 hr. best run so far since coming back. Mileage was 7.33.

Probably will end mileage just below 40.

I was doing some core exercises on the side. I should really start lifting again though, I feel like it helps me a lot especially during track season.

the coaches at miami dont make u lift?

We lift and do core. I was referring to last season. I didn't lift for last track season. I've been lifting for xc this year and I will for track this year too. Sorry if that was poorly worded haha

Try Hard,

I don't understand your attitude about recruiting. Honestly, if you can't hit the times, then why should coaches give you the time of day? With that said, there are D1 coaches out there that do give "questionable" athletes coming out of hs the time of day, but it's on a timeline.

Schools that and/or coaches that have the ability might have an athlete run a few low key meets (usually unattached) to see how they improve, but if they don't...guess what...they get cut. It happened to me. I had a great coach who was willing to work with me. But at the end of the day, I didn't improve enough to the point where I was valuable to the team. I was cut. I don't hold that against him in the slightest.

I left and went to a small D1 school that had a distance program where I could (eventually) contribute. I trained for 1.5years on my own to get there.

The point is that, in the sport of running there is really nothing holding you back from training hard on your own (except injuries). If you go into college as a 4:22guy and don't make the cut, then you work out on your own until you get to 4:15, or 4:10, or whatever it is that you need to get to.

I believe this is what you were doing at UWash correct? But you didn't improve to where you needed to be. I think you ran 4:00/1500 and 1:58/800? Not where you needed to be right? So why hold a grudge against the coach at UWash or coaches in general?

In your post you come across as an entitled prick. 4:10-4:15 guys are a dime a dozen in college t and f. Why have a chip on your shoulder against the coaches? Own your failures man.

Congrats to you on your transfer to UMiami. I hope it works out for you and by the looks of it, it already is. Just remember...a lot of those diamonds in the rough weren't given the time of day until they hit the big time.

Look up Michael Van Voorhis from Wisco, he ran on the club team for his first two(?) years. He came out of hs with your pr, 4:22. The year he made the team he ran 14:06 for 5k. Has since run 13:57. The coach didn't put him on the team until he could contribute.

Thank you.

However, you have your opinion and I have mine. It is ridiculously harder to run on your own and train by yourself then it is to run on a team. I've done both and would know. I made the decision in February that I wanted to transfer even if I was offered a spot there. When I ran my 1500pr in May I didn't even bother to go to the coach. The standard I was told was 4:15 or 1:54 to make the team I ran 4:00 which is 4:16 pace and converts to a 4:17 1600. That may have been good enough to have made the team. I'll never know, I'm not sure how flexible the standards were.

I'd like to end this discussion about recruiting. I realize I brought it up, but it isn't the focus of this thread