Is The RunningLane Course 5K? Or Is It Short?

Cleaned up my errors above in bold

There is more variability in XC courses than in road. And by it's nature, XC is supposed include some difficulty. Otherwise they could just hold it on a road or track. How about a nice runway somewhere? Or salt-flats, with wind?

All I meant was that we should keep the course measurement rules separate from the course setup rules. Someone measuring the course has no power to force the course to be reconfigured. If someone does something stupid like having a straight 100 meter wide starting line 200 meters away from the first turn, then our job is to tell the measurer to start at the closest point on the start line to the turn. SPR. If anyone wants to take our advice on how to setup a fair starting line, then they should change the course setup rules, which already exist right? Dang, looks like I have to cough up another $10 bucks to the get the NFHS rule book again. i can't find it.

Nike is knocking wrote:

There are thousands of cross country meets held around the country. If the NFHS requires some type of standard measuring method, that will add a bunch of time and cost to the sport. I am fine with something as simple as saying that it must be the shortest possible route within 1 foot of boundaries. Tape is preferred. Wheel or GPS are sufficient. If GPS, readings must be taken forward and backward and the shortest measurement will be used.

Your distance to an inside boundary should be the beginning, I think steel taping many courses would be a nightmare with all of the course undulations, and the reality, for most courses, is that it really doesn't matter. I have no problem running on a course that is 200m short as long as it doesn't run like it is 200m short, but would prefer truth in advertising and list it as what it is - a slow, hilly course that is 4812m, or whatever. But when I go to a very flat school grounds course that has great grass or hard packed trails and a nice long down hill finish and it's only 4812m and all my kids run big lifetime PRs...they don't count with me, and I will convert to 5000m and add an * for short course converted.

Not that we need official rules for any of this. The minimum is to have a "best practices" method of measuring a XC course so we have some way to cut through all the confusion on course lengths. A little bit of diligence with a tape will get the job done.

Replies in bold above

lucy the unbanned wrote:

There is more variability in XC courses than in road. And by it's nature, XC is supposed include some difficulty. Otherwise they could just hold it on a road or track. How about a nice runway somewhere? Or salt-flats, with wind?

How about the old Mattoon Invitational in Illinois. 3 miles straight downhill on a road. 30 second PRs for everyone! We can't control everything, but we should be able to know how long it is. That's one variable we can remove from the equation.

Uh-oh Ward. You're way down the mission creep path. If NFHS wants to rewrite the rule book on course setup, I'm willing to help, but I'm certainly no expert on box width, finish line configuration, crowd control, safety concerns, etc. Making some recommendations to existing bad rules is as far as I would go.

DiscoGary wrote:

Uh-oh Ward. You're way down the mission creep path. If NFHS wants to rewrite the rule book on course setup, I'm willing to help, but I'm certainly no expert on box width, finish line configuration, crowd control, safety concerns, etc. Making some recommendations to existing bad rules is as far as I would go.

Distance from inside boundaries to measure from and creating a fair, equal distance to the first turn starting line shouldn't be too hard to list.

Ghost of Ward Cleaver wrote:

DiscoGary wrote:

Uh-oh Ward. You're way down the mission creep path. If NFHS wants to rewrite the rule book on course setup, I'm willing to help, but I'm certainly no expert on box width, finish line configuration, crowd control, safety concerns, etc. Making some recommendations to existing bad rules is as far as I would go.

Distance from inside boundaries to measure from and creating a fair, equal distance to the first turn starting line shouldn't be too hard to list.

That's true. We can create a very nice diagram showing how that should be done.

DiscoGary wrote:

Ghost of Ward Cleaver wrote:

Distance from inside boundaries to measure from and creating a fair, equal distance to the first turn starting line shouldn't be too hard to list.

That's true. We can create a very nice diagram showing how that should be done.

The NCAA Rules Book - pages 179-80 have a little info - no distance from inside boundaries to measure from, but a decent start line section - should give examples HOW to set this up...

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Interesting that the NCAA wants boxes 50cm per individual or 200cm for four up front on a team!

This is a little old but page 13 has the NFHS CC Rules - https://www.uiltexas.org/files/athletics/2019_-2020_NFHS_Track___Field_PowerPoint_Rules_Final.pdf

A newer version with more info pages 15-18

https://www.nfhs.org/media/3609791/2020-pmn_final.pdf

They only say the course should be measured along the shortest possible route. They don't say how the measurement should be done, but they do have a section on measuring the field events for track where they recommend "best practices". We could easily provide a "best practices" section for measuring cross country courses with a tape. Even adding this sentence would get us near where we want to be "The most accurate way to measure a cross country course is to use a tape measure following the shortest possible route."

The more detail on how to do it the better it would be.

Put spikes on the wheel. No slippage. Problem solved.

DiscoGary wrote:

D.Katz wrote:

The problem is not determining that any course qualifies as a "legit" cross country course. The real problem for the existence of this thread is that people want to recognize cross country records beyond course records. Otherwise this thread would have ended on page 1!

I disagree. I think this thread proves that people want to know how long a course is, because times are only meaningful when you know the course length. This is true for the average runner who gets their PR at some dual meet. Is that really a PR? Well, you don't know if the course length hasn't been reliably measured. Its been the bane of XC for a long time. I have no idea what my PR really was.

You have PRs for different courses. Even if there was a standard for cross country course measurement, and all the 5K courses were the same distance, your fastest time that you ran doesn't mean it was your best performance. It could just be the fastest course. Maybe you finished 10th in that fastest race among your usual competitors, but won a sloppy, muddy state championship against the same people in a time 2 minutes slower. That slower race might be the actual best performance.

I'd be happy to see times totally dissociated from cross country like how cross country skiers, cross country mountain bikers, or road cyclists don't care about the average pace/speed of a race and don't go around chasing PRs in race, instead focusing on racing the competitors. One way would be a shorter, more spectator friendly multi-lap format like cyclocross where the race is a certain amount of time on short laps, then one more lap after that. That wouldn't handle many people though. Another is what many, possibly most) cross country races actually are: not exact distances - but acknowledge that and don't try to pretend it's exactly 5,000 meters. I remember doing a USA cross country championship, and the official guide said the course was about 10,200 meters or something like that. That's cool. No one is pretending to run a PR on that course.

What you are proposing is already done in many places around the world and especially for the World Cross Country Championships. The goal is to have the distance as close to the originally advertised distance - ex: 10k, but once it is set up it's measured and the more accurate distance is announced. At the World XC, this happens a few days before the race. It should be noted that times are still used to assist with the scoring. Properly used transponder timing verified by digital imaging allows for fast results. I don't want to open Pandora's Box in a discussion on transponder timing but just wanted to point out that it is a very useful tool in this application. The times for XC are really meaningless outside of displaying the relative spacing of athletes in a race.

Cool Colorado Rain wrote:

Put spikes on the wheel. No slippage. Problem solved.

That changes the circumference of the wheel on different surfaces.

Applying some steady pressure down on the handle is all that is need, but that does take some practice.