USATF changes 50km worlds team selection criteria 3 months before window closes

I can’t believe anyone intending to require a 3:00 50k at the championships would write the the words on the USATF website. For anyone to assume the vague reference to (2) needed to be met in the race there would need to be significant historical precedent for treating national championships this way. In track and field I am not aware of any such precedent.

Exactly.

I'd love to hear about the time that a qualifying time had to be achieved IN the championship race to be an automatic qualifier. It might have happened, and I would welcome being educated on that. I would certainly be surprised if it happened in recent history.

The precedent that I think we all know is:

1) Finish in a qualifying position at Nationals

AND

2) Run a qualifying time in any official race sometime in the qualifying window.

OP:
5 pages of complaining about the USATF 50k Team management is going to, at best, make for a very awkward time in South Africa this May. Lin is a great human and I know a couple people in this thread would attest to that, so I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish here.

Sub 3 has always been the A standard for this race as they are looking for competitive people that can run fast beyond the marathon. Sometimes the weather is pretty bad at the champs because its in NY in March and those years they have been kind to accepting good marathoners. Still, I've made the team twice and turned down a team once and the entire team was sub 3, both times. Your marathon PR is LIKELY to get you in, but if 6 dudes run sub 3 at Caumsett this year (VERY unlikely) you're out of luck.

If I were you I'd delete this thread and seek out a Euro 50k to do because with your PR a sub 3 is quite easy. I ran a 2:52 in Sketchers in the snow. Otherwise you're really not coming off looking great here dude

The OP has poor reading comprehension. They don’t want a joker winning the Championship in 3:00 plus hours and be auto-qualified. The procedures were clearly stated before the race, and if the OP was too stupid to understand them he should have asked for clarification.

What is with all of these USATF apologists? Being a "great human" doesn't mean that person is infallible. And if this Lin person is as great as you say, this is a prime opportunity for that person to corroborate that and say, "Yikes, yeah, that wording is completely misleading and we made a mistake." I'd even go so far as to assume that if they handled this in a more polite and solution-driven way [based on what OP has shared here], this thread wouldn't have been started in the first place.

Additionally, are you not completely discounting the difficulty of your niche event in the running world? Maybe running ultras is not as hard as you all make it out to be if one can just, ya know, go out in their sketchers and run the A standard of a WORLD CHAMPS TEAM?

I'd love a similar scenario to play out at a shorter distance. "Hey sorry random 2:17 marathon runner, your time actually doesn't qualify you for the marathon trials in 2024 due to our clear mistake. Just go out and run that time again next week and all will be kosher."

Did you literally miss the whole point of his post? Running a Euro 50k in sub 3 would not help him in any way under the interpretation USATF is claiming. He already has the marathon standard.

More like a scenario where someone runs the A Standard in the marathon to qualify for the trials. Finishes top 3 in the trials. And then is told they didn't automatically qualify for the team because they didn't run the A Standard in the trials.

I'd recommend a different approach, given that he already has auto-qualified according to their written requirements.

He should simply write them an email and accept the spot that he has earned, before they announce a team.

If they then announce a team that he is not on, immediately file for an injunction.

He probably just wants USATF to do a half-a$$ed job instead of a quarter-a$$ed job. We would probably all be thrilled if they could step up their game from completely incompetent to mediocre.

I've been following this thread and posted above. So far, I agree with OP. But in thinking more about this, I'm wondering what "auto-qualify" means. Auto-selection means you are on the team. But given that many people could run fast enough to auto-qualify, what does it really mean?

He didn’t auto-qualify. He didn’t run 3:00 or faster at the Championship.

Whoever wrote this email is a-hole.

Whether you agree or disagree with OP, I have some questions about his story. Most notably, you won a USATF championship and believed that you had almost achieved automatic selection for team. By your own admission, the text of the selection process hasn't been changed, only how it is interpreted (i.e. whether hitting a time later guarantees selection, or if the team needed to be achieved in the championship race). Did you confirm that with someone after the race? As you were being crowned USTAF 2022 50km champ, did you have any conversation with the USATF officials present? Before you ran the Florence Marathon hoping to hit a time that would, in your mind, guarantee your automatic selection for the national team, did you reach out to USATF to makes sure that was true or that USATF would even honor a time at Florence as being on a certified course?

It bears pointing out that the top three women at the championship did run under their time standard and are listed on the USATF website as meeting selection criteria. I also know that at least one of the top three spoke to officials that day and subsequently about what they needed to do to guarantee their selection to the national team. You had no contact with USATF until last week? You didn't clarify your understanding of the selection criteria for months? You didn't say, while being crowned champion, 'I really want to represent the US internationally and have run a 2:15 marathon in the past. If I hit a similar time again, would I be guaranteed selection?' You had no contact with USATF until last week? Over eight months of uncertainty about if you would be selected and not effort to figure out what you needed to do to ensure selection by USATF?

These are fair questions. After winning I had a discussion with a USATF official. When she mentioned the standards I shared with her that I had run under 2:22 in the LA marathon. This race was 1 or 2 weeks too early to count. In hindsight it is possible she was at this point discussing the standard for consideration and not auto-qualification, but it’s not how I interpreted things at the time.

When I looked at the standards I felt they were very clearly described. For further context, this is the (very different) wording in the 2022 100km team criteria:

”Those who meet the respective qualifying standards at any of the following 50 Mile well-established races also will be considered”

The reason I believed the rules had been changed is because I was sent a new version of the qualification standards with a bolder sentence added which requires the time be under 3:00.

I feel pretty strongly that qualification rules/criteria should not require discussion with an official. Veteran athletes know the committee and officials, but this is not the case for a newcomer.

The MUT community is small. Many can attest that this can be incredibly positive and welcoming, but it can also be isolating as a newcomer who does not know anyone (as was the case for me). It’s difficult to put myself out there and advocate for this - the entire community knows who I am and the committee has been made aware of this thread. I can only hope that 1) Qualification criteria are more clearly defined in the future 2) No precedent is set for changing or re-interpreting rules.

Send someone a bunch of nastygrams, and you just might get one in response.

He didn't have to.

He met the criteria.

Win Nationals.

Run a marathon or 50k fast enough.

Check. And check.

Boxes checked. His qualification is automatic.

Funny that there was a post about someone qualifying wearing Skechers because I think the original poster has actually run shorter distances faster than them in Skechers.

I do agree that coming on here and talking about this will make for an awkward situation if the original poster really wants to run on the US team, but I also think it’s great that he doesn’t want to let the usatf group do what they want to do just because they are in charge. I have always thought that the selection criteria for usatf ultra/trail racing is lagging. There should be a set race circuit and qualifying races every year. Everyone knows that Camsett is the 50k road championships, so the rules for qualifying for worlds should be more clearly publicized because the original runner is a talented runner and beat out other talented runners to win the race despite the time.

Also, people are not being accurate about the issue: running the time in the national championship is not an auto qualifier (as in the quote above); it's an auto selector (i.e., do it an you're on the team, not just qualified to be considered: "Automatic selection will be given"). That's why it makes sense to read the language as requiring winning and running the qualifying time in the same race: it's a step up from just winning or just running the qualifying time.

And to the person who said the use of "minimum performance standards" (plural) doesn't make sense, of course it does, as does the use of "forward looking" "are met" language: at least because there are men's and women's performance standards (thus the plural), and the rule is forward looking because it was issued before the races were to be run.

Yes he did have to run 3:00 or faster to be auto-qualified. Right now he’s only qualified because of his marathon, not auto-qualified.