USATF club XC debacle

The top finishers got medals, the teams were scored, and team titles were awarded. What’s the issue? A race was held and champions crowned. Better luck next year! Extrapolate your GPS data to get a 10K time.

Two key features of Jamin’s operating system.

The finish chute was already set up for a clockwise finish. Plus I think there was less wind that way- the dense trees around the track were a pretty effective windbreak. If they had raced the other way you would have been facing a headwind on the back strait after it had blown across the wide-open center of the track. And I think they put the start where they did so you could have a full straitaway before people cut in on the curve.

For those who care, USATF must have measured the course as it was run. The results paces were updated from 10k to 6.0175 miles overnight. Given it was on a track, GPS may be off a little bit each way and that seems about right to me.

Hocker's time equates to a 27:22 10k, Hasz to an 18:28 6k, and Reyes to a 29:51 10k. Reyes race may have been most impressive because it was run in horrible conditions.

That’s definitely too long. I can tell you from my personal race that I definitely didn’t run 6 miles in that time

I got 5.9 miles on my watch, as did many, many others. Saw as high as 6.1 and as low as 5.85, so around six seems about right to me. Although the truth is nobody ran the same distance because of passing lapped guys, being lapped and preference of lines.

Agreed. Probably 5.85-5.90 for most people. Laps are a known distance: 0.75 miles. We would have had to run exactly 8 laps for it to be 6 miles. I know that as a practical matter it was hard to run the tangents (not impossible since they were just big puddles and some people were running through the puddles), but calling it 6.01 is silly. How would they even have come up with that distance? It would be impossible to know what lines people took, and the 5.80 that Tom Bernhard mentioned earlier on this thread is probably the correct "official" distance and any additional distance due to not running tangents is fun to talk about but meaningless.

It was a real tactical choice about running a shorter distance inside on a much wetter surface or longer outside on a somewhat drier surface.

Well, at a minimum we know each lap was slightly longer than the .75 mile that the oval is purported to be due to the coned off water on the turn just after the finish line. I don't think I saw anyone trudging through that and assuming people stayed to the left of those cones they were forced at least somewhat to the outside at the start of that turn. Over 8 laps I would not be surprised if this added up to an additional 0.1 mile turning the 5.8 miles calculated above into more like 5.9.

The protest period after each heat is short and has already past. The officials were put in a difficult position trying to track hundreds of runners. Fortunately, the timer is one of the very best in the country, so I believe any important cheating will have been caught. As far as the podium and prize money is concerned, I'm sure they got it right. We were fortunate the Polo Field track was there to provide an alternative, though not ideal, course.

Only Americans care about an exact distance and weather for XC. It’s meant to be much SLOWER than a mondo track. The conditions are what make XC different than track. European XC is much more interesting to watch because it’s actually XC.

I think the times are only really relevant in terms of comparing a gap from one competitor to another within the same race.

Even though the Men's Masters (40-59) and Men's Open race were the same course and distance, the conditions felt very different. There were big wind gusts and bouts of rain during the Masters race, but the winds had really died down and I don't recall much/any rain during the Open.

The Men's Masters also had to deal with having their warmup completely disrupted. The announcement that the race was delayed came out 5-10 minutes before scheduled gun time, and the race started ~55 minutes later than originally scheduled. That's a looooong time to stay warm and loose while already wet.

That said, it was a really unique experience, and its pretty far up the list in terms of races that I will remember and consider fun. There was something very cool about the exact distance getting thrown out, and the officials just saying, "We'll start here, run this many laps, and finish there. Got it? Ok, let's go!"

Really enjoying the race summaries... Anyone else want to share?

YOUR MOVE CENTRO

Those times are still ridiculously fast.

I don't care what the course distance was in most XC races as long as it is in the ballpark. In this case probably 9.4-9.5K for a hastily modified 10k. The original course was probably pretty accurate as originally laid out. USATF did the right thing to run the races on polo field after being shut down by park rangers. Everybody in each race dealt with the same conditions. The result was pretty good considering the last minute change.

Most of what I saw wasn't what I would classify as cheating. It was guys at the back of the pack being told the wrong number of laps because they were in a huge pack and officials couldn't tell what lap they were on. Some also may well have stepped off the track and dropped out. Wasn't ideal but was something which will be talked about for years to come, and was a lot of fun to run.

7 and 3/4 laps isn't too hard to count...I managed to do it...and I'm a moran...would have liked to know how I actually stacked up in the Masters race...

Unfortunately I left my road flats in our rental so I ended up racing in my trainers (spikes didn't seem ideal)...the interrupted warm up was probably the biggest bummer...I was shivering the first mile or so of the race...my watch showed 6.08...but I spent a lot of the race in the middle of the track getting around lapped traffic/avoiding mud.

The race officials made the best of a bad situation and I'm glad no one got hurt when that tree went down. I saw one poor 60+ master digging through the branches to get his warm ups out.

I agree. It was a one of a kind experience. I do wonder what the races/times would be like if they had a race around that track that was planned like the Twilight 5000s, or maybe Twilight 10000s. I bet lots of people could PR if they were prepped for it and in better conditions. Some people had extrapolated PRs based off Strava. Though it'd probably lose some of the magic if it was planned. It was a great experience.