Valby lost b/c she was horrible with the tangents

Agree completely with this. This is something that needs to be coached. Every single great athlete in any sport does things instinctively that might work at a lower levels but becomes a hinderance at higher levels. That’s where coaching comes in. It’s their responsibility to get the athlete to understand how certain instinctive things need to be altered. Heck, football coaches get their players to fundamentally understand what angles to take and I’m pretty sure a lot of those guys aren’t math wizards. Yet could you imagine a player after a game saying they missed tackles because they don’t really know what angles are? Warby is a phenomenal talent who needs better coaching than what she’s seems to be getting.

The actual quote was “My coach keeps telling me this. I never run the tangents on any race. I don’t really know what the tangents are. I don’t know how to tell what they are. So I always just follow the cart and so I always end up running more than I should be. But it is what it is.”

Just telling her over and over to run the tangents isn’t coaching. If your athlete is saying they know it’s a problem and they don’t understand how to fix it then as a coach it’s your job to explain it to them so they do understand. The response shouldn’t be “it is what it is”. There’s a difference between coaching and telling.

People saying Valby could beat KT right now didn't really understand what they saw yesterday, IMHO. Valby was close because KT hung back long enough to ensure her spot in the team race was secure; once KT decided to close that gap she just mowed Parker down in shockingly short order. Line them up 1 on 1 with no one else in the race on the same course and KT wins 20 out of 20 times. That race was nowhere near as close as it looked, exciting though it was.

Whether she lost to Tuohy or not because of the path she chose to follow is debatable but it is not debatable that Valby was clueless about either how to run the shortest line possible or that by running the shortest line possible you prevent giving up ground on your competition.

I find it shocking for an athlete at this level to be ignorant to such a basic concept. Really, this should be intuitive for any older child or adult of average intelligence right away, but certainly after you've run a couple of track or XC races. And for coach S not to identify and correct this issue by now with his athlete competing at this level is equally baffling, unless, of course, he's discussed it with her and she just doesn't get it.

I'll have to say that in the pre-race interviews, she did not sound like the sharpest tool in the shed. Perhaps it could be chalked up to being nervous under the spotlight but it was pretty bad how she couldn't form a well articulated and thought out response to the questions she was presented.

She only runs 25-30 mpw and a ton of Elliptical. Dang, so much more potential for this lady if she knew Geometry and trained properly.

why do you call it a tangent. tangents are straight lines. she is running a bend.

elliptical is smart for easy runs. saves the muscles for tempo/threshold/interval/hill days and gets the same aerobic workout.

I'm in camp Valby FTW but this is the most logical answer. When it comes to women and math problems beyond arithmetic and especially those that involve situational critical thinking, I completely support the sentiment that "anything is possible."

When I was a sophomore in college (at a selective engineering school) taking the non-Physics/Chem lab to satisfy my degree requirement, I saw some very troubling things. I'll never forget how on the first quiz, one of the questions was "Draw a cube where each side is 1cm in length." It was supposed to be a dead-simple directive to get you to use the correct end of a ruler. Instead, I had multiple ... people ... asking me to draw cubes for them. Some even left the question blank.

Look at her track performances, every xc performance this year, and the bare admission that she didn't know what tangents are. I fear that we are dealing with a prototypical "doesn't get math" person who Solinsky is struggling to educate, rather than a completely savage racer whose coach doesn't have common sense. She lost this race due to tangents and course management--she even said in an interview that she made her move so early because she was "annoyed" by something in the front pack which I took to mean she was kinda unsettled after giving up a slight lead when she went in the wrong direction on the U-turn.

This "annoyance" goes back to 2021 when she was leading slightly through 4000m on the same course and got tripped up while (typically)drifting wide on a turn, but while amidst the front pack (I went back and watched it). In yesterday's interview she remembered it as hitting the ground when in fact she managed to stay on her feet but in any case it screwed up her stride and may have injured her slightly as she fell back and finished 27th (Tuohy actually hit the dirt in the other champs and finished 24th; weird parallel).

I think her determination to really break clear of the pack stems from her frustration with that particular race, almost a PTSD reaction to "get out of there". As I stated earlier, she races on impulse rather than strategy, in contrast to Tuohy. It is interesting how much stronger the Tuohy/Henes alliance is strategically than the Valby/Solinsky, but it makes for topnotch entertainment!

My down vote is entirely a response to your first clause

Tuohy was the stronger runner and held back only from the need to insure a high finish for the team. However, she might not have made it to Valby had the latter run the shortest possible distance. I never even heard that phrase, run the tangents, until I was an adult coming back to running in my 30s, and the idea of running the shortest possible distance is a bit more complicated than that. Valby had not needed to run the shortest possible distance prior to this race because she was so much better than everyone else this year. But try explaining what 'run the tangents' means. I haven't seen anyone explain that here. To run the shortest possible distance, you will usually be hugging the curve and then running a straight line from there to the vanishing point of the next curve as soon as you can see it. Sometimes, then, you don't want to hug the curve because the next curve is on the opposite side (S curve, for instance) and you actually want to go about halfway/the middle and then turn toward the next vanishing point of the curve (the tangent). I was going to link one article about doing this, but there are many, so I'm just linking the search results. In other words, a lot of people have trouble with this and it really helps to know the course on a course like OSU, which she hadn't run before. With runners much better than everyone else they have faced up to a championship, you get stuff like this, not knowing how to run in a pack without being tripped and so wanting to front-run, not running the shortest possible distance, going to the front too soon. But just think of the potential here when or if she is able to run in the pack, to run 'the tangents', to run high mileage, to run a lot more hills, and to be acclimated to such conditions (all of which she admitted to missing).

https://www.google.com/search?q=explanation+of+running+the+tangents&oq=explanation+of+running+the+tangents&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i546l3.5193j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Tuohy was just stronger. She was at 5 seconds by the 4.93 mark and it was over. She caught her well before the final turn and has better kick.

That said, Valby needs to work on her race tactics. Trying to outstrength the field does not work against a stronger opponent, and running inefficiently definitely does not help.

Valby tends to go off on a tangent.

Could not have said it better. What kind of fitness do you have to be in to let a 12 second gap grow on the OK state course and believe you can run someone down, and then do it? Valby did not slow down, and she was moving fast.

KT is fit enough she could have just run that pace with Valby and then kicked. The gap was big because KT decided to pack run, which was their race strategy.

BTW, all the editors at TSR agree with you. This race was not lost because of tangents.

She can't handle the centripetal forces required to hug the turns.

She can't handle the centripetal forces required to hug the turns.

Valby talks and races like an inexperienced front runner who needs more experience in big races. She’s also disadvantaged vs. KT by having no real teammates to give her repetition running in a group. KT on the other hand has run in a host of big meets since early HS and has had elite teammates for several years. Recall all the discussion last year regarding Kiptoo’s questionable racing tactics. He started to change his racing approach but it took some time. Hopefully Valby will learn from this experience, get more exposure to elite racing and will apply those lessons.

You just made the same excuse for her.