Which collegiate cross country/track & field team has the harshest winter training conditions?

wisconsin native wrote:

Hands down it has to be any college in the range of North Dakota, South Dakota, & Eastern Montana. Nothing compares to treeless areas with high winds when it's cold.

Miami is probably a close second with it's other awful extreme . . . . mugginess.

Yep, Miami in the winter we're dying with 70's weather. that's extreme. Humidity is way down for the winter months in Miami-Dade and Broward county. We can't wait to train in Syracuse or Vermont or North Dakota. That 70's weather is just so brutal, I can't stand wearing shorts and a tee shirt all day and watching all those bikinis at the beach and at the pool.

I have worked and run in just about every State and run in some tough conditions(e.g., Alaska in winter, Phoenix in summer). For me, the toughest runs are in places that are very cold & very windy but don't have much snow on the ground. Somehow, a coating of snow makes me accept the cold to some extent. So, Amarillo Texas and Tonopah Nevada get my vote (except no colleges in Tonopah).

In Grand Forks today, there are eight inches of new snow on the ground (on top of the 10+ that are already there). Temps are nice (around 20F, 15mph winds) due to the warm air that brought in all the snow. But once that is gone, it will be back into the single digits until the next big arctic high drops us below zero for most of January and February. Running outside for the next week to ten days will be brutal, due to very limited access to the sidewalks. Lots of ankle biting, twisting, slick footing, etc. Roads are also slick and dangerous, but that's about the only choice unless you have a treadmill, which the university teams don't really have access to.

I would say that Bates may be tough, but when you go another hour or so north to Orono, you hit a whole new world of hurtin

I can't imagine this discussion getting past the following schools:

Alaska Fairbanks, for the misery of running in the dark AND the cold.

Minot State (ND).. having lived in NW Iowa and Eastern South Dakota, there is nothing worse than the NW wind at 30-40 mph in the winter. The farther NW you go on the prairie, the worse it gets.

Big Chilly Style wrote:

The farther NW you go on the prairie, the worse it gets.

Minot averages:

Grand Forks averages:

GF is colder in every category (avg high, low, and record low temp), and windier due to its location in a river valley. Minot is somewhat sheltered by hills and rolling terrain. Minot sucks, don't get me wrong, but it's verifiably false to say that the weather gets worse the further NW one goes.

I'm not saying its the worst but I ran @ Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste Marie, MI (da U.P. eh?)

I have fond memories of 6:30am runs during blizzards and below 0 temps. Some of the guys thought I was goofy when I wore my ski goggles on those days but after the run they all wished they had thought of it too...

2 solid months of temps in the teens at best and one sunny day a week if you're lucky, probably not the worst but certainly up there

SUNY Plattsburgh!

Alaska Fairbanks does not have a real cross team (they only have nordic skiers that run) and they do not have a track team.

Alaska Anchorage is the running school in Alaska and they have it way better than most of the northern schools in the US.

I can't imagine anything worse than the midwest wind, cold, and flat, open land.

Regina or Manitoba. I'll give Regina the nod because the majority of Toba runners just run in max bell all winter. Having trained in Winnipeg, however, I can attest to how awful it is running outside some days. No trees and no elevation to block the winds leads to some very cold days.

Additionally, Winnipeg has some ridiculous temperature fluctuations. It has been known to fluctuate 150 (150!) degrees farenheit in one year from winter to summer. Go from -50 to 100.

Neither Toba or Regina are top end D1 schools, so I don't know how they play into the argument, but both are on par or better than a lot of the northern MN and ND schools being mentioned.

Anywhere in Kansas, Nebraska, and, as previously mentioned, in the Dakotas and Minnesota. Iowa can get bad as well.

Southern Cal has the worst training conditions in the winter. With the slight wind that they get, those poor runners have to pick up palm tree branches in the middle of the road. And I heard one of the guys got his hand pricked from the branches. And he started to bleed.

Yep, USC has the toughest conditions during the winter.

Everyone chimming in with how terrible it is in Florida and Tempe are just HILLARIOUS. Informative and clever.

What about a school without an indoor track? All these schools have harsh conditions, but you can just go inside and run on the 400 meter tracks (in Alaska) and the indoor tracks in ND. What about Oakland University in Rochester, MI? No indoor track (a D1 school...how does that make sense?) and no place to hide during the winter. Also, it's very close to Detroit. In fact, what about the University of Detroit? They have no indoor track to hide in, and nowhere besides Detroit to run in. So not only are there no trails and only shit buildings everywhere, Detroit is consistently in the top 5 for crime rate per capita every year.