Beckham wrote:
[quote]runnerfan wrote:
Ok give me a fact only a huntsvillian would know.
Hmm.. North parkway was under construction for the better part of 30 years?
There was a Toys R Us and mall on the corner of University and Memorial Parkway years ago. (where planet fitness is now)
I do know I attended all of the city council meetings when this XC course project was being debated.[/quot
Sure you were.
Shifter,
It is probably quickest to point you to some of my previous posts of detail on page 4 and page 9 of this thread.
The absolutely crazy times (the competition was absolutely nuts) were due to a bit of perfect storm. Weather was excellent (particularly the first race and half). It was even more excellent at the Southern Showcase in September that you are referring to because the temps and humidity were similar, but even more overcast to hide the sun. A good point of comparison is some of the 2019 events, which were quite a bit warmer. In particular the college races in 2019 were a good bit hotter and more humid to their 2020 counterparts (which were the morning of Southern Showcase this time around). The individual differences between those two college meets are quite telling. As anyone from hot/humid environments knows (and here that means 75F with 100% relative humidity before sunup as a typical summer day), the difference over 3 to 5 miles is significant.
A good illustrator of what field depth on a nice course with a hot pace does are the results from the CIF State XC meet in 2010 (where it was actually a tad drizzly), which were historically deep for Woodward Park. If you merged the D1, 2, and 3 races they possibly would have gotten more wild (slowest winner was 15:00 between those 3). Multiply that 5 fold and that resembles the caliber of the field from the Boys Championship race this past weekend. Similar to what happens at Arcadia in the 3200. Perfect storms are few and far between, but occasionally occur. This past weekend was a fortuitous combination of weather, depth of field, style of race (they got out hot...but not too hot), and energy at the venue.
Lastly, it is important to note that this facility is intended to evolve to the level of prestige of a LaVern Gibson, or an Apalachee Regional Park, or a Wisconsin Zimmer. Hence no expense, no measurement, no feature has been spared. Of course people question the level of insanity from a time perspective at the event in question. Had I not been present, I would have asked "where did they move the starting line to?" based alone on the magnitude of the result (Spoiler alert: start, finish, and turns were in the proper place). But hopefully I have been able to shed some additional detail on the discussion.
There is no way that this course is an accurate 5K. There are kids from pancake flat Florida who PR'd by over 30 seconds well under 16 which is typically not the time range that you get tons of 30 second PR's. The week prior most of these guys couldn't even break 15:30 at a fast course in Tallahassee at their State meet. That many guys breaking 15 is unheard of in a 5K, just look at any of the NXR Regional meets that have top individuals racing. Incredible that a course that was "designed" and so much money spent on is short even by a foot. I have no issue with milesplit and others touting how good the competition was but reporting it as a 5K is a disservice to the kids who ran.
Nota5K wrote:
There is no way that this course is an accurate 5K. There are kids from pancake flat Florida who PR'd by over 30 seconds well under 16 which is typically not the time range that you get tons of 30 second PR's. The week prior most of these guys couldn't even break 15:30 at a fast course in Tallahassee at their State meet. That many guys breaking 15 is unheard of in a 5K, just look at any of the NXR Regional meets that have top individuals racing. Incredible that a course that was "designed" and so much money spent on is short even by a foot. I have no issue with milesplit and others touting how good the competition was but reporting it as a 5K is a disservice to the kids who ran.
You big mad.
As a side not over the last two years alone there have been multiple improvements and upgrades made to the gps satellite system which has resulted in much greater accuracy. I guess you forgot about that.
Nota5K wrote:
There is no way that this course is an accurate 5K. There are kids from pancake flat Florida who PR'd by over 30 seconds well under 16 which is typically not the time range that you get tons of 30 second PR's. The week prior most of these guys couldn't even break 15:30 at a fast course in Tallahassee at their State meet. That many guys breaking 15 is unheard of in a 5K, just look at any of the NXR Regional meets that have top individuals racing. Incredible that a course that was "designed" and so much money spent on is short even by a foot. I have no issue with milesplit and others touting how good the competition was but reporting it as a 5K is a disservice to the kids who ran.
I guess you shoulda been there! The City of Huntsville took the Field of Dreams approach. "If you build it, they will come". Kids wanna run fast, HS, College, it doesn't matter. I don't care that a bunch of you old codgers are on the interwebs saying "back in my day you had to run through 6 inches of water and mud in order for it to be a cross country course". Each and everyone one of you doubting the kids are just J E A L O U S
Look you get 32 sub 15s and the number of significant PRs and people have every right to question the validity of the results. I think the issue from everything I have been told is that the course is an outlier. No law against fast or in this case very fast courses. But it makes fair comparisons impossible.
astro wrote:
Look you get 32 sub 15s and the number of significant PRs and people have every right to question the validity of the results. I think the issue from everything I have been told is that the course is an outlier. No law against fast or in this case very fast courses. But it makes fair comparisons impossible.
Noone should ever be comparing cross country course, it is pointless!
True.
It's a 167 speed rating.... the only thing that makes this legit is if all these kids go out and set records on the track by 10 or 20 seconds
Bill ton of work into his speed ratings and I trust those a lot more than I trust some guys arguing for why it has to be legit
bill is totally impartial obviously doesn't have a reason either way but a lot of people obviously are trying to justify their PRS
Don Mauer wrote:
TN runner1 wrote:
Has anyone said this course is the same as a really tough course? Of course not. Several claimed it was short and when that was debunked, they shifted to claiming its mostly downhill which is also false. This is a legitimate, fast 5k course. As is the case with all xc courses, the only real comparison is to other times run on the same course.
What do you mean debunked?? Everything that people have said about the measurement has pretty much proved that it was short. There have been several people pointing out that the GPS watches in the race are giving measurements that are right around 3.11 miles. This proves the course is short. There are some people that want to believe that GPS watches will produce very accurate measurements for XC courses, but this is just not the case. The vast majority of watches are going to give a measurement that is significantly longer than the actual distance. You always have that one guy that will come in and say their GPS watch measures short but they are very much the minority. The vast majority of kids that we coach have worn GPS watches for at least 10 years now and they ALWAYS give measurements that are longer than the actual distance. Any time that people are saying that a course is "lightning" fast, you can pretty much take it to the bank that the course is short. This doesn't mean that these kids ran slow or that they are not any good, it just means that they didn't run a 5k XC race. They ran a race that was close to 5k. No big deal.
Wrong. The guy who helped build the course gave us a detailed description of the lengths they went to in order to make sure the course was a true 5k. A couple of people said they wheeled it and came up 5 or 10 meters short which is nothing, especially on a course this wide with a number of turns. The course is fast, but that's not because it's short.
Also why would we automatically say wow! What are we just blind sheep that automatically follow whatever..... that's good advice should be a gullible idiot who believes anything
But I will say Jenna Hutchins is having a great season definitely top five and maybe even third best all-time
Nota5K wrote:
There is no way that this course is an accurate 5K. There are kids from pancake flat Florida who PR'd by over 30 seconds well under 16 which is typically not the time range that you get tons of 30 second PR's. The week prior most of these guys couldn't even break 15:30 at a fast course in Tallahassee at their State meet. That many guys breaking 15 is unheard of in a 5K, just look at any of the NXR Regional meets that have top individuals racing. Incredible that a course that was "designed" and so much money spent on is short even by a foot. I have no issue with milesplit and others touting how good the competition was but reporting it as a 5K is a disservice to the kids who ran.
Wolfe ran 14:30 for 5k in September on a course at altitude and only ran 4 seconds faster here. Strand is a 4:10 (2 years ago)/9:10 (indoors) guy and he finished 14th and ran. Steury is a 4:12/8:57 guy and he finished 17th. Do you think its surprising that 9-minute guys can break 15 minutes for 5k on a fast course? The 20th ranked guy on the milesplit 50, Sam Rich, finished 23rd. There were 15 guys coming into this race who had broken 15 minutes on other courses. As Bruce pointed out, this was a stacked field running on a very fast course in great conditions. It is pretty pitiful that there are so many who feel compelled to try and discount these performances rather than just marvelling at what can happen when you put together an extremely strong field and the conditions are ideal for a historically fast race.
Not to quibble but the 14:30 was set on a road course, Someone noted that earlier in the thread and photos of the Heritage course seem to bare this out.
The course was built in 2019 and 2020 are the first races on it. In that time we have seen a 19 year old state record fall at the Southern Showcase and the latest sub 15 fest. When that happens on a brand new, newly constructed course it raises questions. Which even prompted someone familiar with the course design to try to address it. I think it is an ultra fast course with design features intended to facilitate extreme fast times, and I think it will establish that reputation as a course history develops.
astro wrote:
The course was built in 2019 and 2020 are the first races on it. In that time we have seen a 19 year old state record fall at the Southern Showcase and the latest sub 15 fest. When that happens on a brand new, newly constructed course it raises questions. Which even prompted someone familiar with the course design to try to address it. I think it is an ultra fast course with design features intended to facilitate extreme fast times, and I think it will establish that reputation as a course history develops.
Please don't respond if you do not know what you're talking about. The course was completed in 2019 there were races in 2019 both invitationals and sectionals there. This year there was the southern showcase sectionals metro meets etc all hosted on this course.
Ok I stand corrected. Built in 2019 and there were a few races on it in 2019. Which does not change anything.
Just a few tidbits that some may find interesting.
Some numbers for the the earlier season race at the course that I speed-rated (The Southern Showcase, Sept 19) indicate the course was a bit faster on that day than at the RunningLane Nats race ... A quick search found 80 boys and girls that ran both the Showcase races and the Gold RunningLane races ... 9 were initially excluded as outliers (ran either a minute or more faster or slower at one of races) ... For the remaining 71 runners:
42 were faster at Showcase
29 were faster at RunningLane Gold
Median difference: 6.4 seconds faster at the Showcase.
... And that had nothing to do with how the RunningLane races were speed-rated ... it is just confirming data ... I expected more runners would be "fitter" at the later season race, but sometimes that doesn't happen at year-end races.
Jenna Hutchins was excluded as an outlier data point when I speed-rated the girls race ... Her speed rating was determined by how fast the other girls ran relative to each other as correlated by their seasonal speed ratings with exclusion of outlier data ... The resulting value of 167 for Jenna Hutchins simply reflects how well she ran relative to the other girls in her race, and it is neither generous nor under-rated (most people think I under-rated her when, in fact, I did not even consider her in the deriving stats).
Direct correlation between the boy's and girl's races is skewed because the quality of the boy's race was better than the girl's race.
If we can conservatively put Wolfe as 8:47 shape, then Hutchins is in about 9:42, which is very reasonable given previous efforts. I think in an ideal well-paced competitive race she goes under 9:40/15:40 (track 5000), as does Thorvaldson.
Ouf... just saw her run. Painful to watch. Gidey she is not. She is certainly strong, but her hip, knee and ankle alignment is completely off. In addition, she has very low back kick and knee lift...
Why are there so many strong HS girls with terrible form. I mean her form is not the worse, but certainly very bad for a sub 16 XC runner.