HS CC: Never finished outside of top 10 my Jr./Sr. years, won most local races and a few invitationals.
College D1 CC: 1st race - 65th place.
HS CC: Never finished outside of top 10 my Jr./Sr. years, won most local races and a few invitationals.
College D1 CC: 1st race - 65th place.
Reed Brown ran sub 4 in high school and he is on Oregon's JV DMR.
My first 8k in college, I split over a minute faster than I'd ever run for 5k, en route to 8k. At the conference meet that fall I went through the first mile in 4:30, and was at least halfway back in the pack.
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A joke to you? Look at the times from Paul Short Brown 8k yesterday. With your times that you mentioned you’d be 5th-6th man on a good d3 xc squad
Oldtimer68 wrote:
A joke to you? Look at the times from Paul Short Brown 8k yesterday. With your times that you mentioned you’d be 5th-6th man on a good d3 xc squad
Let's be honest. D3 is a joke compared to D1. We all know that.
It depends on what you want to get out of it. Do you want to compete with the top runners in the country, and see how far you can get? Or do you want to run to enjoy the sport?
In both academics and athletics in college, what you get depends on what you put into it.
Form a good relationship with college coach and be on the same page as far as your goals, their goals for you and what your running career might look like. I went to two different schools, first D1 and then D2. D1 was a walk on, coach was a really good coach, but lacked common communication skills. He was going through a divorce at the time and I myself could have definitely communicated better. I finished every high school race 10th-12th grade in the top 5% besides state, went D1 and was battling not to get last place every meet, as a mid to low 16s 5k runner. I never expected a scholarship from this D1 program, so I never had that "pressure", but I put so much pressure on myself. I ended up not doing track that spring and transferred. In hind sight, really wish I would have stuck with it and gotten a degree from first school and enjoyed running more. Teammates were mostly great, bought in, my relationship with coach was spotty to non existent. Yes he accepted me to try out for the team, called me in summer, stated what I had to do to make the team. Ended up making the team, then my wheels fell off and my love for the sport. It is pretty cutthroat, always someone looking to take your spot.
As another poster said, don't focus so much on D1, D2, D3, NAIA, all the divisions overlap. Look for a great coach and talk to runners who have a similar story to yours and how you could succeed.
I was a decent runner in high school not great, top few runners in the state but was outside of the range of making a shot at footlocker nationals and would just go with the best medal I could get in mind. I did an official visit but wasn’t recruited really for D1. I knew what was coming in D1 as my siblings both ran but it still couldn’t prep me for those workouts.
Unless you’re at one the top programs in your state maybe even in the nation you’ve never touched anything like doing 8000m or 10000m of work. It wasn’t until my junior year honestly I could get a grasp on them. The mileage/tempos/etc. is all manageable but the workouts are the hardest part.
Although it has been extremely hard I’ve gotten so much faster (:50 in 3k PR 1:20 in 5k PR) and it has been the most rewarding part of my life to be able to score and help your team win that I’ve worked to be apart of for years. If you’re not great going in don’t expect to be in the starting 7 right out the gate. You WILL be out of your league at the start unless your a phenom but just keep an eye on your progress if you decide to stick around.
Yep! That's what it is kind of like for a lot of athletes making the move from high school XC to D1 college XC.
“…it has been the most rewarding part of my life to be able to score and help your team win that I’ve worked to be apart of for years. If you’re not great going in don’t expect to be in the starting 7 right out the gate. You WILL be out of your league at the start unless your a phenom but just keep an eye on your progress.”
There are so many great stories like this in XC. Life-lessons about work ethic and perseverance that will be part of your character forever. Well done and thanks for sharing.
pin oak wrote:
There have already been some good replies.
I would say that the biggest difference between high school and a reputable D1 xc program is the practices, or to be more specific, the workouts.
The easy days, steady state runs, and even the tempos are generally doable for your "average" 15:00-15:30 hs xc walk on at a solid D1 program.
What gets tough are the 8 x 1k on 1 minute rest, 6 x mile and 3 x 2 mile workouts. At the program I was at, the coach basically wrote down a top 7 time standard and a scrub time standard. If you wanted to travel, you better hit the top 7 time standard for every repeat.
Looking back, this wasn't the best system for myself and I think more programs individualize and bring runners along slowly than back in the old days. That said every coach knows if he makes it to mid November with 5 really fast guys, 2 solid guys and 5 injured/ burnt out guys he's better off than having 2 really fast guys and 10 solid guys.
Also, an 8k race takes a lot more out of you than a 5k. An all out 10k is even worse. Because of this, most programs have cut back the number of races over the past 20 years which is generally helpful to developing runners.
One other notable difference is the need to be able to consistently run in traffic. A 24:30 8k runner at a competitive program will basically run shoulder to shoulder with a dozen other runners every step of their entire race season. The best national class runners typically negatively split their races but that is a whole different deal.
In terms of picking a school, I would not worry too much about D1 vs DIII or P5 vs mid- major. In any case, you have to cover the usual items regardless of the load. When I was studying I was looking for an essay about education on https://writingbros.com/essay-examples/education/ doing all my free time running. If the team will let you on, you like the coach, are comfortable with the other runners on the team, and would consider going to the school even if you weren't running then that's the school for you.
Interesting point, I think a lot depends on the approach of the trainer, not just the program.
This is Jim Kiler wrote:
I won state, and a year later, was redshirting.
At a club meet I narrowly beat a senior who had won state in my state four years earlier, and we were both back a few dozen spots. I went through the 5K nearly a minute faster than I'd run a year earlier in winning.
My eyes were open that day.
I was thinking about this- how many high schools are there in the USA? How many cross runners?
How many colleges are there with cross country teams? Add in foreign runners who come in and run, what % of US High School runners run in college?
Even the bad college runners are the cream of the crop from high school.
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