Sliding Scale wrote:
Bit of a dick move; I have no problem letting the second squad compete in the varsity meet for the win. It looked liek a good competition for them (they won with depth and without a top three runner). Obviously this meet was below their top athletes. So why do it? I have never understood the workout through the meet mentality.
If you need to workout, then workout...just stay at home and tempo, do mile repeats or what ever on Friday (before the JV team departs) and then go easy on Saturday before a long run on Sunday. They would probably get a better workout in this way, and likely would have a better long run. Additionally, they would likely save some money on hotels, meals etc. (no idea where Lowell and Dartmouth are, maybe no hotels involved, but still).
I had the same thoughts initially, but I disagree now.
Sure, they could have just done a tempo themselves on their own fields, but there are a lot of elements that an organized, legitimate race has that you can't simulate on your own.
Race Atmosphere = The set time that you must prepare and be ready for (warmups, getting spiked up, pre-race strides, getting to the line, etc. all on a specific schedule that you aren’t setting yourself); Start at a starting line with a big mass of people; the anticipation of a gun start; that mad rush and jockeying of positioning after the gun; finding your teammates and syncing up with them while having to deal with opposing runners; etc.
They had a meet they could take an afternoon drive to and practice all of that. It was very low-key and had barely any expenses to the program.
I think this was a great opportunity to knock out those pre-race jitters before stepping into a more intense atmosphere like Coast to Coast or Paul Short later this month. Smart move.
As to why they had their upperclassmen race JV and not Varsity, well I think that's been explained already. It allowed their underclassmen to get some real race experience in the Varsity race, and kept their older/faster dudes from getting tangled up in an actual race with some D3 dude trying to push the pace.
As for the times, if you look at the ULowell dudes' Stravas (a good chunk did GPS it), they clearly acknowledge the short distance.
Pretty much everyone else in the field (on Strava at least), including the winner of the "Varsity" race seem to be under the delusion that they just ran a breakthrough 8K... gunna be a rough remainder of the season for those fellas...