On average, how many hard races do the top HS and College X-C runners run?

High school is more challenging because often you have 4 to 6 dual meets to squeeze in. So high schoolers should only do 2-3 invites on top of that. That’s plenty.

In college they race 8k not 5k so it takes more to recover. College only needs 4-5 races before championship season.

But the reality is you only need 1 or 2 hard races before you peak for championship . All those other races are for kicks and giggles. America has the football schedule mindset where a game in September is as important as a game November. But in XC it doesn’t matter what you do in September. It only matters what you do at the championship races.

I ran hard every race. If you’re coasting through races, you’re a little b!¥ch. and that was when we had balls and raced more than 4 times a season. Unlike these pansies these days.

Truck Stop wrote:

High school is more challenging because often you have 4 to 6 dual meets to squeeze in. So high schoolers should only do 2-3 invites on top of that. That’s plenty.

In college they race 8k not 5k so it takes more to recover. College only needs 4-5 races before championship season.

But the reality is you only need 1 or 2 hard races before you peak for championship . All those other races are for kicks and giggles. America has the football schedule mindset where a game in September is as important as a game November. But in XC it doesn’t matter what you do in September. It only matters what you do at the championship races.

Thx for feedback. Anyone else?

I may be in the minority here but we simply do not do dual meets. What’s the point of racing 1 team?

At our high school, our varsity kids would race 8-10 times. 8 gets you through the state meet. Races # 9-10 would be some combination of Nike or Footlocker. Of those 8 'regular' season meets, 3 are very small and lowkey. Top end kids will still race at those ones (although occasionally they'll miss for a college visit) but we'll work on a specific tactic or skill during that race rather than blasting it from start to finish.

My team will have 11 in just over three months. All of them are hard. Only one of them I will have them tempo to advance. It depends on your team and your philosophy. For me I feel like they need to relearn how to race each year. Freshmen should improve every week and so they are at a new level just about every meet and learning how to race at that level. Those that worked hard over the summer should have a new fitness from the previous season so they too are up a level and learning how far they can go each race.

Let's assume it is a college team that is NOT going to Nationals.

-Regionals is the last meet and best quality

-Conference 2 weeks before regionals and most important meet of year

-2 weeks before conference is the biggest regular season meet on pre nats weekend.

Those 3 are usually the "all out" races.

-Then there will be 1-3 meets prior to that for experience, experimentations, harder than a workout, meeting NCAA sponsorship requirements, giving bottom end of roster opportunities etc.

The most elite teams with podium aspirations at nationals have the ability to not run all out and still win some of the above mentioned last 3 races.

I'll say 4 to 6 hard races. In college starting at the end of season and moving back in time it's NCAAs, regionals, conference, and then a race like Nuttycomb at Wisconsin or pre-nationals, maybe one more race beyond that but then it gets to be a lot. In high school you've got possibly a national meet like footlocker or NXN, a regional meet for one of them, state, state qualifying, conference and one or two other invitationals. College is 8k-10k so it's only about 4 big races, high school is only 5k so they can manage 6 or 7 of them.

Answering for top 25 in state type, not national caliber but going mid major D1 level guys. From what I’ve seen in Connecticut.

I’d say 4-8. Early season invite, 1 or 2 mid season invites, conference meet, class meet, state open, new englands, nxr/fl.

Some will have another mid season invite in there, some will have to go all out at a dual or tri meet if it’s two top teams, some will not race early season invites and really just show up later in the season.

There’s definitely outliers. Seen some teams that are on their 4th or 5th invitational this year. Conference meets are just starting…

Top high school teams run 9 meets per year. Top college teams run 5 meets.

In high school I put on flats and basically tempo'd all of the low key meets. Big invites against good competition and semi-state/state were all out. In college, ran all out in my races, which was every 2 weeks if I remember. So enough spacing to where it wasn't an issue IMO.

Depends on the group, I suppose.

Our program typically concludes the season at a Nike Regional, where about 50% of our 80 kids will compete. We are also free to build whatever schedule we feel best benefits our kids - no requirement for X amount of dual meets, etc.

This year, our top kids are senior-heavy and have aspirations to go well into the post-season. They have raced 3 times since mid-August and have 3 more all-out efforts on the docket over the next 10 weeks, with 2 more races that will be used as practice/rehearsal/race simulation.

Many of our sophomores and juniors, JV level kids, have raced 5-6 times already. The thought here is that there is benefit to the repetition of going through the race routine. There is a steep learning curve when it comes to racing - knowing what to do the day before, the warm-up, experimenting with going out hard vs. controlled, learning how to manage discomfort, etc. Giving those kids the opportunity to go through that routine so they become dialed in prepares them for "bigtime" racing later in their high school career, when the primary objective is performance.

Again, we are fortunate in that we operate with few external constraints and our team is large enough where we don't need to push young kids into the fray too quickly. Not everyone has that luxury.

Our 'traveling' guys would run 3 times before Nationals, then Nationals if they'd make it.

Us scrubs would run four or five "club"-type races. Maybe 6 one year.

And I just looked up the yearbook from my senior year in HS.

We ran 12 races, with 6 of them being "invites" or championships/qualifiers, then state, for 13 total, between the first week of September and the last week of October.