What's happening with Oregon Distance?

It is an incredibly massive shift in training. Ben Thomas was way different than Jerry in how he trained his guys. For the holdovers from that program, it is a weird change. For the new kids, the volume takes time to adjust to. I expect them to either start clicking in track this year or in XC next year.

Ben Thomas: Low-moderate mileage. Lots of short, hard workouts. Lots of speed endurance. Lots of hill + speed endurance. Very little tempo style running. Mostly maintained aerobic fitness through "comfy steady" running, i.e. marathon pace cutdown tempos.

Andy Powell: Moderate mileage. Lots of consistent moderate workouts. Very little speed endurance. Lots of cutdown style mile pace reps. Lots of threshold work every week. Maintained through classic tempos or 1k reps.

Jerry Schumacher: High mileage. Lots of very long, hard workouts. High volume speed sessions. Tons and tons of threshold running in massive single sessions.

All three Oregon coaches trained differently. I'd argue it was easy for a Powell guy to drop some of the aerobic work in favor of Thomas' system, than it is a Thomas trained guy to drop the speed and crank up the high volume running.

This is the sort of insight normally sorely lacking on this site.

Also, Jerry is famous for rarely racing his runners. It would not be surprising to see his runners enter 1 or 2 invites to get NCAA qualifiers, skip conference. If he could find a way to skip NCAA Regionals he would. Maybe they are doing inter-squad time trials.

What happened was two of their top seniors graduated and then Hocker and Teare went pro. Once Thomas figured out he was getting let go he stopped recruiting, leaving the cupboards very bare.

He has been there 6 months. They made NCAA cross and ran well at the meet. Many didn’t expect them to qualify. The team is young, you have to leave something on the table, had to maximize all 3 seasons at this point. The women have been steady as well, few more to NCAAs, DMR qualified.

It takes even the best programs a minute to retool. It took Bucknam at Arkansas 5 years to get a title after he took over

This is right.

And training takes time. Development takes time. Recruiting takes time. We can discuss in 2 years.

I am dubious about Jerry as a college coach but it is way too early.

Dubious? Of what? He was previously a top tier coach at Wisconsin with some pretty big success.

Prepping 3 guys to run regional qualifiers on the last possible day in a home meet attended by Oregon and a local community college. Then regionals and nationals. 3 meet season is really pushing Jerry’s system to the limits

Everybody else will just do laps on turf field until XC.

Yes. And he wasn't also coaching 13 professional runners and the premiere USA professional group then.

He can coach there is no doubt about that.

But a successful coach, especially a college one, is so much more than just someone who writes workouts. They are a leader and must develop very young and immature athletes into adults. Recruiting also takes time. We shall see.

When "he wasn't also coaching 13 professional runners and the premiere USA professional group then."

Not to put a fine point on it, but if you click on all their tfrrs links below, you'll see that Oregon's men's middle and long distance runners did shockingly bad. Other than NCAA XC Regional, where they had some good performances, they regressed indoors, if they even competed at all, which many did not. Those who did compete, other than a guy like Cook, who ran a fine 1:46.9, typically competed only once at the Ken Shannon meet at the end of the season. It is astonishingly rare to see everyone regressing or not competing on a college track team, especially this year when pr's and barriers were seemingly to be had by anyone. Jerry's going to have a lot of explaining to do to Boss Phil if he doesn't turn this program around quickly. When you have a guy like Rheinhardt Harrison and you get almost nothing from him as a freshman to this point, you'd better have a good reason. I was very confident in Jerry's ability but he seems to be putting his runners through the kind of first year he puts his pros, which is making them regress from injury and overtraining. Maybe they will come out of it by fall.

The overall xc results are poor and the indoor results ludicrously bad.

They already were pretty bad with Ben Thomas. What did you expect to happen?

I think he can handle going to two workouts a day.

Seems like Schumacher is utilizing the old Oregon approach: XC is a big prep season, Indoors doesn't even exist, Outdoors is everything.

Bowerman did that.

Dellinger did that.

Maybe Uncle Phil wants it that way again?

You missed my entire point-

Coaching at college isn't just workouts. It is developing boys into men.

there are ebbs and flows with most college programs, even the elite ones. duke basketball missed the tourney a couple years back, louisville missed it this year. obv different sports but similar logic applies to track. Granted Oregon distance may be more comparable to uconn's womens basketball where they are always one of the top teams, i dunno. Let's see how outdoors goes but Oregon was only 16th in xc too. Which seems like it has to be one of their worst performances?

There are no PAC-12 Indoor Track championships, so unless you're in a position to do damage at NCAAs, it really is a season that can be treated more as an extension of outdoor.

I'd imagine the program expectation at Oregon is an 18 to 24 month race to be great, rather than a 6-9 month race to be solid. Jerry has shown his focus is in training is on being best prepared for those times that really matter. They've probably got a date circled (perhaps when NCAA XC's are at Jerry's old school...) when they really want to be putting on a show.