There is a dude with a 3:58 time at Nationals

Then coaches should take their athletes to go run meets at altitude. If a bunch of people do it and it starts too look like the conversions are bad then they'll change it.

Nico ajd geordie arent enough proof that theyre atleast a but accurate? I know there are more examples but thats only recent examples. Why does a conversion bug you so much?

Wouldn’t that make the conversion much larger? A 4:00 guy from a college at sea level, would be lucky to run 4:20 at altitude.

Like Abel Kipsangs 3:25 last year? Or Geoffrey Kamworor's 25:50 converted? Altitude impacts everyone differently, there is no scientific formula. And the longer you spend there, the less you are impacted.

But given the constraints of teams living at altitude and travel to meets, I get why the NCAA needs to use it. But its not a perfect conversion like some people wanna believe.

For every example like this there is also examples that back up the altitude marks. Look at the NCAA this year, Colin Shalman ran a time at altitude that converted to 3:54 and then ran a 3:53 at sea level. In D2 Migel Coco ran a 3:55 converted and a 3:56 at sea level. There are plenty of to other marks that do back up the altitude converted times.

I've actually found them to be pretty accurate for athletes who are coming down from altitude to race at sea level. Athletes who go UP to altitude tend to actually run even worse than the calculators predict. You can look up the results of the 2008 outdoor track and field Big 12 conference championships if you don't believe me. It was held in Boulder, a town that is much higher than most other schools in the conference, Colorado stacked the 10,000m, and they totally dominated. A few other schools put decent guys in the race, but they just couldn't run well at altitude even though they were probably superior runners at low elevation.

Also, FWIW, I have experienced this myself and have seen it in close friends/teammates of mine too, sometimes a runner will actually run significantly faster at sea level than what the conversions predict. I had a teammate in high school who ran a full 25 seconds faster in a 3200m when going from 5000ft to sea level. The calculator only gave him about 10 seconds.

Coco sounds like the problem. He runs a 3:56 he doesn’t get in. Get an altitude conversion that is off by 1s and he doesn’t. None of the conversions are accurate enough.

Of course by the same token, anyone think the difference between BU,Washington, and some random 200m track also aren’t on the order of 1s?

And we also have kenyans that have run times at altitude that formally converted to 3:24-3:25. The NCAA conversions are complete garbage on events as short as a mile. This kid doesn't deserve to be there.

womp womp

For those who were ever curious, yes, indeed mediocre non qualifying D1 XC teams do hover over the message boards to defend their one piece of honor.

Egos bruised, justification to their performances that don’t correlate with their sea level performances this indoor season, their “truths”, all lashed out outing themselves to the internet. The question is, which underperforming teammate is defending Labra? The big bad wolf’s talking big on a forum- in a sport full of skimpy looking middle schoolers. “But but I told you so…”.

There is also no way to scientifically prove an altitude conversion when everyone Vo2 max is different, responds to altitude differently, and trains at different elevation. It was a random set of numbers thrown out by coaches back in the day. Younger kids wouldn’t know this…yet let their emotions dictate everything.

Reading comprehension is important. Coca is a D2 athlete.

From what I can see he's been improving every time he has run this year. He started out with a 4:20 mile and now has a 3:55 converted mile where he won the race by 5 seconds. He could very well be a dark horse or be a complete nonfactor proving right the creator of the thread.

Keep crying, loser. You'd probably pass out and piss your pants if you ran a race at altitude.

Who remembers when Geordie Beamish WON NCAAs with a 4:07 entry or something like that? The announcers were losing it because he was BY FAR the slowest seed time on paper but were so stupid that they couldn't figure out that it was his raw time that he ran in Flagstaff. This same topic gets brought up every year and people continue to forget how good these altitude programs are.

Look at Geordie now.

Yes, like you say, it is not perfect. These examples prove it: there's no change Kamworor could have run 25:50, great as he is.

Given the athlete-to-athlete variance, there are two ways to approach altitude conversion

a) Make it correct for the "most acclimated" athlete. This will be correct for an athlete like Kamworor, and any less-acclimated athlete will run better than their converted time when they actually move to sea level.

b) Make it correct for the "average" altitude athlete. This will overestimate some athletes and underestimate others.

I think a) is better if you're comparing records (e.g. I wouldn't refer to Kamworor's converted 25:50 as the best 10k of all-time, but if he somehow ran 26:15 at altitude, I absolutely would consider it the best run ever because under any remotely reasonable conversion that would be a world record).

But b) is probably better for qualifying times. You're never going to have a perfectly fair conversion due to athlete variance, so best to peg it towards the middle. The risk of abuse is minimal since an athlete trying to take advantage of the rule would have to a) know ahead of time that they are better than average at altitude, and b) move to altitude for several months, in order to get appropriately acclimated.

You must not run at altitude much. The conversions are only about 5 seconds per mile, when I have done workouts in places like Boulder/Albuquerque/Utah my workouts aren't vastly different from that. Plenty of professional runners at USATF indoors who don't live at altitude ran a pretty typical race there.

This is really quite simple. The NCAA has clearly listed conversions for altitude, flat tracks, and oversized tracks. These rules are outlined before the season starts so everyone can plan where to send their athletes to accomplish their goals. If coaches have an issue, they can take it up with the rules committee to make adjustments for future seasons. This one miler is not an issue, other athletes should have run faster.

The times from Big 12s indoor also got a conversion from from being in Lubbock and only 3200 feet. See Molly Born's 5000m time. All these rules though are clearly outlined and all the athletes and coaches should understand them.

Houle needs to get a leash on his kids, this is quite embarrassing. I respected SUU for being nationally competitive a few years back, maybe the lack of respect online has a correlation with the drop in their performances. It’s pretty sad.

I understand rooting for your teammates, but it’s pretty obvious SUU athletes are lingering on messageboard. Does this mean they are responsible for the Nico Young slur and NAU hate threads? Seems quite plausible now…

Houle, I expected more out of your kids.