Cross country courses with hills > pancake-flat ones. Agree or disagree

They’re both good as long as it’s a golf course brah

Trick question, cuz pancake flat courses aren't XC.

I ran 16:5x and nearly won.

In 40 mph winds on long grass over hills.

Cold take. Real heads know that proper XC shouldn't even be a round distance, just the customary distance of whatever the muddiest available course works out to (this one's two laps, each lap is somethin like 4.5 or 5.5 k, have at it lads!)

Problem is that everyone with a say in the matter is incentivized to favor flat courses. Athletes, coaches, ADs, etc. all want to see fast times you aren’t getting that with a hilly course

fixed

Never understood that idea to aim for time in cross country, or why would you want to make it a fast course.
It's supposed to be a race where only ranking matters.
You have track season or road races to run for time.

Here in mich ours are getting flatter. Its a draw I think. We have one course that is flat with one big artificial hill in the middle (along lake erie so you need a fake hill). This year, 2 meets there, they re routed the course around it. Def getting less hilly every year.

I guess if XC is supposed to be not track, we should have hills, dales, logs to jump over. Trust me the kids disagree.

Please name 3 pancake courses. I have nevercseen one.

Woodbridge

I like blacktop.

Mead High School (Spokane) had one of the toughest XC courses in the nation--according to Gerry Lindgren. Our school had 790 students and over 300 would show up for some of the meets. There were plenty of flat courses, but there's something special to a memorable course

For high school anyway, you often have to work with what is available on school property. This is why you end up with start on the right field foul line of the softball field, run around the school's perimeter, a lap around the tennis courts, and finish on the track. Some schools will hold the race at a nearby park, but then poses challenges of transportation, no locker rooms, no indoor space for before/after, etc.

There are two seasons devoted to running on perfectly flat, pristine surfaces. There should be one with challenging hills, crappy footing, course elements and varying distances even.

- coming from a guy who sucked at XC for the most part

I disagree completely. You've got two disciplines in the sport where people race over flat and fast surfaces and where runners with a fair bit of speed should do well. Cross country often neutralized the advantage of "speed" runners at least a bit and let runners whose strong suits were endurance and strength be more competitive. Yes, it's harder to compare times run on one such course to those run on other such courses but that is a good thing.

i don't get the desire to have a course with impossibly hard hills to climb, but my preference is something that is challenging enough that you'd maybe run 45 seconds to 1 minute slower than you would on a track.

Colleges are setting minimum times to be recruited, even in XC. Coaches in high school see it, they are just doing anything they can to help the kids, so they create advantageous courses to be able to run fast. Thats the only factor in play at all. If colleges weren't setting time standards for recruiting in XC, courses would have stayed more challenging then they currently are.

Theres a few traditionalists left out there, but they are a dying breed thats for sure.

Legendary cross country courses that are talked about across generations are the challenging ones. These courses have hills with names like Weenie Bake, Switchbacks, Top of the World, and Poop Out. You don't hear grandparents sharing with a cross country grandchild about when they ran a particularly hard section of the Woodbridge course. For that matter, what Woodbridge course? They've moved it's location around so often that there are seniors in high school that haven't run the same course they ran as freshman.