Anyone know why almost no "big" names participated this year? Just lack of promotion by USATF? Look at all the top athletes who raced this meet in 2022, the last time there was no Worlds to qualify for (and also a post-Olympic year). What was the big difference this time around?
All of our club's members skipped this year's event. The 4 1/2 - 5 hour drive from the nearest large(r) airports was the main drawback.
The only upside to having gone would be that the fields in the masters was SO thin, there were easy 'points' for the taking for the 2025 Grand Prix count.
However I am not spending $600-1000 to travel 1/2 across the country for three days to pick up a few easy points. Glad I did not go.
Anyone know why almost no "big" names participated this year? Just lack of promotion by USATF? Look at all the top athletes who raced this meet in 2022, the last time there was no Worlds to qualify for (and also a post-Olympic year). What was the big difference this time around?
That's easy. San Diego vs Lubbock, Texas. People want to go to San Diego. People do not want to go to Lubbock, Texas. The only way to get people there would have been to raise the prize purse.
A Texas race should have been in Austin, Houston, Dallas, or Corpus Christi. If the prize money is going to be crap at least make the trip interesting for people.
A number of things derailed attendance at this year's championship. Primarily there was no world championship to qualify for, so all but a handful of top tier pros stayed away. Check the Houston half marathon entries for next week, that's were a lot of the xc runners are headed. However, note that the winners in the open and masters events were top tier.
No question Lubbock was out of the way with few direct flights (but note there is a history of having championships at seemingly random places (Bend, OR, Pocatello, ID etc). USATF announced the meet very late--they often make that a year ahead but this time they didn't do that until mid-autumn.
Added to the above bad weather thwarted travel plans for dozens of runners due to flight cancellations in different parts of the country.
They should've paid Kofuzi to train for it on the Runna app. He would've brought a lot of amateur runners along with him.
I absolutely do not see the point of a community 5k or even a Masters 8k/6k if a grand total of 102 people register for the races. Put them all into one 10k and have everyone run that. The small size of the field explains why the status of entries wasn't posted till race day.
Spencer Brown and Allie Ostrander missed an opportunity for great endless YouTube content here. Allie definitely could've won in the 10k, and maybe Spencer pulls off the double. We could've had years of "How I won the American National XC Championship!" videos. Put In suppose the recent surgery prevented that. Michael Ottesen missed out on an easy chance to add $2,500 towards his 10k goal. Too bad Matt Foxx's papers didn't come through. He could've won! But he has marathons to run.
I feel bad for the host committee, they paid out $20k in prize money for that. And everyone wants to know why no one wants to host USATF races!
And next year is going to be worse, club nats will be the qualifying race and then the national championship will be at World XCs. I think they should just roll it all into club nats and have that be nationals.
This post was edited 2 minutes after it was posted.
A number of things derailed attendance at this year's championship. Primarily there was no world championship to qualify for, so all but a handful of top tier pros stayed away. Check the Houston half marathon entries for next week, that's were a lot of the xc runners are headed. However, note that the winners in the open and masters events were top tier.
No question Lubbock was out of the way with few direct flights (but note there is a history of having championships at seemingly random places (Bend, OR, Pocatello, ID etc). USATF announced the meet very late--they often make that a year ahead but this time they didn't do that until mid-autumn.
Added to the above bad weather thwarted travel plans for dozens of runners due to flight cancellations in different parts of the country.
Not just hard to get to, Lubbock is massively unappealing as a destination. I'd rather go to Lawrence to race at Rim Rock. Only the die-hards went, and it looks like none of the open finishers are pros.