RealXCRunning - The reasons they ran the race on the rain were these (and no others ... especially absurd ones such as making sure that German was going to be in the finals ... which he would have been on any course):
1. The course was not runable. No matter how much people on here talk about what kinds of courses other parts of the country are running on, it doesn't make the Mt. SAC course runable in the rain. I tried to jog it after a rain only a year ago. It was impossible. We had to walk the downhills, and we had to clear brick-sized hunks of mud off our shoes just to do that walking. I've run in the rain and on the snow and ice and through the mud and in sub-freezing temperatures and on all kinds of cross-country courses all over the country. They were all runable courses. Mt. SAC is not runable after a rain. If you think differently, then you are simply making stuff up in your head, and you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
2. As another poster said, changing the course location at the last minute would have been a nightmare for everyone involved - and mostly for those who'd traveled to the meet. If you've put on a meet of this magnitude yourself, then you're conveniently overlooking this burden. If you haven't, then once again you're making stuff up and don't know what you're talking about.
Now, as for why the race is at Mt. SAC ... Because it's got the most tradition of any course in Southern California, and because everyone loves running there. Defaulting to the rain course is a risk that people are willing to take. If it bothers you that much, now would be a good time to start lobbying the powers-that-be for a change of venue in the future. But be prepared to be rebuffed. Because make-believe reasons for not running a course won't hold much sway.
Rojo - None of us Californians mind getting ribbed about our "fair weather" conditions. Or about our flat road race x-country courses ... with the caveat that the ribbing is well-intentioned. Yours was. Others - not so.
And then, of course, there's this: the actual Mt. SAC course is anything but flat. And our So Cal USATF Championship X-Country course is at Kenneth Hahn Park, with both steep and gradual hills, no flat spots at all, uneven grass the whole way, patches of mud and very deep grass, gopher holes, rocks, roots, and just about everything except cold weather and snow ... though I'm sure you can get that at some of our higher elevation schools, given that Southern California has higher mountain ranges than much of the country - and certainly much much higher than anything offered by our midwestern or eastern brethren. Perhaps some of you midwestern mountain goats would like to breeze up the Mt. Wilson Trail for the annual race to the top and then back to the bottom. Or the Mt. Baldy trail race. Or perhaps we should discuss the relative difficulty of the famed Van Cortlandt Park course in New York with ... well, how about Mt. SAC?
Seriously, it's all in good fun. Except that with some of the posters here it's not. They really believe these negative images of Southern California. And here's why: because they believe them. That's right. Not because they know anything about Southern California. But simply because they believe that thinking something about something is as good as knowing something about it.
Okay, enough from me.
Bash on.