5th out of 8. i guess he really doesn't have talent. yes, that's the only explanation.
5th out of 8. i guess he really doesn't have talent. yes, that's the only explanation.
As it happened, I was at the Ivy League's meet today (getting a look at the course for the UAA meet, tomorrow), and at one point was standing next to the Cornell tent (the Ivy schools erected team tents along the finishing straightaway--a nice touch), where I overheard someone saying that he thought the meet was the Cornell men's worst race of the season.
Cornell seemed to have a 3+ strategy today: their top three men went to the front, right from the start, while the rest of their team fell in right at the back of the pack. I'm guessing the plan was that they would pace themselves and work their way up through the field.
That's probably sound physiologically--I'm told that the Ivy League race always starts much too fast--but it requires a) a course with sufficient room to pass guys, and b) a very mentally-tough team that will actively be passing in the middle stages of the race, so the runners will be where they "belong" at 3/4 of the way through the race (in VCP's current configuration, I'm guessing that would have been between the Back Hills and the men's second trip up the Cowpath).
But sound physiology may not work if you have a narrow course and a pack that stays together (and an earlier poster was right: it was wonderful to see *all* the competitors in a tight pack in the first mile). The whole field has gone out too fast; now you're winded and at the back of the pack, and you're supposed to pass guys on the Cowpath and Back Hills--narrow trails where you'll have to fight for each pass through a dense pack? That's a tall order. Cornell's remaining scorers did improve their positions some, but I'm not sure how much actual "gaining" they did--it seemed more a question of some guys in front of them slowing down, really.
While I was standing by that tent, after Cornell's uninspiring performance, I heard a medium-sized middle-aged guy say, repeatedly, to a runner who was standing there, "Okay, I know just what we'll do after this." Finally the kid said, "Okay, John, you're the coach."
Would that have been JK? (I know it wasn't RoJo--I've seen the BrosJo.) Does he do some/all of the team's coaching? Is he on staff, or a consultant? I guess it's hard for an outsider to understand the dynamic there.
Anyway, that race had a terrific field (Princeton and Dartmouth were *very* impressive). I don't think Cornell ran terribly; they just would have had to have one of their better days to finish in the top half of that race, and it sounds like they had one of their lesser days. Tough league, tough race. Fun meet to watch! (Tomorrow's should be, too.)
Well, there's more meets left in the season. We'll see how these Ivy teams do in coming weeks. I'll say that they impressed me today.
Is that supposed to be a controversial quote?
Is it nor clearly true?
Nobody ever gets attacked as visciously as someone telling an obvious truth
S. Canaday wrote:
As a former athlete of Rojo's I will tell you that he cares a lot about the distance team at Cornell and their success and improvement in the sport. He'd let the less talented guys that would have been cut at any other Ivy stay on the team and do workouts. As a person, he truly cares about improving all of his athletes.
How much "talent" did we bring in? Well as far as the distance team goes (when I was there) we had 3 guys who were 9:10-9:05 in hs (Luff, Krause, Dannemiller). We had our big talent in Wyner (4:11). Hine was a 4:17 guy and i was a 9:25 guy....good, but not "great." Hatch and Kimple were good milers (4:07, 4:14), but didn't adjust quickly enough to the 8k distance. Luff initially had some non-running related health issues and Krause got injured if he ran more than 60 miles a week. That was the probably the most "talent" (based on hs times) we had in Ithaca all at the same time. It's hard to get talent out there....Ithaca is in the middle of nowhere and it's cold! The academics aren't easy...the suicide rate is high.
In Rojo's first year they got 2nd to LAST at Heps in xc....by my senior year we got 2nd to Princeton (which had 2-3 footlocker finalists, plus Maag who ran like 8:23 for 3k in hs and a stud in Nightingale). That was a good year for us!
We also got 4th at the regional meet in xc my sophomore year with 4 guys in the top 25. In the history of Cornel xc, those were really good performances!
That spring Hine and I went 1-2 in the 10k at Heps; the year after that it was Hine and Edelman who went 1-2 in the 10k.
In indoor track the mid-d guys scored more points at Heps than a lot of the entire teams in the league. We all seemed to peak and race well when other teams with better talent under-performed..that was something Rojo instilled in us.
As far as the comment about me running a marathon in college- that was all my idea. Rojo didn't really want me to do it- but he was flexible with his runners and would respect an individuals input.
As a final point, I'm sure that his current roster of runners aren't insulted at all with the quote.
A well thought out, well written and loyal post. Thank you for bringing that to sewage filled message board.
YesJo wrote:
Nate Edelman was pretty much nobody in high school, running around 9:30 in a middling state for distance runners (TN). Now he's a freaking stud. Clearly Rojo can do something with average talents, turning them into studs. Maybe he's onto something.
He recruited one of my runners and did a great recruiting job on him. He ended up going somewhere else because the cost of the school was so prohibitive.
Nate ran 16:23 at the TN state meet his senior year in high school.
kibitzer wrote:
As it happened, I was at the Ivy League's meet today (getting a look at the course for the UAA meet, tomorrow), and at one point was standing next to the Cornell tent (the Ivy schools erected team tents along the finishing straightaway--a nice touch), where I overheard someone saying that he thought the meet was the Cornell men's worst race of the season.
Cornell seemed to have a 3+ strategy today: their top three men went to the front, right from the start, while the rest of their team fell in right at the back of the pack. I'm guessing the plan was that they would pace themselves and work their way up through the field.
That's probably sound physiologically--I'm told that the Ivy League race always starts much too fast--but it requires a) a course with sufficient room to pass guys, and b) a very mentally-tough team that will actively be passing in the middle stages of the race, so the runners will be where they "belong" at 3/4 of the way through the race (in VCP's current configuration, I'm guessing that would have been between the Back Hills and the men's second trip up the Cowpath).
But sound physiology may not work if you have a narrow course and a pack that stays together (and an earlier poster was right: it was wonderful to see *all* the competitors in a tight pack in the first mile). The whole field has gone out too fast; now you're winded and at the back of the pack, and you're supposed to pass guys on the Cowpath and Back Hills--narrow trails where you'll have to fight for each pass through a dense pack? That's a tall order. Cornell's remaining scorers did improve their positions some, but I'm not sure how much actual "gaining" they did--it seemed more a question of some guys in front of them slowing down, really.
While I was standing by that tent, after Cornell's uninspiring performance, I heard a medium-sized middle-aged guy say, repeatedly, to a runner who was standing there, "Okay, I know just what we'll do after this." Finally the kid said, "Okay, John, you're the coach."
Would that have been JK? (I know it wasn't RoJo--I've seen the BrosJo.) Does he do some/all of the team's coaching? Is he on staff, or a consultant? I guess it's hard for an outsider to understand the dynamic there.
Anyway, that race had a terrific field (Princeton and Dartmouth were *very* impressive). I don't think Cornell ran terribly; they just would have had to have one of their better days to finish in the top half of that race, and it sounds like they had one of their lesser days. Tough league, tough race. Fun meet to watch! (Tomorrow's should be, too.)
Well, there's more meets left in the season. We'll see how these Ivy teams do in coming weeks. I'll say that they impressed me today.
It seems to me that Cornell usually has their runners start off relatively slow. I was curious about that hunch, so I looked at the 2007 and 2008 results (the last two years with 5k splits published in the results). Those results showed that Cornell is, in fact, the most patient team in the Heps. In 2007, their runners gained a total of 59 places in the last 3k (Princeton gained 33, Penn lost 13, Harvard gained 24, Brown lost 104, Darmouth lost 20, and Yale lost 21). In 2008, Cornell gained 70 places (Princeton lost 18, Columbia gained 8, Dartmouth lost 15, Brown gained 22, Harvard lost 3, Yale lost 32, and Penn lost 32).
Cornell's strategy looks the same those two years and this year: top guys go out with or close to the main pack and the rest of their pack starts off conservatively. The difference between 07/08 and this year is that not all of their top guys maintained their position in the top group and none of their pack runners moved up enough.
In an actual response to the person I quoted: Cornell's strategy to go out slower does not look like a bad one, as it worked well in the past (2nd in 07, 3rd in 08). Really, it just looks like a bad day from Cornell's pack. The last few years, they've had at least 2-3 of those guys finish in the top 25. Didn't happen this year.
