Should the regular season in XC count for anything?

....so then racing 2x per week and 'training through' meets is going to get a better result than racing 1 x per week...I don't buy that except for kids that don't train in the off season and don't train hard in workouts-

...for kids that train year round and strive to be top/elite HS runners there is a different formula... they are more likely to get to elite performance with 1 race per week, long runs and 'elite workouts'... and yes the total training stress of an 'elite' workout is harder than running in a race, that is how physiology works

I didn't realize there were so many still racing dual meets. It was common when I was in school but I can't remember either of my sons running a single dual meet in their HS careers.

Their conference meet was a 'one and done' with all the invites throughout the season being meaningless, as was mine. I think some kind of points system could make the season more interesting. It doesn't have to be the whole system but definitely more than just one race. I never know other states used something like that.

....top/elite HS runners are NOT the #1 and #2 men on the #3 team of a reasonable conference in Maryland or Indiana. They need less stress not more.

I must be seeing something different in Iowa because I see 12 meets in 9 weeks and kids being over raced and under trained. The problem is even worse in HS track.

Again this works for the middle of the pack varsity runner and even some better than mid-pack runners with some talent but no off season training and a low training work ethic. It does not work as well for the top kids who tend to hit a lower peak earlier and then plateau.

adsfadsfs wrote:

Ballsweat42 wrote:

If you race the league meets you would have to do less invites. Nobody wants to give up invites . Racing hard too much during the season will prevent a good peak at the end

Spot on. Check out the race schedules of the best teams in the country—they usually race once every ~2 weeks for most of the fall.

AGAIN, this is complete nonsense. Look at what I posted for Malley. Weak and feeble minded people buy into the above concepts. Tell a kid he's going to be tired ... guess what, he'll be tired.

I coach a team where we only run 1-2 invites, and four duals, before championship season. And we run very well at the end of the year. Kids want to compete like other sports, one on one, with one winner and one loser ... our sport used to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated on a regular basis, not anymore. This bass-ackwards thinking has put us in the grave .... but OK, we now have TV ratings below Arena Football. For what, so we can have a concept which is driven by some mythical peak?

Americans want head-head competition, with winners and losers. This is why track and field is dying in this country.

iowa,

It works fine for state class kids not living in CA, TX or the other 6 or so states that have 10s of thousands of kids competing. Is it personal coaching, of course not, but how often do you see a coach that can juggle 20 or 40 or 80 individual athletes schedules and not make a mess of it?

I see a time trial and 11 meets in 9 weeks that last year brought two freshman one who ran in the summer and one who did not into the top 7 of a top 6 team in our non CA type state. Similar winter and spring track schedules got both of them under 9:40 for 3200m. Every year it works that well for one or two guys and/or girls. Every year we get 80+ guys and girls out for the team.

Will it get them to Footlocker or NXN? It hasn't gotten them their yet but they have run at Track nationals in the 4x800 or 4x1600 relay two of or the last 4 or 5 years.

Look, the HS I graduated from tries to do it your way. They have cuts to keep the guys team to 20. They have been ranked in the top 25 in the country a couple times over the last 30 years and had a distance national champ one year. Other than those 2 magical periods, with half the enrollment, our HS is competitive with them every year.

Ol CM - I understand and agree with your points on the challenge of individual programs when you have numbers. We've gotten involved with the local CC program down to the middle school level to provide time, input and help the coaches manage a growing program of 80-100 kids. This has enabled the training to be more specific based on the kids background and goals. It does require more resources and expertise to do it this way. And honestly, it also requires HS and MS coaches that are open minded to be more sophisticated in their training approach. Quite honestly the bar in our area has been raised by the handful of national elite kids (Pollard, Austin, Evans, Jenks, Topham...) and it has caused people to think differently about what is both possible and required to get to the top level in the state (and beyond).

Racing and competing is fun. training, and training, and training, from Summer until Fall= boring.

These aren't Olympians trying to peak for the race of their lives. They're HS kids that went out of a sport (yeah a SPORT that means competition). If they just wanted to go running every day they don't need XC.

Malley was frequently injured during his college career due to crazy, high mileage weeks.

Interesting coincidences regarding injuries before big national meets - bad shoulder, bowling ball incident.

lovethebowlingalley wrote:

Malley was frequently injured during his college career due to crazy, high mileage weeks.

Uncatagorically false. Keep trying chump.

when I ran, we didn't have a league championship, so the league "champion" was the team with the best dual meet record. Now that they have a league championship, they call the winner of that meet the league champion, but in track (which has always had a league meet) it's still the dual meet champion - the league meet isn't even scored, it is only used to qualify athletes into the district meet (which is scored).

IMO, it makes absolute sense to use the league meet champion as the league champion and disregard regular season meets.

malmo wrote:

Catagorically false. Keep trying chump.

Fixed.

I coached XC in Maryland for 7 years. I liked the system.

Regular season meets counted in the sense that people got press and pride for doing well at meets with good competition. Coaches were free to use the meets as they pleased.

Even if there were regular season rankings or something of that sort, it would be problematic to make it fair. How do you compare invitationals? Must we all run the same meets? If not, do we have to race hard at some stupid tiny county meet?

IIRC, in my county, they used to have a regular season "champion" for those who did the best at those meets. Rightly, no one cared, because the best teams wanted to run well against the best competition at invitationals and do well in championship meets.

The county meet was a big deal. Kids cared about going well and so did the coaches, even if it didn't affect who goes to regions or whatever. Why does it need to matter in any other sense than kids knowing they were best in the championship meet?

Everyone goes to regions and the top half go to states, with runners not on state-qualifying teams who finish in the top 1/4 qualifying individually. The state meet wasn't overcrowded and at least in the large schools divisions (ie 3a 4a) it guaranteed that only half-decent teams ran at states, but that a lot of people got the chance to run there.

Part of the beauty of the sport, IMO, is putting in the hard work for a long time to get a big reward at the end. Nothing wrong with that. It's the nature of the sport.

I ran in Maryland high schools as well. I'm not understanding the original posters position that he thinks dual meets should count for something? In most sports (like football) where a championship, or tournament, isn't available the regular season counts for the championship. In every other sport the championship event is the determining event. In those sports the league title is very important, ACCs, Big10, SEC, Big East, etc. The Nationals were something beyond.

In high school in Maryland, the league title just happens to be the County Meet. I just happened to run in an era when the top three teams in the County (and State) where ranked in the top ten in the county. So obviously both the County and State meets were very intense. We ran dual meets against each other, but the duals were way down on the scale of importance -essentially we regarded them as mutual time trials. The invitational meets on the weekends were what we were pointing to and those races were wars. But after the dust settled the teams partied together on weekends.

malmo wrote:I just happened to run in an era when the top three teams in the County (and State) where ranked in the top ten in the countRy.

Fixed.

This.

iowa,

It would be great to have the perfect system. While our HS has numbers, part of why our system may work is that our MS program is very low key and so many just don't do it. They won't let 6th graders run and practice maybe 3 days a week for 6 weeks for XC. Track with the school is even less because the city has a great set of meets. Unfortunately, the city track program is based around elementary school and the 7th and 8th graders drop out mostly because practice is a joke because the coaches don't keep them busy.

You got it wrong twice the first time and wrong once the second time. It is cat"e"gorically correct and you know it.

A couple of weeks of little to no running due to injury followed by a 50 mile then a 100 mile week, on more than one occasion.

A depressive lull succeeded by a manic phase. Very familiar pattern. It is still happening, without the running, of course.