Collapsing at the 6km XC finish? A new thing? Theatrics or real exhaustion?

Nice speculative physiology musings..

"Personally if it was me who collapsed I wouldn't want the help because 1) I'd get DQd and 2) I'd feel like an idiot being helped across the line in a freaking XC 6K, give me a break."

if you were passing out - you wouldn't care

classic video wrote:

You must be a newbie and wasn't a around when Letsrun had discussion of this classic Flotrack video in '07 (go to about 8:15 to the end):

http://www.flotrack.org/coverage/105-2007-Pre-National-Cross-Country-Meet/video/5156-Womens-White-Race#.VHIQ4PnF-So

That was horrible. It was like a mass hysteria of exhaustion.

watched both 2007 and 2014.

yesterday's was worse for collapses. The only difference is the commentators ignored it yesterday.

They all had the fish at the Banquet? The ones who didn't fall had the chicken?

There probably is something else going on ...

26mi235 wrote:

I guess I get it now; guys just do not get it.

One idiot formed exactly the wrong conclusion - girls collapse and guys almost never do, so girls are weaker. Horse shit, guys just cannot drive themselves to the point of extreme exhaustion, they do not have the guts to push the little extra bit at the finish and they are backing off rather than risking getting in to that state. And women do it in the team sports, because they are doing it for the team, which is the extra impetus to drive harder. Almost all the women actually make it to the line and many more collapse at that point then men because they have pushed themselves harder.

So, it is the GUYS THAT ARE WIMPS, not the women!

Anemia and other health conditions are huge reasons to why Men and Women, may collapse at the finish line... Like said before, these athletes may have slightly health conditions and not even know it...

Also, Women naturally have a higher pain tolerance because they are made to give child birth, so yes, they are able to push themselves a lot harder and test their limits... Having this said, they can empty their tanks by the end of the race and when they get to the finish line they collapse...

Also, Men, even though the race started out very slow can still give it their all... Did they optimally expend all of their energy? No, but pushing hard that last 2k of the race can still deplete you...

Someone said it earlier, but the guy who said women are the weaker sex is an idiot. Women have a higher pain tolerance which is why so many more of them can push to exhaustion. That's why this happens. They are built to handle childbirth. There is no way any man can handle the kind of pain a woman can during those 9 months and then the labor! We are not built for it. We are weaker when it comes to pain tolerance.

So clusters of women happen to arrive at the finish where al of them in the group have a health problem or an ability to push harder?

The childbirth thing is not true.

Women just have to put up with the pain, they aren't all equally good at it.

Most women just wave the epidural flag.

You are analyzing after the fact. I like the fact that in the heat of the moment, without thinking, the IMMEDIATE reaction of this runner was to help someone in distress. We have enough bad stuff in our world so I want to applaud an instinctual impulse to do good. I know that does not often jive with the make frat personality

Just my little bit of input, fwiw....I ran 4 years of college XC, and while I never full-on collapsed, I always found that I was a bit of a troublemaker in the finishing chute. Nothing major - I just found that I really wanted to just lie sprawled out on the ground, but I had to keep moving through the chute, and found it really hard to do. I was usually somewhere around #4 or #5 man on my team, so I was always in the thick of traffic at the end and battling for places. The thing is, I'm not someone who wants any attention in the least - it was embarrassing to me. I was the same way at the end of hard workouts, and track races of any distance. And yet I'd see something like that video of Steve Cram setting the 1500 WR where he had to dig deep to hold off Said Aouita, and was really pushed to his limit, and yet 10 seconds later, he looked fully recovered and was calmly talking to a reporter.

Obviously, I don't think I was running any harder than most of the people around me, and I didn't seem to be suffering any more than anybody else if you checked in with me 10 minutes after the race. And I do think there is some theatrics and mass hysteria involved in some cases. But I also think that to some degree, this is just an area where a whole spectrum of reactions could be considered "normal"; anything from near collapse to looking like nothing happened. I must admit, I've never seen the fittest runners (i.e. the winners of races) stagger around like I used to, and agree that in large part they are just super-fit, but on the other hand, I was pretty fit back then, and ran some 100-mile weeks over the summer even though it was the '90s.

Imaman wrote:

Someone said it earlier, but the guy who said women are the weaker sex is an idiot. Women have a higher pain tolerance which is why so many more of them can push to exhaustion. That's why this happens. They are built to handle childbirth. There is no way any man can handle the kind of pain a woman can during those 9 months and then the labor! We are not built for it. We are weaker when it comes to pain tolerance.

Wrong, I'm afraid. Men have a higher pain tolerance than women

Women only have a higher pain tolerance than men during the childbirth process.

30 seconds on the Internet would have told you this.

Kinda reduces your argument to BS, hmm?

So clusters of women happen to arrive at the finish where all of them in the group have a health problem or an ability to push harder?

The childbirth thing is not true.

Women just have to put up with the pain, they aren't all equally good at it.

Most women just wave the epidural flag.[/quote]

+100.

It seems to me that everyone has missed the point so far.

Collapsing before the finish line (like the girl in the "sportsmanship" flotrack video) is completely different from the all the girls collapsing just after the finish line.

The "mass hysteria" flopping after the finish is 100% mental. Nothing physical at all.

As a coach of high school kids this is one of the topics we address very early on in training. If you ever watch World Championship or Olympic races it is always the runners who finish way back in the pack who flop to the track after a race. 99% of the time the winner of the race looks amazingly fresh immediately after the race. Why is this? It is certainly not a matter of effort given, but being in control of managing your effort as a runner.

The winner of a race is usually the person who is able to remain calm and execute his/her race plan. The runners finishing in the back of the pack, chose to give up at some point in the race. At some point they decided that the effort required was too hard and they were not "able" to win or even execute their plan. In essence they lost control of their focus and their ability to regulate their effort. Additionally I don't doubt for a second that the runner goes into "excuse mode" at that point and a lot of the grandiose flopping is for theatrical/sympathy effect.

A good coach will teach young runners almost immediately to monitor their "effort" while running. Runners begin to learn actual effort from "perceived effort". "Perceived effort" allows for outside influences and distractions, while running on actual effort is 100% internal.

In any workout a good coach will walk the tightrope of maximizing the potential benefit of a given workout against setting a workout that is too hard resulting in the athlete failing. You don't wont to have failure in workouts that destroy confidence. So you push your athletes to the edge while teaching the athlete to simply gauge their own individual effort.

We don't allow young athletes to fall to the track during workouts until the last interval is completed and even then it is highly discouraged. We teach them to take control of their bodies by managing their effort. As the cliche goes "At the end of the day all you can do is give it your best shot". But you'd be amazed how many people are looking for ways out when things start to get tough. They don't know how to manage discomfort or suffering within themselves.

If you desire to race to the peak of your potential you must know how to manage your suffering. It must become second nature to you. Some actually become masochistic and fully embrace it, that's probably about the time you're ready to become great.

Those flopping mid to lat pack ladies at cross country races are not real runners. They have never been taught properly what it is to be a runner and how to manage their suffering/effort. I'm 100% convinced that they gave up at some point in the race because in their mind it was "too hard" and that is the result you see at the finish line.

Finally someone who has something intelligent to say on this thread.

well,. wrote:

mindset wrote:

It seems to me that everyone has missed the point so far.

Collapsing before the finish line (like the girl in the "sportsmanship" flotrack video) is completely different from the all the girls collapsing just after the finish line.

The "mass hysteria" flopping after the finish is 100% mental. Nothing physical at all.

Finally someone who has something intelligent to say on this thread.

Except you (and mindset) are wrong. The reason the women collapse more is that they are tough than the guys. They push themselves harder than the guys do so that they are spent at the finish line - often completely. If they push just a bit harder their bodies punt even before the line. Remember, women do that childbirth thing remember, and guys just cannot take that level of pain but the women can (there are lots of women - Miki Gorman for one, winner of the NYC Marathon and masters record holder in the marathon and half marathon) who told me that no racing she ever did even held a candle to the pain of childbirth.

So, you don't you guys start to think about maybe the women just are a hell of a lot tougher than the guys, and thus are total wasted at the end, unlike the guys who can rarely push themselves that hard.

Now, if you can start to cite a lot of medical literature that indicates that you are correct but it is not going to happen with stuff written in the last 10, 20, 30 years (before that there were lots of things that could get through because of 'old boy bias' in the referring process (well some gets through even now, but not nearly as much and not nearly so far off).

Don't be ridiculous. None of these girls have had kids so they have nothing to compare it to..

Nobody knows if guys would be tough enough to take the pain of childbirth just like nobody knows if a woman could take a kick to the balls.

There were a few handsome guys at the finish line. If you watch the video you'll see that the girls who end up right before a guy immediately start to fall. Those who are too tired to see what's going on just walks away.

put in the fat boys wrote:

There were a few handsome guys at the finish line. If you watch the video you'll see that the girls who end up right before a guy immediately start to fall. Those who are too tired to see what's going on just walks away.

And to be honest, I might have considered falling if I had been taken care of by a hot chick.

Nonsense. Why do never world class runners fall down after the finish? It´s always back of the packers. Are they tougher than the best?