Jonathan Gault wrote:
I'm wondering whether he runs World Cross this year. I don't think Michigan has a big indoor season so I'd like to see him focus his attention on that. I'd be interested to see how he adapts to the 8k.
MI has a big indoor season. You can run a meet nearly every week (sometimes twice) at EMU, UofM, MSU, Grand Valley, even Spring Arbor, etc. from January 15th until ~march 15th. Which is when they hold indoor State Meet. This does not include the National indoor meets.
This does not mean that he will do any of them though. He might do 30 races indoors like Ritz did as a soph and junior, but that is not very likely.
More likely he just runs 1-2 meets to qualify for States and NBN. And then does a couple big ones like State and NBN. It looks like NBN is 3/13-15 this year so State will be earlier than it was for me.
I checked the site and I was sort of wrong, there are really a LOT of indoor meets:
http://mitstrack.org/36 meets before State Meet, and they have already started. In my day, we started after we had 10 weeks base in after XC around January 15th and just kept base training until the first week of outdoor around March 1st.
In any case I don't see him running WJCCC or the Trials. His coach has said that neither of them care about times, just that "he gets there first." I don't see GF winning a XC race against 24 yr-old Kenyans. I don't even think he would place that high.
All he has to shoot for indoors is a National title or a time high on the all-time list in the Mile or 3k or 2M. I can't see him shooting for a fast 5k indoors. There is not much chance he could set a HSR indoors, so if I were him I would be training to maximize my chances outdoors for whatever goals they have worked out for him.
He was compromised this Fall by running the World Juniors late into this summer and this is the first period of time he has not been playing soccer as well.
Who knows, with someone to run with, maybe he CAN run 3:53/8:29? I really would be surprised though.