Is it always the slowest guy on the cross country team that tries to lead on easy runs?

rudy man wrote:

It's the Rudy syndrome. Some kid no talent kid with a chip on his shoulder decides to prove he belongs by "winning" a recovery run. Problem is, he doesn't, well, recover. He just ran another hard day. So on the next day's interval session, he's even further behind. Then he tries to make up for it by "winning" the next recovery day, and the cycle continues.

The "Rudy" on the team usually ends up injured or burned out and rarely lasts more than a couple of semesters. At least that was my limited experience.

This.

We had that very kid on our team. He was never entered in a meet, much less scored. He couldn't hang in repeats or tempo runs, but every easy day, he was in full race mode, redlining it to lead the team. Easy days were his race days. Pretty soon, coach started having him do his easy days alone.

He quit after one season.

If you want "Rudy" to stop running with you on easy runs, all you have to do is talk to him. If you keep the conversation civil but pepper him with questions and let him know you really want answers, he won't have the wind to answer. Once the run is over, talk to him some more. It won't take many easy days of you asking questions which he can't answer for him to stop running with you.

It's possible that a slow guy may be leading the easy runs simply because he thinks that pushing the pace on recovery days is a path toward improvement. I wouldn't say I lead a lot of easy runs early on in HS but I certainly spent a lot of time hanging on to more experienced runners that I had no business running with. I wish someone had explained to me that a 5-minute miler doesn't have the same optimal recovery pace (nor tempo pace, rep pace etc.) as a 4:30 miler.

Conundrum wrote:

Me Duh Leader wrote:

How dare a slower runner run faster than a faster than runner on a training run!!!

Blasphemy !!!

Nonsense!!!

Bull-sheet!!!

Every runner must know their place, and the finishes of training runs must exactly match the expected finishes in real races.

Good post except I don't think most picked up the sarcasm.

You're probably the only one who was happy that you understood it was sarcasm. No one else would even consider it anything but a joke and thus they played along with "Me Duh Leader".

You have a long way to go before you eventually attain an average lrc comprehension level. But don't give up.

I'm just going to offer another view of the situation here... I presume most of you are talking about High School, but I am going to share some experiences that we had at the D1 level.

We had a handful of guys who rarely had the opportunity to suit up outside of the occasional home meet (once or twice a year). These guys just didn't have the talent to race at the collegiate D1 level. But they did offer something helpful to the team. They kept us honest. On maintenance days - our coach called them maintenance days, not "easy" days - these guys would take the pace and keep it honest. They wouldn't race or "redline" like the mentions above, but they would pick up the pace if guys tried to run north of 6:45-7:00 pace. There was no rule that you had to stay with them, but then you'd be running alone.

So look at it as a benefit if you can. Have these guys do the work on the maintenance days like domestiques...